I'm going to pull something out of u/Strikester101's handbook and post this ;).

There are two links I've seen thrown around that shows that "men who request custody usually get it". One shows that it happens 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.

Anyway my thoughts on these kinds of studies are this:

  • Shouldn't this number essentially be 99%? Why is 50% or 70% applauded? It's like they think men don't have a right to complain since these numbers are so "big". My thought is that 70%, even if it were true, still falls short of what it should be.

  • How does it compare to when women request custody? If women receive custody 90% of the time under the same circumstances, it really doesn't prove much.

  • 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?

Here are the links that get posted.

http://amptoons.com/blog/files/Massachusetts_Gender_Bias_Study.htm

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 moms, 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. And 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 Massachusettes study from above. But the other one eventually links to this paper:

"Beyond Economic Fatherhood: Encouraging Divorced Fathers to Parent" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=569363

Which itself contains another footnote but this time it references a bunch of other studies. And those studies all appear to claim that women are favored more often than men (which goes back to the second point that I made above).

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 for example only showed 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 quoted yet again but the authors here didn't dig into it very much.

This paper is also interesting because it appears to back up a claim that I've made in the past (and that I've seen other MRAs make). Which is the claim that societal pressures 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 (resulting in the expectation that fathers won't get custody so they don't try) also influence how often men chose to seek custody.

What really kind of upsets me though is that I found all of this in a big circle jerk about how family law is fair to men and how men are just a bunch of babies for whining about losing custody. The implication that is presented is this notion that men are bad parents and that's why the courts rule that way. 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 about this -- clearly show something very different.

Anyway what are your thoughts on the issue? Do you think men are discriminated against in family court? What about research showing that men who ask for custody usually get it? Is it an important point to make? And if it is an issue of men needing to ask for custody more often, why don't they do this?