I'm a heterosexual male, pushing 40, not too bad looking. No one has ever asked me to sit in their lap, grabbed my but, catcalled after me, or "jokingly" appraised my breasts or other body parts. I've never been anywhere, where I've had to consider the possibility of rape.
How often do you hear females lurking in dark parks, just to hunt down men who they can rape?
Yes, sexual and psychological violence goes both ways, but still females are more often the victims.
It might be totally symmetric in female dominated groups with males being the victims.
What ever that is, males don't get their buts squeezed in elevators by random strangers. Or I'm missing from some action I'm not aware off.
The reaction is practically always the same, ie that the man ignores it or at worst tells the woman to please stop hitting/yelling/acting inappropriate, and the woman either blowing it off or laugh it off. If the man complains more he will most likely hear "man up" and just take it, which is the cultural image of a male victim of female violence.
I've used my personal experience, sampled over thirty years as the metric. It's the only data set I can approach with some certainty it's not polluted with observer bias. I've never been personally assaulted in such a way. I did not deny the large spectrum of abusive behaviours that exist.
To quote myself:
"Yes, sexual and psychological violence goes both ways, but still females are more often the victims."
The original post was about experiences of sexual harassment and I stated few statistical reasons that come to my mind that can cause it.
There is a tendency for some reason to disregard these sorts of claims "because that happens to everybody". No. That's just wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. Like in engineering, in social settings problems need to be tackled one at a time. That some men suffer violent attacks from some women does not make it right that some women are sexually assaulted by some men.
The male to female "sexual predator" pattern is a specific pathology that exists and needs to be taken seriously. Just like female to male "violent abuse without retribution" is another - but different kind.
Men don't need to "man up" just like "boys will be boys" is not an acceptable defence.
I would like to point out that women were more like capital and not like free citizens even in the most progressive countries until hundred years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage.
Values and attitudes travel across generations. These affect stereotypes, which affect our mental processing even if one is against said stereotypes. There is a very good reason females can be still considered statistical underdogs for a while - the fact that can be abused by predatory individuals as a shield with impunity. The fact that these abuses happen, do not mean we should not still be in general vigilant in upholding female rights for a few generations still.
Except, of course, your bias, which is pretty clear. I think you'd be surprised at what we do to our own memories.
"Some people are likely to spontaneously sexually abuse members of opposite sex in their vicinity and there are more men than female in this group" would have been more accurate.
I have no statistics for or against this.
The test we need is: How often are individuals in social groups with skewed sex ratios who are of the rarer sex in the said group sexually harassed, and is this ratio skewed in software engineering.
Generally, from what I can gather from the anecdotal evidence of my female friends, a certain percentage of us men in general are assholes. It seems that as a matter of fact they have to suffer the real possibility harassment where ever they are (not constantly, but they have to consider it a plausible event). Which to a guy sounds just horrible.