Hmmm, I think there’s some confirmation bias at work here: namely, in your overlooking that that happens all the time the other way around too. Namely, discussion of women’s problems (on these boards, for example) gets shifted to focus on men.
So, nah, I don’t really think that “the internet” is particularly predisposed to just ignore men’s problems or treat them as secondary to women’s problems. There has always been and continues to be a lot of interest in discussing the problems of men.
I agree with this. However, IMO outside of FQ most threads drift. Just look at the various related and relevant topics disussed in this thread.
I’m reminded of when my kids and I were starting to jog, and once we took the 5-year-old neighbor boy with us. He said to us, “I’m SO good at running!” I said we’d be running around the block (about half a mile), and asked if he’d be able to do that. “DEFINITELY! Because I’m so good at running!”
Spoiler: he ran maybe 1/4 of the way around the block, and walked the rest of the way.
Anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but I’ve noticed this with more than one small boy, and I don’t think it’s entirely cultural, as I know at least some of the parents (including the parents of the neighbor boy above) are actively trying to tamp down that overconfidence. And I’ve noticed that girls (especially girls who are more attuned to social cues) tend to assume that these boys actually know what they’re talking about (even when they don’t), and lose their own confidence thereby when they aren’t 100% sure they’re correct.
Huh?
No that article does not contradict what I said in any way. Primary care in general pays much less than the specialties. The article makes that comparison. And the article details the crisis my field is in as fewer of either gender choose it.
The income bit first. There is a significant gender pay gap in primary care. And Peds, now overwhelmingly female, is not much different than the other primary care fields.
I can grant that male primary care doctors are more likely to work full time plus than female doctors and tend to have higher productivity. But given being a woman in primary care Peds if anything pays higher than family medicine.
The article mostly discusses why pediatrics is not attracting many of either gender, which goes way beyond compensation factors, but the point isn’t why women choose it, but why men stopped choosing it. I would have to dig for the numbers but I would strong suspect that there was a tipping point. Once a large fraction of residency spots were going to women men started seeing the specialty as less masculine…
None meet the criteria of “better in schools across cultures and across time, even in the face of cultures that declare them inferior” especially since culture is a major defining aspect of ethnic groups. Other than that I’m not going to take bait on scientific racism claptrap.
More common than you may think depending on subcultural group.
Being realistic even if sounds pedantic: to reduce bias.
We are, I fear, getting afield with the testing discussion. We agree at least that grade assessments are more predictive of college success than standardized testing is. Weighting tests more simply because male students do less poorly compared to females students on tests than on grades would be an extreme DEI tactic.
I will indulge in the digression this far: when I am supervising or mentoring someone I much prefer the diligent person of good enough intelligence to the brilliant person who is less diligent. Same for any employee or co-worker. And if the latter develops conscientiousness with maturity? Good. Apply then. (My eldest’s story. Entering college he was not fully ready to completely apply himself. Tested well. Did fine but fine would not have enough if he was premed. Four years after college he was more mature. Went back after he decided that he wanted to become a psychiatrist and took the science classes he needed, studied conscientiously, got into med school, and is now at 39 in his neuropsychiatric fellowship.) And FWIW nursing is becoming more attractive as a path to primary care due to less time a debt.
They most certainly are.
“I said ‘The plural of anecdote is data’ some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student’s dismissal of a simple factual statement–by another student or me–as a mere anecdote. The quotation was my rejoinder. Since then I have missed few opportunities to quote myself. The only appearance in print that I can remember is Nelson Polsby’s accurate quotation and attribution in an article in PS: Political Science and Politics in 1993; I believe it was in the first issue of the year.”
I also e-mailed Polsby, who didn’t know of any early printed occurrences.
What is interesting about this saying is that it seems to have morphed into its opposite – “Data is not the plural of anecdote” – in some people’s minds. Mark Mandel used it in this opposite sense in a private e-mail to me, for example.
Fred Shapiro
But of course one single data point proves very little if anything.
True.
I think some of the question is to what extent that actually is the central issue. It certainly seems to be so for some – but for what percentage of currently single young heterosexual men? I actually have no idea. I don’t think we can judge by the amount of noise being made on social media, because the ones who do think like that may be making a disproportionate amount of the noise.
If that really is the central problem for most, then the question is how do we get them to think differently? But if other things are the central problem for most, and many actually are already looking for equal relationships, then telling them that the problem is that they’re not doing something they already are doing is going to be unhelpful and annoying.
ETA: and a related question: is part of the problem that figuring out how to accomplish an equal relationship can be complicated? Because they don’t all look the same. I know relationships that appear entirely equal to me in which the male partner fills traditional male roles and the female partner fills traditional female ones – because that’s genuinely what works for those individual people, and there’s full respect for the work done by each. But there can also be relationships in which the woman holds a high-paid well-respected job but is nevertheless being kept subservient – or, occasionally, the other way around.
They certainly aren’t; but I will say that I’ve known more than one person with a bad case of what I call Refusal To Admit They Don’t Know Something; and that those people have IME tended to be male.
(Six people will probably now come in with anecdotes about women they know who have that problem.)
There are big paintbrushes and big paintbrushes that completely cover up the meaningful discussion: there are young men without those patriarchal system ideas, but relatively few of them compared to the number of high achieving women, and they aren’t great at marketing themselves so often. And there are plenty of women, huge numbers, who buy into many of the aspects of the patriarchal system, uncomfortable being more “powerful” than their male suitor, among other aspects.
Anecdotally, I don’t know these uncomfortable women. I think there are a lot more men that are uncomfortable with being “less powerful”, whatever that means, than women who mind being “more powerful”. Generally most people of either sex do not mind being powerful.
Part of “marketing yourself” is having good social skills, indeed it is most of it. That’s part of what I meant by men not having the tools. If you don’t have the social acumen to attract compatible women, is it a far leap to suggest that you might also lack the tools to make a relationship of equals work?
It’s what the first portion of this thread addressed, what I termed “proxies of power.”
In my mind yes. They are very different skill sets.
My social milieu is that of one where intelligence tends to be a more prized characteristic than other proxies of “power” (money, political power, etc.). And I will say that of all my friends, I can think of exactly two marriages where the woman did not think of her husband as as smart as or smarter than she was. (What does “smarter” mean? Could mean a number of different things; it doesn’t necessarily line up, for example, to how many degrees one has vs. the other.) Both those marriages ended in divorce.
Conversely, I can think of a bunch of marriages where the man does not think of his wife as as intellectually smart as he is. He generally values her in many other ways, of course, and will admit many other categories in which his wife is better/more talented/more skilled than he is. Most of these marriages seem to be ticking along just fine.
Of course in many, if not most, of the marriages I know of, both partners feel that their spouse is on about the same level as they are in most areas. But I will say for myself, as a woman, that I would in fact be uncomfortable dating a man that I considered less smart than I was. And it’s not that I mind being smart or intellectual or technical. In fact I love being all those things!
Relevant, though it mostly confirms things that have already been said:
(An uncommon violation of Betteridge’s law of headlines.)
Tl:dr College educated women will marry non-college educated men provided they earn a decent amount, so more women than men going to college is not a direct problem. And the ‘marriage gap’ between women from high and low income families is smaller in areas where more men are employed (with both showing higher numbers married), so improving the economic prospects of people from low income families would be the best way to increase the number getting married.
Me too. A university education isn’t necessary, but it’s important to be able to talk about and understand things at the same level. And while I wouldn’t demand someone super rich, I wouldn’t want to date a guy who was unemployed or stuck in a minimum wage job.
I meet extremely few people at all, who are brighter than I am, in the things I’m bright in. My husband is far brighter than I am in the things he is bright in, which are not my things. Thus, we are rather equal. But it’s been a long long time since I thought intelligence was one of the most important criteria for a relationship.
It was the basic premise of the OP:
Income is not the only dimension in the calculus, but given that equal or greater education is often out just by the numbers, then equal or greater income is the main power proxy. Other factors still count too, but the need to be physically protected by a big strong aggressive man doesn’t have the cache it might have once had.
Unfortunately we also live with economic hollowing out of the middle. The last few years had a little bit of an uptick in their circumstances but overall the economic prospects (and thus romantic?) for men without college degrees have dropped.
So these women are happy to accept a high enough income man without a college degree, but there are fewer of them than there used to be. Hopefully the numbers of the last decade actually are a turning point for this group.
Another sobering set of statistics. On average men without college degrees spend increasingly fewer years being married.
The Rise of the No-Bachelor’s Bachelor? | PRB.
To highlight:
I heard an economist talk about the three benefits of marriage (in generic terms):
Now the balance of importance of these factors can vary, but it’s interesting that as people become more prosperous, and entertainment became a larger part of life, “common interests” became a goal in finding a good match.
If you think about a dating profile, the things people write fit into these categories - high income (or proxies for that) fit into 1 (and 2), “great cook” is 2 (or 3) - and walks on the beach is all 3.
You’ve got to be careful with stats like these because of compositional effects. The proportion of men with college degrees has increased substantially since the 1970s, and when more of a given population go to college, they aren’t chosen randomly: they are disproportionately going to be the ones who would have been successful anyway. And a result of more people having a college education is that more jobs now require or expect a college education when they didn’t before, and these are disproportionately the higher paying ones. So non-college educated men in 2025 are a somewhat different group compared to non-college educated men in 1970 in terms of their average ability and employment options, independent of any changes to the economy.
Still, AFAIK there have been real changes to the economy, I’ll take a closer look at the stats later.
Anecdote, as I am not a child behaviourist, and my sample size is only 2 individuals. But we (his parents) did not nickname my son “Danger James” without good reason
His sister is very risk averse.
Of course the composition has changed, just like the composition of women with and without college education has changed. A greater proportion of all are going to college compared to 1970, perhaps, but definitely many more women than men.
The premise that started this discussion includes that there are increasingly more women with college degrees to get married than men who meet the criteria of having equal or greater education, but, no worry for the women, they still find men of equal or greater wealth and income. The men without wealth and income are shit out of luck.
The point of this latest bit is confirmation that the men without college degrees are still being left behind, in income and in marriage. They are unmarried more often and longer, as well as dying young, both divorcing more and staying unmarried longer. Indeed young men without college degrees as a group are shit out of luck.
And since the women with college education are still getting married at the same rates, with relatively fewer new college educated men with good incomes to partner with, who then are the extra men they are marrying making up the difference? Divorced college educated men on a second go round?
Additionally - these men without college education and of lesser income and wealth are not getting married to women without college education and/or wealth income either, although they may be cohabiting some. Unsure if that is the lack of willingness on the men’s part or the women’s or other. But for both genders in that grouping marriage and persisting partnerships are decreasing.
As one’s income increases, they can outsource 1 and 2 and presumably find other people to do 3 with, all without entering into a lifetime contract.
The main benefit is stability and continuity. Something that becomes important if you enter into a multi-decade long project like raising children. Sure, nothing is guaranteed. But sometimes there is a benefit to a formal agreement to stay together and share or pass on your wealth vs having no assurances the other person won’t just leave at a moment’s notice.