Gender equality: reduction in male female differences in lifespan, deaths on the job, % victory in custody disputes, % in prison, % in college, % in medical school, % in law school, and eliminating any gender favoritism in college sexual harassment complaint adjudication.
In many ways. I actually think that on average men have a higher variance of outcomes than women so most people on the top and bottom of society are men.
The lifespan gap may be enforced by biology, but it seems wildly unjust to me that retirement-related social programs like Social Security and Medicare do not take the lifespan expectancy gap into account. For example, if the life expectancy gap is 5 years, the Medicare age of eligibility should be 68 for women and 63 for men, so that both sexes get the same number of years of expected coverage.
“According to estimates from the National Institutes of Health, in the United States in 2010, 207,090 women and 1,970 men will get new cases of breast cancer, while 39,840 women and 390 men will likely die from the disease. The estimated new cases of prostate cancer this year — all affecting men — is 217,730, while it is predicted 32,050 will die from the disease....In fiscal year 2009, breast cancer research received $872 million worth of federal funding, while prostate cancer received $390 million.”
If breast cancer is a more serious disease than prostate cancer, it does make sense to spend more on the former.
(Assuming that the number of breast cancer deaths equals the number of breast cancer cases times exp(-(federal funding for breast cancer research)/k) and likewise for prostate cancer disease, the constant k is $529M for breast cancer and $204M for prostate cancer, and the allocation of $1.262bn among these two diseases that minimizes the total number of deaths is about $765M for breast cancer and $497M for prostate cancer, resulting in about 68,200 combined deaths compared to the actual 71,890, so the actual allocation is at least in the right ballpark.)
(This used to be a gentle comment which tried to very indirectly defend feminism while treating James_Miller kindly, but I’ve taken it down for my own health)
To stick my oar in for a minute, as I am wont to do, I didn’t find your comment offensive. That which is true should never be offensive, and those are some real metrics by which gender inequality can be measured.
However I didn’t get “humorous”. I thought it was intended to be serious, though I could interpret the intended message in several different ways—interpretations to which my responses could range anywhere from “total agreement” to “not even worth engaging”, so I decided to see where the discussion went before joining in anywhere.
I think if the humour was intended to arise from “this is not the type of list you expected”, you might be underestimating how frequently points about “gender inequalities which disadvantage males” are made in public discussions of anything related to gender equality.
I’m not criticizing your tone—I think tone-policing is rarely useful unless someone’s being an egregious dickhead—so I guess I’m just criticizing your comedy.
Regarding tone specifically, you have two strong options: one would be to send strong “I am playing” signals, such as by dropping the points which men’s rights people might make, and, say, parodying feminist points. Another would be to keep the tone as serious as it currently is, but qualify things more; in some other contexts, qualifying your arguments sounds low-status, but in discussions of contentious topics on a public forum, it can nudge participants towards cooperative truth-seeking mode.
Amusingly, I emphasized the points of your comment that I found agreeable in my first reply, both since you’re pretty cool, and also since I didn’t want the fact that I’m a hardcore feminist to be obvious enough to affect the discourse. However, to the extent which my reply was more serious than your comment, this could have made me look like the less feminist one out of the two of us :D
Fair enough! I am readily willing to believe your statement that that was your intent. It wasn’t possible to tell from the comment itself, since the metric regarding sexual harassment report handling is much more serious than the other metrics.
Yes, I probably should have omitted that one. My information bubble keeps discussing cases in which men are treated horribly in college sexual harassment disputes, but I should have recognized that other peoples’ bubbles don’t and so my including it would send an unintended signal.
Is there any reason to think that % in prison “should” be more equal?
(Some alleged psychological differences between typical men and typical women are controversial. Some are less so. That men are statistically more prone to violence is surely one of the ones that’s less so.)
“Gender equality” is a fuzzy term. Taken sufficiently literally, it’s absurd (We demand equal rights for men to bear children! We demand equal rates of breast cancer for men and women!). So, when the goal is reasonable discussion (as opposed to, say, making one’s ideological opponents look silly), we should either avoid using the term or interpret it more charitably.
I think there is a useful thing that the term “gender equality” is gesturing towards, even though taken absolutely literally those words don’t point in quite the right direction. It means things like not giving preferential treatment to one sex or gender over another when there isn’t an actual reason for doing so, and finding ways to reduce disadvantages faced by one sex or gender even if they are (incidental) consequences of real differences.
This is not the same thing as claiming that there must be absolute equality according to all measures. Neither is it the same thing as saying that any sort of equality must be enforced. (Yes, I saw what you did when you slipped in “the enforcement of”. That’s rude. Please desist.)
Yes, I am suggesting that a modicum of charity be extended even to your political opponents in these discussions. If that is unacceptable to you, then unsurprisingly it is going to be difficult to have a useful discussion.
So, anyway. We are not talking about ‘optimizing for “equality” between two fundamentally unequal things’. We are talking about making the thing called “gender equality”, which is fuzzily defined and doesn’t in fact mean exact equality in all things, one of the things we would like to see more of. At least, that’s my interpretation of ArisC’s use of the term, and it’s what I would mean if I wrote something similar. (As it happens, I generally avoid the term “gender equality”, precisely because of the issue we’re seeing here.)
If we need to have something more like an actual definition of “gender equality”, I suggest that it means “treating men and women more fairly”. That’s still fuzzy, it’s still open to plenty of argument about what constitutes fairness, and what we’re doing now is engaging in some of that argument. Except it seems almost as if some participants are less interested in arriving at a reasonable answer than in giving answers they don’t themselves believe in in order to make the whole notion look bad. (I should maybe say explicitly that I don’t think James_Miller was doing that.)
Would having a more equal fraction of men and women in prison necessarily mean that society was treating men and women more fairly? Well, men are more prone to violence than women (#notallmen, of course, but statistically) and commit a lot more violent crime than women (statistically), and there seems little prospect that any actually-possible social intervention will undo that. So whatever the target, it shouldn’t be 50⁄50. Maybe there are feasible changes that would make men less likely to engage in violent crime; maybe some of those are best thought of as aiming at “gender equality” rather than at trying to reduce violent crime overall; if so then yes, we would want to see the ratio become more equal, but not because the goal was 50⁄50, and I don’t in fact know of any credible changes of that sort. In any case, I’m pretty sure that the reachable states of society in which there are as many women in prison as men are mostly ones in which either lots of violent crime is going unpunished or else lots of women are being imprisoned for reasons that would generally be regarded as insufficient.
Gender equality: reduction in male female differences in lifespan, deaths on the job, % victory in custody disputes, % in prison, % in college, % in medical school, % in law school, and eliminating any gender favoritism in college sexual harassment complaint adjudication.
I suspect you are coming from a “men are actually “less equal” than women” perspective...
In many ways. I actually think that on average men have a higher variance of outcomes than women so most people on the top and bottom of society are men.
If x < y is inequality, so is y < x.
Or perhaps we should call it “greater-than-or-equality” to avoid confusion.
“Less equal” is a reference to “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” from Animal Farm.
The lifespan gap may be enforced by biology, but it seems wildly unjust to me that retirement-related social programs like Social Security and Medicare do not take the lifespan expectancy gap into account. For example, if the life expectancy gap is 5 years, the Medicare age of eligibility should be 68 for women and 63 for men, so that both sexes get the same number of years of expected coverage.
I would wager that the majority of gender inequalities in the Western world are reinforced by biology.
(Also income and other professional phenomena.)
I think those are extremely unlikely to be in any way the fault of former US presidents.
Vietnam? runs away
Good point.
(But FWIW Scott expressed skepticism at the idea that Trump will decrease that particular kind of male deaths.)
Certainly not most of it, but:
“According to estimates from the National Institutes of Health, in the United States in 2010, 207,090 women and 1,970 men will get new cases of breast cancer, while 39,840 women and 390 men will likely die from the disease. The estimated new cases of prostate cancer this year — all affecting men — is 217,730, while it is predicted 32,050 will die from the disease....In fiscal year 2009, breast cancer research received $872 million worth of federal funding, while prostate cancer received $390 million.”
If breast cancer is a more serious disease than prostate cancer, it does make sense to spend more on the former.
(Assuming that the number of breast cancer deaths equals the number of breast cancer cases times exp(-(federal funding for breast cancer research)/k) and likewise for prostate cancer disease, the constant k is $529M for breast cancer and $204M for prostate cancer, and the allocation of $1.262bn among these two diseases that minimizes the total number of deaths is about $765M for breast cancer and $497M for prostate cancer, resulting in about 68,200 combined deaths compared to the actual 71,890, so the actual allocation is at least in the right ballpark.)
(This used to be a gentle comment which tried to very indirectly defend feminism while treating James_Miller kindly, but I’ve taken it down for my own health)
I was trying to humorously point out a common false assumption: that improving gender equality would necessarily benefit women relative to men.
I’m not good at tone (and this does get me in trouble) so could you please explain why what I wrote might be considered offensive?
To stick my oar in for a minute, as I am wont to do, I didn’t find your comment offensive. That which is true should never be offensive, and those are some real metrics by which gender inequality can be measured.
However I didn’t get “humorous”. I thought it was intended to be serious, though I could interpret the intended message in several different ways—interpretations to which my responses could range anywhere from “total agreement” to “not even worth engaging”, so I decided to see where the discussion went before joining in anywhere.
I think if the humour was intended to arise from “this is not the type of list you expected”, you might be underestimating how frequently points about “gender inequalities which disadvantage males” are made in public discussions of anything related to gender equality.
I’m not criticizing your tone—I think tone-policing is rarely useful unless someone’s being an egregious dickhead—so I guess I’m just criticizing your comedy.
Regarding tone specifically, you have two strong options: one would be to send strong “I am playing” signals, such as by dropping the points which men’s rights people might make, and, say, parodying feminist points. Another would be to keep the tone as serious as it currently is, but qualify things more; in some other contexts, qualifying your arguments sounds low-status, but in discussions of contentious topics on a public forum, it can nudge participants towards cooperative truth-seeking mode.
Amusingly, I emphasized the points of your comment that I found agreeable in my first reply, both since you’re pretty cool, and also since I didn’t want the fact that I’m a hardcore feminist to be obvious enough to affect the discourse. However, to the extent which my reply was more serious than your comment, this could have made me look like the less feminist one out of the two of us :D
Thanks.
Fair enough! I am readily willing to believe your statement that that was your intent. It wasn’t possible to tell from the comment itself, since the metric regarding sexual harassment report handling is much more serious than the other metrics.
Yes, I probably should have omitted that one. My information bubble keeps discussing cases in which men are treated horribly in college sexual harassment disputes, but I should have recognized that other peoples’ bubbles don’t and so my including it would send an unintended signal.
Is there any reason to think that % in prison “should” be more equal?
(Some alleged psychological differences between typical men and typical women are controversial. Some are less so. That men are statistically more prone to violence is surely one of the ones that’s less so.)
Since we’re talking about optimizing for “equality” between two fundamentally unequal things, why not?
Are you saying having the same amount of men and women in prison would be detrimental to the enforcement of gender equality? How does that follow?
“Gender equality” is a fuzzy term. Taken sufficiently literally, it’s absurd (We demand equal rights for men to bear children! We demand equal rates of breast cancer for men and women!). So, when the goal is reasonable discussion (as opposed to, say, making one’s ideological opponents look silly), we should either avoid using the term or interpret it more charitably.
I think there is a useful thing that the term “gender equality” is gesturing towards, even though taken absolutely literally those words don’t point in quite the right direction. It means things like not giving preferential treatment to one sex or gender over another when there isn’t an actual reason for doing so, and finding ways to reduce disadvantages faced by one sex or gender even if they are (incidental) consequences of real differences.
This is not the same thing as claiming that there must be absolute equality according to all measures. Neither is it the same thing as saying that any sort of equality must be enforced. (Yes, I saw what you did when you slipped in “the enforcement of”. That’s rude. Please desist.)
Yes, I am suggesting that a modicum of charity be extended even to your political opponents in these discussions. If that is unacceptable to you, then unsurprisingly it is going to be difficult to have a useful discussion.
So, anyway. We are not talking about ‘optimizing for “equality” between two fundamentally unequal things’. We are talking about making the thing called “gender equality”, which is fuzzily defined and doesn’t in fact mean exact equality in all things, one of the things we would like to see more of. At least, that’s my interpretation of ArisC’s use of the term, and it’s what I would mean if I wrote something similar. (As it happens, I generally avoid the term “gender equality”, precisely because of the issue we’re seeing here.)
If we need to have something more like an actual definition of “gender equality”, I suggest that it means “treating men and women more fairly”. That’s still fuzzy, it’s still open to plenty of argument about what constitutes fairness, and what we’re doing now is engaging in some of that argument. Except it seems almost as if some participants are less interested in arriving at a reasonable answer than in giving answers they don’t themselves believe in in order to make the whole notion look bad. (I should maybe say explicitly that I don’t think James_Miller was doing that.)
Would having a more equal fraction of men and women in prison necessarily mean that society was treating men and women more fairly? Well, men are more prone to violence than women (#notallmen, of course, but statistically) and commit a lot more violent crime than women (statistically), and there seems little prospect that any actually-possible social intervention will undo that. So whatever the target, it shouldn’t be 50⁄50. Maybe there are feasible changes that would make men less likely to engage in violent crime; maybe some of those are best thought of as aiming at “gender equality” rather than at trying to reduce violent crime overall; if so then yes, we would want to see the ratio become more equal, but not because the goal was 50⁄50, and I don’t in fact know of any credible changes of that sort. In any case, I’m pretty sure that the reachable states of society in which there are as many women in prison as men are mostly ones in which either lots of violent crime is going unpunished or else lots of women are being imprisoned for reasons that would generally be regarded as insufficient.