The large social structures ... are male creations, and yet the young men entering any of them are required to accept formal policies that women will be treated preferentially at each step.

rebuildingMyself · 2012-11-05T06:26:23+00:00

What's funny is that a lot of organizations and whatnot that women create, they have no problem excluding males from it (usually coupled with feel-good coverage in the local news).

2012-11-05T04:16:00+00:00

All of this is a bit ironic, in historical context. The large institutions have almost all been created by men. The notion that women were deliberately oppressed by being excluded from these institutions requires an artful, selective, and motivated way of looking at them. Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality—not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister 2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small.

For present purposes, the irony is that men have collectively put themselves at structural disadvantages in the organizations that men have created. (Social scientists like ourselves naturally seek to test hypotheses by considering contrary cases, as in how men fare in large organizations built up by women, but there are too few such organizations to permit general conclusions. The absence of such organizations is an important and revealing fact.) The large social structures that comprise the worlds of business, government and politics, economic relations, science and technological innovation, and the like are male creations, and yet the young men entering any of them are required to accept formal policies that women will be treated preferentially at each step. How can we account for this remarkable, ironic twist of history?

Indeed, the world of work is a daunting place for a young man today. Feminists quickly point to the continued dominance of men at the top of most organizations, but this is misleading if not outright disingenuous. Men create most organizations and work hard to succeed in them. Indeed, an open-minded scholar can search through history mostly in vain to find large organizations created and run by women that have contributed anything beyond complaining about men and demanding a bigger share of the male pie.

2012-11-05T11:08:08+00:00

The authors seem to be tremendously overstating how easy it is for most men to get sex.

Regardless, historically social change is pretty fast once it gets going. The Men's movement has almost hit a tipping point. For public has almost rejected the idea that the "wage gap" is evidence of discrimination. I think in the next 20 years we will see most of these policies defeated.

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