That's directly on topic. I suppose from an "eating your own (addictive) dogfood" perspective its kinda self inflicted.
It would be interesting to look at male/female relations and ratios for programmers at non-traditional employers, perhaps the government or military or maybe academic. I suspect the lifestyle at a unionized state government office is quite a bit different than "standard" programming environment and theorize almost anything would be an improvement WRT women's interest in that workplace. Perhaps addictive behaviors would vary in those circumstances.
Surely there must be some HR statistics buried somewhere at a giant corporation or government about % of programmers participating in the corporate alcoholism project by decade, or something like that, WRT trends in addictive personality by decade.
I'm calling attention that rhetorical slight of hand. Reducing prejudice overall sounds like a noble goal, and it's one I share. But the stats I'm familiar with suggest that prejudice has decreased.
When prejudice in my favor decreases, it feels a lot like prejudice against me increases, so I can get why he feels that way. But I don't think that personal experience justifies a broad claim of increasing prejudice.
You are leaving out the possibility that real prejudice is decreasing, but that prejudice against males is increasing, just not as much as prejudice against females is decreasing. Not appearance, actual prejudice.
The reason for the slight of hand is that being open about the possibility of prejudice against males increasing tends to get a number of quite negative reactions, from the common (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'you have too much privilege to be able to comment on the matter' to the far less tolerated (at least here) insults.
As for increasing prejudice against males, there is far more evidence than just personal experience that there is real increases, not just perceived. From the negative effects of lacking male role models in grade school (it doesn't matter why this happens, as it does and thus it creates a negative effect by society impacting young boys) to issues such as biased definitions being used in government reports to cover up or down play male victims of crimes.
I'm interested in decreasing total prejudice, and also decreasing the substantial imbalance in net prejudice benefit between groups. I don't think prejudice can be eliminated; System 1 thinking is too practically useful.
I think the reason people react negatively to dudes bringing up a possible increase in anti-male prejudice is that that it's usually brought up as an interruption to discussion of anti-female prejudice. That is, it's not used as a serious participation in a broad discussion of prejudice and how to reduce it, but a way of derailing discussion. And as I said, people are inclined to treat a reduction in pro-them prejudice as an increase in anti-them prejudice. So even sincere attempts can come across as ignorant.
Personally, I suspect anti-male prejudice is actually decreasing as we unwind patriarchy. I think it can be more visible, though, as a) women are more willing to be open about anti-male prejudices they have, and b) as we see women moving toward equality, we reexamine our own position. But I'm personally ok even if it's a temporary increase, as I see it as a backlash against the status quo. Honestly, given the number of women I know who have been sexually assaulted or physically abused, I'm amazed there isn't more anti-male prejudice. As we reduce the number of people who have those experiences, I expect we'll see dramatic drops in anti-male prejudice.
Would this work for anti-female prejudice if the stats were reversed. For example, once you look past how the CDC picks a specific definition of rape that excludes male victims of female rapists, you find that within a given year, men are raped at almost the same rate as women (if memory serves it was a .2% difference).
So given this, why are anti-male prejudice given an explanation based on male behavior while anti-female prejudices are not given an explanation based on female behavior?
As to your question, the short answer is patriarchy. We're slowly emerging from a millennia-long system of male dominance of women. I read a lot of anti-female prejudice as part of that system of control of women. Whereas I read a lot of anti-male prejudice as a) reaction to the experience of patriarchy, b) resistance to the system of patriarchy, or c) part of patriarchy itself. As we eliminate patriarchy and then have a couple of generations of people who haven't experienced it, I expect much of that to fade.
CDC 2010 NISVS. But you can't look at the summary, because they use a definition of rape that doesn't involve most cases of male victims of female perpetrators. You need to read the stats on male victims of contact sexual assault which aren't in the summary.
The experts are making very specific claims based on biased definitions. If we were to use those biased definitions, then their claims are not wrong. The problem is their definitions, and on a deeper level, why they went with such definitions.
Full report:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a...
From page 20 of the pdf, 10 of the report
>Questions on sexual violence were asked in relation to rape (completed forced penetration, attempted penetration, and alcohol or drugfacilitated completed penetration), being made to penetrate another person, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences.
Notice that being made to penetrate is not listed with the group that includes rape?
Page 27 (17) goes into more details and once again clearly lists that being made to penetrate doesn't count as rape.
On page 28 (18) we see the number of victims for women raped within a 12 month period is 1.27 million.
On page 29 (19) we see the number of victims for men made to penetrate (aka raped) within a 12 month period is 1.267 million.
Pulling out two numbers from a large report and saying, "aha, proof of the grand conspiracy" is not compelling to me. You're claiming that you personally have discovered a major revolution in understanding the nature and impact sexual violence. But the numbers are weird on their own (1-year and lifetime rates are oddly different, apparently no examination of the gender of user of force, no description of what force was used). You claim that the definitions are biased, but you don't demonstrate it. You imply that the levels of trauma are equivalent, but I don't see a reason to believe that. This doesn't seem congruent with other research. And it also doesn't match what direct knowledge I have of the topic. I know a number of women who have been raped, and it was a deeply traumatic experience for them. I've never heard of a woman similarly forcing a guy to penetrate with, say, knife in hand. I'm having trouble even imagining how such a crime would work.
The reason we take rape seriously is not one number in one box somewhere in one PDF. It's the great array of studies and personal narratives demonstrating the crime and the severity of its impact on people's lives. Now it could be that you have uncovered a vast new area of crime that people were somehow unaware of. Or it could be that, as happens all the time in research, a couple of numbers came out odd because they made a mistake, or because subtle implications of study design produced unexpectedly misleading results.
If it's the former, presumably we'd see other evidence besides a couple of odd numbers. After all, this report has been out for years and there's been plenty of time for followup research. Plenty of time for people to come forward with stories of how this crime ruined their lives. Are we seeing that?
If not, then maybe the explanation here is not, "OMG CONSPIRASY AGAINT THE MENZ!" but "anonymous guy on the Internet does not understand a topic as well as a (mixed-gender) array of doctors who have spent years in the field".
The article even suggests that the drop started with the boom of the personal computer. That is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that women do better in formal settings, since that inflection point is essentially the moment it became possible for large amounts of people to teach themselves to be a computer programmer. It seems likely that some pre existing bias (either in interest our ability from girls or more likely an interplay of interest and culture) was just amplified when the flood of autodidacts joined the field, not that everyone decided to exclude women just as the field was getting hot.