Studies proudly posted by feminists show that men are discriminated against in family court

So I recently decided to do some research into the issue of child custody. One thing I ran into was the claim that a lot of men don't ask for custody, and that the ones that do, tend to get it.

There are two links I've seen thrown around that pretend to show this. One claims that men who ask for custody get it 70% of the time. And actually this study has been criticized as having misrepresented the data, which I'll discuss below. But the other shows it happening 50%-65% of the time, and is a little more credible.

Here are the links that get posted.

"Gender Bias Study of the Court System in Massachusetts". http://amptoons.com/blog/files/Massachusetts_Gender_Bias_Study.htm

"A Father's Race to Custody: An Argument for Multidimensional Masculinities for Black Men". https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1131&context=bjalp

The first one is known to be fraudulent though. The tldr is that the data from the study shows that fathers who ask for custody are 6 times less likely to get it compared to mothers, which is obviously evidence for discrimination. The authors pulled some academic shenanigans to make the results look different from what they are though. And the history of how that happened, and how one researcher was able to get ahold of the raw data (that they attempted to suppress), can be found here:

Rosenthal, M. B. (1995). Misrepresentation of Gender Bias in the 1989 Report of the Gender Bias Committee of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Breaking The Science. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from http://www.breakingthescience.org/SJC_GBC_analysis_intro.php

The other link is also kind of interesting because it shows the extent that some people go to try and hide the facts here. The piece that gets quoted is this:

In fact, studies show, when fathers fight for custody they are awarded sole or joint legal custody in fifty to sixty-five percent of cases even where the mother was the child’s primary caretaker.80

One of the references in the footnote is the Massachusetts study from above. But there is another reference that eventually links to this paper:

"Beyond Economic Fatherhood: Encouraging Divorced Fathers to Parent". [Abstract]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=569363, [PDF]: https://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/lawreview/articles/volume153/issue3/Maldonado153U.Pa.L.Rev.921(2005).pdf

This paper contains another footnote but this time it references a bunch of other studies. And those studies all claim that women are favored more often than men.

Here is the footnote that they use to summarize this research:

See id. (noting that fathers who seek custody prevail in half or more cases); Mason & Quirk, supra note 228, at 228 tbl.2 (citing statistics showing that fathers won custody in forty-two percent of custody appeals, mothers prevailed in forty-five percent of cases, and twelve percent of the cases involved some form of shared custody, including 9.2% with split custody and 2.8% with joint physical custody); Massachusetts Report, supra note 227, at 825 (finding that fathers obtain custody in 70% of cases). But see MACCOBY & MNOOKIN, supra note 13, at 103-04 (finding that mothers obtained their preferred custodial arrangement twice as often as fathers); Bahr et al., supra note 208, at 257 (showing that fathers in Utah were awarded sole custody in only twenty-one percent of disputed cases, mothers received sole custody in fifty percent of cases, seventeen percent of fathers were awarded joint legal custody, and thirteen percent had split custody); Fox & Blanton, supra note 101, at 261 (finding that when fathers in California sought joint custody and mothers sought sole custody, mothers prevailed in sixty-seven percent of the cases)

The numbers differ because different states have different statutes and legal standards. One study only shows a small bias (42% vs 45%) but the others all show much larger differences (21% vs 55%, "twice as often", etc).

Of course the Massachusetts study is referenced yet again but the authors didn't dig into it very much.

This paper is also interesting because it backs up a claim that MRAs commonly make. Which is the claim that societal biases (bigotry against fathers), and legal challanges (court fees, low probably of success, etc), discourage men from seeking custody.

From the abstract:

In this Article, Professor Maldonado examines the extensive empirical evidence of paternal disengagement and analyses the reasons close to one-third of noncustodial fathers have little or no contact with their children after divorce. Exploring current societal norms of post-divorce fatherhood, she concludes that the law's and society's treatment and expectations of divorced fathers may be facilitating their disengagement.

So basically not only does the court system discriminate against men. But social norms, and legal statutes (which result in the expectation that fathers won't get custody so they don't try) also influence how often men chose to seek custody.

And these facts are all right below the surface, hidden through indirection, by studies that feminists post to try and deny or downplay the problems that fathers run into in family court. Studies which they probably know don't back up their position, and that they hope other people won't try to dig into.

A few additional thoughts I have about this:

• Shouldn't this number essentially be 99% if it were to prove their point? Why is 50% or even 70% applauded? They're quoting studies which, even on the surface, don't appear to back up their claims very well.

• Obviously women still receive custody more often. A 50%-65% success rate is nice and all, but it doesn't disprove claims of discrimination against fathers.

• Joint custody and equal custody are not the same thing. Joint custody can be as little as one day per year visitation rights. What percentage of the men in these studies wanted 50% custody but only got weekend visits? One claim I've seen is that only 12% of fathers who ask for equal custody ever get it. I don't have a source for this though.

• Fathers shouldn't have to "ask for custody" to begin with. They should get it automatically, as a default presumption of the law. Expecting men to shell out the cash and the time to fight for custody is itself kind of sexist.

• The men who do not fight for custody probably have a below average chance of getting it, so that's why they don't fight for it. There is a selection bias where only men who are in a good position to argue for custody are the ones who ask for it. And even those men who are in a good position to ask for custody, don't have that great of a success rate.

So even on the surface, all it takes is a little bit of logic to show that these claims don't back up what they're saying.

What really upsets me though is that I found all of this in a big circle jerk where people were talking about how family law is fair to men, and how men are just a bunch of babies for whining about losing custody. What people were saying is that men are bad parents and that's why the courts rule against them. Which I feel like is incredibly sexist, and would never be tolerated if we were talking about women, or about minorities. The facts though -- even from their own sources that they proudly post themselves -- clearly show something very different.

And that, I think, should show pretty well what the truth is.