I would agree completely normally but in the context of the list he gave I don't think that's what I did. The op list is a list of social men's set up for women. "I am not expected to blank because I am male" so it's essentially a list saying that "as a woman in this society I am expected and judged by these double/sexist standards. Now an equivalent list for men would garner the same respect as understanding for men.
If the list that the poster I was referring to said,
"As a woman my woman hood is not questioned for allowing my husband to make more income" than that would be totally fine and within the context of the concept of social privileges.
My issue with the list is that yes men are at the majority of these troubling statistics, but without context, or a similar framing in regards to social issues, it's not a good counter example.
"As a woman, I do not typically feel the societal pressure of being the sole provider, and because of this I am far less likely to commitsuicide" fits the nature of the list and discussion much more. The poster may have been implying this, (if its even true, just a hypotetical for me as I don't know the primary reason for suicide in men) but he/she did not say this. Therefore his/her list simply sounded like a list of unfortunate naturally occurring statistics as opposed to something that is a result of our social structure, making it a pie rebuttal
I see where you're coming from, but the bottom line is when arguing about gender differences the starting point really
should be the facts, not what some people feel.
After these facts are agreed upon, then we can start looking at individual causes, be they emotional or social or whatever. This is true just as much for women as it is for men.
As a man who isn't naturally aware of what it feels like to be a female in society, I rely on factual evidence to tell me there is a problem with gender equality. Studies can show this empirically by looking at employment rates, salaries, etc.
In this sense the OP was somewhat sarcastic because the examples he chose to include where closer to anecdotal evidence than empirical ones, which is perhaps why some of the discussion in this thread started off on the wrong foot.
With that said, if we
do start with the empirical evidence rather than anecdotal, it's true there is a major gap between men and women at the top end of many (probably even most) fields. This in itself is legitimate cause for concern.
But just like any other empirical claim, there is room for criticism, and the prevalent criticism against the claim that men occupy top positions in society due to unfair or unnatural intervention is well known to be that it is based on a sample of society that is not entirely representative of the whole.
This is why I said earlier that I'm eager to see a more extensive study, in order to get the complete picture. Personally, I believe this complete picture won't reveal how one gender is superior to another, but instead demonstrate how innate differences in how we perceive, communicate and learn need to be taken into account in order for both genders to excel and reach their full potential.
In case you're interested, my guiding intuition based on previous knowledge, is that at the end of the day, as smart as we humans think we are in many areas, nature is still smarter than us when it comes to life, which shouldn't be all that surprising as it has had billions of years of trial and error whereas we've only been thinking about this stuff for a few short thousand years. And the idea of certain genetic traits being distributed among men differently than the way they are distributed among women seems to not only fit with what we see around us, it also seems to be a better construct than the alternative, when it comes to ensuring long term survival of the species.
