# Too Much Choice -- POF, OK Cupid, Tinder ...



## bigmac (May 14, 2016)

Note: The following post is not BHM specific but I think its relevant to the BHM community.

Having too much spare time today I've been ruminating about the glut of choices we're presented with every day and how in many ways too much choice is at least as bad as too little. Go into the average supermarket to buy the fixings for dinner and you're confronted with literally thousands of choices. Ironically most are pretty poor choices. If one is fortunate enough to live near a Trader Joe's this dilemma is easily remedied. 

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...e-stressing-us-out-dating-partners-monopolies


Not so easily remedied is the problem presented by the ever expanding universe of dating sites and dating apps. Some issues come to mind: These sites and apps convincingly promise that there is and always will be a never ending supply of dates. They convince people that sexual attraction can be reduced to algorithms, search terms, or a photo gallery.

However, the love lorn rely upon the promise of technology at their peril. As the saying goes time waits of no one. No amount of technology can change the fact that we become less physically attractive with each passing year (not to mention less fertile -- applies to both men and women). Perhaps more importantly, rather than helping us become more marketable in the dating world, over reliance on this technology tends to create stagnation. People seeking fit trim partners -- rather than actually participating in activities where they might meet fit people IRL -- just search of potential dates with athletic bodies. Rather than being a active participant in the local art scene people just claim to be artistic. Rather than participating in real life endeavors that are likely to result in meeting real life people who actually share their interests people get lazy and rely on the representations in profiles not know for their accuracy.

Then there is the Tinder effect. IMHO Tinder has done significant harm to male female dynamic. Using Tinder (or similar apps) pretty much any female between 18 and late middle age can hook-up with a decent looking guy. Guys fortunate enough to be traditionally good looking can of course make out great. But the downside is that encounters with greater probability of actually leading to relationships never happen. Women hook-up with guys who are very unlikely to actually date them and guys who don't make the cut are left wanting. Of course some of the guys who don't make the cut do so because of intrinsic faults -- but many are perfectly dateable. Women get used to being physical with guys who they find very attractive and become likely to find guys who are actually interested in a serious relationship with them wanting.

Taken in toto we have an elite group of guys who (at least until they age out) have an overabundance of willing women. For these "lucky" guys there is little incentive to commit to a serious relationship until they're good and ready (i.e. right before they get too old). Women can internalize unreasonable expectations. Dateable guys with ordinary looks can become bitter. The net result is an ever larger population of single people. While some people claim that single people are actually happier I have a hard time believing that -- we are after all a social species and other means of actual socialization are vanishing as well.


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## Big.Papa (May 17, 2016)

The fundamental issues with your thesis are... 
The ceiling on the limit for guys dating is way way higher than you think it is. Especially because as we "age out" we age up, and lots of women would rather have a 35 year old entrepreneur over a 25 year old intern. And Bruce Willis and George Clooney are still getting laid, too. It's not just because they're famous. Women really like attractive guys with careers. "Elite" makes sense if you're gauging solely on looks. But few girls are going to screw an "elite" guy who lives with his mom and doesn't shower. Even if the app is all about looks, real life isn't. 

It's not all about Tinder. Plenty of people hook up in other places. I met my ex on Words With Friends lol. People will meet. Some will hook up. The Internet age gives you more options. 

The hookup culture has always been there. It used to be you'd go to a bar and buy drinks. Now you go to an app and swipe right. It's cheaper and you don't have to smell like smoke, but there are just as many horny people as 1997.

People are ready for marriage when they are ready. If you really believe in the one person for each of us story, well, I'm sorry. I've seen 100 friends get married and the truth is, two people who are both ready for it, who find someone who is relatively complimentary to them, will date and get married. If you introduced them ten years earlier, it's not like it would have happened ten years sooner. 

If you want to be not single, say that in your profile, and use a site where other people say the same thing. If you want to get laid, it's a different pitch, to a different audience. But don't mix the two together and somehow blame Tinder for someone's inability to find happiness. If the difference between you and happy you is having a partner, that's literally 0.00000000001% of the population. So go find that person and don't let the fact that most of the girls on Tinder think you have too much neck hair stand in your way. It's completely non-relevant.


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## loopytheone (May 20, 2016)

bigmac said:


> Note: The following post is not BHM specific but I think its relevant to the BHM community.
> 
> Having too much spare time today I've been ruminating about the glut of choices we're presented with every day and how in many ways too much choice is at least as bad as too little. Go into the average supermarket to buy the fixings for dinner and you're confronted with literally thousands of choices. Ironically most are pretty poor choices. If one is fortunate enough to live near a Trader Joe's this dilemma is easily remedied.
> 
> ...



Just because you don't believe something or it wouldn't be true for you doesn't mean it isn't true for other people. Speaking personally, I have never, not even once, been unhappy about being single or felt like something was missing or lacking when I was. Being a relationship also doesn't make me innately happier. The same with socialisation in general actually; I have absolutely no desire to socialise with people for the sake of it and it brings me no real pleasure or benefits. Perhaps this is because I'm autistic. Perhaps not. Even if it is, then there are plenty of other autistic people out there too. Not *everybody* would be happier in a relationship.

Also, what's wrong with people having lots of casual sex and hook ups with people they find really attractive? Or with having really high standards? I might be wrong here, but I think that most people only want to be in a relationship with somebody they find really attractive. If anything, the standards are higher for that than for casual sex, for what I've seen. 

For the record, I can think of nothing less attractive than a guy whining that he can't get dates because he 'isnt attractive enough'. I know plenty of 'ugly' guys that are flocked around by girls. The issue is very likely nothing to do with how a guy looks and everything to do with how he acts and how he presents himself. Bitter, angry people are not attractive to most of us. People who understand that a person turning them down isn't an insult, that friendship is not a consolation prize and that there are plenty of people out there that will find them attractive if they just make the first moves... these are the people that tend to be popular with friends and dates, in my experience.


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## bigmac (May 20, 2016)

Not whining. According to a "sex history calculator" from slate.com I've had more partners than 93% of the men my age. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/...number_of_sexual_partners_low_average_or.html

My point is that our new dating market is not working particularly efficiently for most people in that limited resources (i.e. sexual partners) are not being effectively allocated.


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## tankyguy (May 20, 2016)

bigmac said:


> My point is that our new dating market is not working particularly efficiently for most people in that limited resources (i.e. sexual partners) are not being effectively allocated.



Historically speaking, we're the offspring of 80% of the women and 20% of the men who've ever lived. Meaning, very few men throughout time actually managed to find a partner to reproduce with. Attaining the resources to support yourself and a family, and enough to attract a mate, was very difficult to do.

It's only the post WW2 period of stability and wealth where nuclear families and the expectation that most men would start families became the norm for anyone but the privileged classes. That only happened because, in addition to the spoils of the war making the West richer, there was the G.I. Bill and so many men died in the war that competition for good jobs was thinned out a lot.

Really, the present sexual marketplace is returning closer to what it's always been, except maybe worse since it will probably overshoot. Historically, mortality rates for men were higher. Many died at sea seeking their fortune, or at the bottom of a mine, or in war. In the relative stability and peace of the modern age, they're competing for jobs against not only the increased number of all the other men, but with women as well.

Expect marriage rates to continue dropping until there's some trend or event that cuts down on the male population and/or creates tons and tons of new jobs and status opportunities for men.


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## dwesterny (May 20, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> creates tons and tons of new jobs and status opportunities for men.


At this point I doubt that the jobs and status opportunities would even matter since women are becoming more capable of holding the jobs and status themselves. I don't see that reversing unless maybe some blatant sexist were elected to like the presidency of the united states but that's not really possible. Right?


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## tankyguy (May 20, 2016)

dwesterny said:


> At this point I doubt that the jobs and status opportunities would even matter since women are becoming more capable of holding the jobs and status themselves.



Obviously, it would have to be opportunities _just_ for men. Like the G.I. Bill that helped unprecedented numbers of men attend college, start businesses, etc.



> I don't see that reversing unless maybe some blatant sexist were elected to like the presidency of the united states but that's not really possible. Right?



I'm not going to call a presidency, and I'm even less qualified to talk about Hegelian Dialectics re: gender roles. 
But I wonder though, what's stronger: women's need for self actualization through career or their biological drive to start a family. That's a question they've been wrestling with themselves for the past 50 years.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969


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## dwesterny (May 20, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> Obviously, it would have to be opportunities _just_ for men. Like the G.I. Bill that helped unprecedented numbers of men attend college, start businesses, etc.
> 
> I'm not going to call a presidency, and I'm even less qualified to talk about Hegelian Dialectics re: gender roles.




Even the GI bill and all the vet benefits are available to women. Currently the discussion is whether to eliminate the draft (which men still register for) or to have women register for the draft as well.


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## Xyantha Reborn (May 20, 2016)

I am not sure I understand your base premise. Is your issue that chauvinistic characteristics are now being displayed by the fairer sex? Or that you think people are unhappy being single? Is it get off the phone and go beat the streets?

If the former, all I can say is in the words of Louis CK - "no one dates down, they always date up or across". That isn't a new concept. And I agree with Tankyguy; most males in most species never get to mate. Even social animals like Stallions form brotherhood bands; but the majority of them never get to mount a filly even once. Besides which, no female I know uses Tinder or other apps to meet 'the one'. Those are basically fuck buddy sites. Most women I know generally meet "the one" through friends of friends, or meet up through a common interest like Dims or Anime or what have you. 

If the later; marriage is a social construct and has very little to do with bonds. The majority of people in 'asia' still marry based on economic, status, or political reasons. The idea that marriage was a prerequisite for happiness is enforced by religion, and was a gate to having children. But as a species we are overcrowded. The biological response to overcrowding is generally to have less offspring...unless things like religion tell you to have 6 kids. I don't think the world is exactly jonesing for more kids.

And your idea of what a social species is also seems odd to me. Most married couples actually socialize much less when they are married or have children, because their focus turns into the core family unit. Socialization is, in today's society, the domain of the single. What do you define as social behaviour?

I think you are projecting your own believies and emotions on others when you say "while some people claim that single people are actually happier I have a hard time believing that..." After a while of reading your posts, I get the impression that your time being single was not very palatable, that you struggled with people accepting your preferences - and that you are at least proud of your wife. I get the impression you found dating a chore, marrying a relief, and that you feel others must feel the same way.

And if that is true, I can't say I personally disagree with preferring marriage. To be honest, from a very young age I knew I wanted a monogamous relationship with a steady older guy, and when I got my man, it was what I wanted...but that doesn't mean that I don't see how some of my stridently independent friends prefer a looser relationship that does not impinge on their life, limit their freedom, or cause them pain.


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## tankyguy (May 20, 2016)

dwesterny said:


> Currently the discussion is whether to eliminate the draft (which men still register for) or to have women register for the draft as well.



I think the realistic conclusion that discussion ends with will be the fact that women can guide robotic drones was well as men can and we really don't need to pull people from the general population for that. :doh:

[edited to add a missing 'be']


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## dwesterny (May 20, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> I think the realistic conclusion that discussion ends with will the fact that women can guide robotic drones was well as men can and we really don't need to pull people from the general population for that. :doh:



There is a joke about women drivers that I am not going to make.


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## bigmac (May 20, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> Historically speaking, we're the offspring of 80% of the women and 20% of the men who've ever lived. Meaning, very few men throughout time actually managed to find a partner to reproduce with. Attaining the resources to support yourself and a family, and enough to attract a mate, was very difficult to do.
> 
> ...



Yes this is the natural, as in red in tooth and claw, system. Natural though it may be its not a system that maximizes economic utility or the social stability upon which high standards of living are based.


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## bigmac (May 20, 2016)

Xyantha Reborn said:


> ... The biological response to overcrowding is generally to have less offspring...



Yes, provided that the species in question is a k-selection species (i.e. one that invests heavily in a limited number of offspring). However, r-selection species just keep on reproducing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory


In Homo sapiens culture determines strategy. Thus, many groups without the resources to practice a k-selection strategy gravitate to the alternative and continue to have large numbers of offspring.


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## Xyantha Reborn (May 20, 2016)

My drone skillz r the best, especially when i put on makeup while operating it. 

....BM, did you just really quote _Wikipedia _as your source? :doh:


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## loopytheone (May 21, 2016)

bigmac said:


> Yes, provided that the species in question is a k-selection species (i.e. one that invests heavily in a limited number of offspring). However, r-selection species just keep on reproducing.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
> 
> ...



Humans are, as a specie, K selected. Biologically we are incapable of reproducing at a number/rate that would allow R selection pressures to apply. That said, K-R selection is more of a scale than two set points and I'm not denying that specific populations can slide around a little depending on circumstances. But regardless of that, humans are not capable of producing hundreds of offspring per individual at once and said offspring don't tend to survive if just left to themselves without additional parental investment rather than the parents focusing on just creating more children. Even during periods of very low resources - such as the beginning of the farming revolution - where it was vital to reproduce a lot to have many more hands to support the family unit, the amount of resources invested into individual children to make them survive vs the speed of reproduction in human females means as a specie, we don't even get close to being R selected rather than K selected. Carrying capacity is always the limit as opposed to rate of reproduction in humans. 

(Sorry, rambling. Just so happens to be a zoological theory and therefore my specialty and I get very excited when it comes up in conversation.)


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## Yakatori (May 21, 2016)

Otherwise, I would just offer:



Xyantha Reborn said:


> "_....BM, did you just really quote Wikipedia as your source? :doh:_"


I don't think it's so bad to cite Wiki in this context. I actually love _Wikipedia_, for this very reason, of how it makes this kind of stuff so much more accessible for this current generation, and so, therefore, kind of easy to take for granted.


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## bigmac (May 21, 2016)

dwesterny said:


> At this point I doubt that the jobs and status opportunities would even matter since women are becoming more capable of holding the jobs and status themselves. ...



Assortative mating comes into play:


_IN MAD MEN, a series about the advertising industry in the 1960s, women are underpaid, sexually harassed and left with the kids while their husbands drunkenly philander. Sexual equality was a distant dream in those days. But when Don Draper, the shows star, dumps the brainy consultant he has been dating and marries his secretary, he strikes a blow for equality of household income.

Nowadays, successful men are more likely to marry successful women. This is a good thing. It reflects the fact that there are more high-flying women. Male doctors in the 1960s married nurses because there were few female doctors. Now there are plenty. Yet assortative mating (the tendency of similar people to marry each other) aggravates inequality between householdstwo married lawyers are much richer than a single mother who stacks shelves. ...

The wage gap between highly and barely educated workers has grown, but that could in theory have been offset by the fact that more women now go to college and get good jobs. Had spouses chosen each other at random, many well-paid women would have married ill-paid men and vice versa. Workers would have become more unequal, but households would not. ...

But in reality the highly educated increasingly married each other. ...
_

http://www.economist.com/news/unite...tween-rich-and-poor-households-sex-brains-and


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## tankyguy (May 21, 2016)

bigmac said:


> Assortative mating comes into play:
> 
> 
> _IN MAD MEN, a series about the advertising industry in the 1960s, women are underpaid, sexually harassed and left with the kids while their husbands drunkenly philander. Sexual equality was a distant dream in those days. But when Don Draper, the shows star, dumps the brainy consultant he has been dating and marries his secretary, he strikes a blow for equality of household income.
> ...



Exacerbating this problem is the fact that not only are more women graduating with degrees, fewer men are. The percent of men getting a Bachelor's or better had been in decline since the mid 1970's and the percent of women has been rising. IIRC, around 1992 was when the crossover happened and there was a brief moment of parity. If the trend continues at the same rate, the last man will graduate from college in 2065. This... probably wont actually happen.  Some kind of crash is bound to upset or at least slow the trend, but it gives you an idea where things could be headed. Having a few generations of frustrated, unemployed/undereducated men sitting around with little chance to ever start a family is not the best for a stable society. Either way, something will give out.


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## dwesterny (May 21, 2016)

Crash? No, it will just hit a point of stasis and eventually it will shift again when things change (cost of college etc...) 

I don't see a problem with any of this, it's human nature. As far as causes of economic inequality I would put people marrying within their own income bracket about as low as you can get and the parity between partners probably makes things more stable in the relationship.

The only real difference is we are moving away from an inherent power differential favoring males in relationships.

At least you're not a single male in China. Those dudes are screwed, the one child policy plus the cultural preference for male children led to a generation where men outnumber women significantly.


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## bigmac (May 21, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> ... Having a few generations of frustrated, unemployed/undereducated men sitting around with little chance to ever start a family *is not the best for a stable society*. Either way, something will give out.



Yes!!! Exactly!!!

Promise frustrated men seventy two virgins or a wall to keep out their supposed enemies and there's no telling what some of them will do.


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## bigmac (May 21, 2016)

Xyantha Reborn said:


> ... no female I know uses Tinder or other apps to meet 'the one'. Those are basically fuck buddy sites. ...



Yes, but it is the rise of the "fuck buddy" that is having social impacts. We're a social species that uses sexual interaction to reinforce social bonds. Serial monogamy or casual dating likely strengthen social bonds. However, if women just hookup with the best looking guy available most men are shut out. This ineffective allocation of sexual resources undermines society.


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## tankyguy (May 21, 2016)

bigmac said:


> However, if women just hookup with the best looking guy available most men are shut out. This ineffective allocation of sexual resources undermines society.



Then, if they end up having a kid by this guy and he doesn't stick around, the partial cost of supporting the kid is offloaded onto the rest of society via taxes. The guys who aren't getting any end up footing the bill for someone else getting to spread their genes around and you start to see why they're getting so angry at the status quo. :doh:


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## dwesterny (May 21, 2016)

bigmac said:


> However, if women just hookup with the best looking guy available most men are shut out. This ineffective allocation of sexual resources undermines society.


I really can't see this as a problem and I'm guessing a lot of women would take issue with considering their vaginas a resource to be allocated. 



tankyguy said:


> Then, if they end up having a kid by this guy and he doesn't stick around, the partial cost of supporting the kid is offloaded onto the rest of society via taxes. The guys who aren't getting any end up footing the bill for someone else getting to spread their genes around and you start to see why they're getting so angry at the status quo. :doh:



Sorry, I don't really think the single parent household issue has anything to do with tinder and this is striking me as unsubstantiated and misdirected bitterness.


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## bigmac (May 21, 2016)

dwesterny said:


> I really can't see this as a problem and I'm *guessing a lot of women would take issue with considering their vaginas a resource to be allocated*.
> 
> ...




I've been accused of being less than romantic. However, want I'm advocating is pairbond coupling -- a society where the large majority of people pair off. My cold hard calculus actually supports and provides a foundation for the romantic stuff.

But, if women insist on entering sexual relationships with only the best looking guys the result is that most guys are shut out all together and most women get nothing more than a spot in the rotation. Everybody involved must learn that we all need to settle -- that we cannot have it all. Again not too romantic -- but reality seldom is.


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## CleverBomb (May 22, 2016)

Yakatori said:


> Otherwise, I would just offer:
> 
> I don't think it's so bad to cite Wiki in this context. I actually love _Wikipedia_, for this very reason, of how it makes this kind of stuff so much more accessible for this current generation, and so, therefore, kind of easy to take for granted.


You can't cite it for a research paper, but linking to it is often a good way to provide an overview of a topic that your audience may be unfamiliar with, rather than dropping a wall of text into the middle of what might otherwise be a fairly brief comment.


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## agouderia (May 22, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> Historically speaking, we're the offspring of 80% of the women and 20% of the men who've ever lived.
> 
> Historically, mortality rates for men were higher. Many died at sea seeking their fortune, or at the bottom of a mine, or in war.



Sorry to have to contradict you - but that is historically plain incorrect.

The figure you quote is slightly distorted - more realistic estimates say it's 80% of the women and app. 30-35% of the men ever lived were ancestors.

The reason for that is a totally different one though - many men had offspring with more than one woman because so many women died young in childbirth.

It's is only in the past 80-100 years with better pregnancy and birth care as well as effective means of birth control that women have started outliving men in all age cohorts.

Stop the whining guys - one side aspect of more (not yet really acheived) gender equality means that you get back a bit of the lookist-shit males have been (and still are in a much more massive and invasive way) subjecting women to.


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## dwesterny (May 22, 2016)

Also I have to ask who posting on this has actually used (for more than a day) PoF, OKC or tinder? Because I have to tell you my tinder experience is that 1/2 maybe as much as 2/3rds of the female profiles on there say "If you just want a hook up swipe left" or similar. The FFA I met on tinder stated her goal is marriage and children. That's not my goal (at present I guess) so it's probably not going to work out but it's out there if you look.


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## bigmac (May 22, 2016)

agouderia said:


> ...
> 
> Stop the whining guys - one side aspect of more (not yet really acheived) gender equality means that *you get back a bit of the lookist-shit males have been (and still are in a much more massive and invasive way) subjecting women to.*



Don't disagree with this -- but does equality really mean imitating the worst qualities of the masculine gender?

Also, guys may talk smack but at the end of the night they'll hook up with a women in their league (obviously we're not all Brad Pitt -- or who ever is considered hot today). Traditional guy "lookism" doesn't distort the dating/marriage market.


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## bigmac (May 22, 2016)

dwesterny said:


> ... her goal is marriage and children.
> 
> ...




I've learned to take people's publically stated goals with many grains of salt.


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## dwesterny (May 22, 2016)

bigmac said:


> I've learned to take people's publically stated goals with many grains of salt.



It wasn't publicly stated, it was in our discussion about what parameters/goals we were interested in for a relationship.


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## fat hiker (May 24, 2016)

tankyguy said:


> Having a few generations of frustrated, unemployed/undereducated men sitting around with little chance to ever start a family is not the best for a stable society.



Based on what I see teaching at a Canadian community college, there won't be 'a few generations of unemployed men' - instead they will get different jobs. While women are increasing their numbers in university, more men are gravitating towards 'non-academic' technical trades, from plumbing to carpentry to motor mechanic to engineering technician.


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## Tad (May 24, 2016)

Lots of great posts in this thread   

Hiker: perhaps better to say "Still gravitating towards"? After all, those trades have always been male dominated .... it is just that many that used to be male dominated no longer are, while certain fields just haven't appealed to women in the same way.

(and for what it is worth, women's enrollment in engineering seems to have stalled or even slid back a bit, from what I've read/heard. Frustrating for the field as a whole, possibly a relief for nerdy young men who are lagging their female peers in overall maturity, so less apt to be as effective at being a student. (I'm taking it as a given that higher maturity tends to give better studenting skills)


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## lucca23v2 (May 24, 2016)

This is interesting.

First let me say, many people are happy being single. Many lie and say they are to cover, but many really are happy being single.

This is really a matter of how society changes. Before the only way for a woman to have some form of freedom was to get married. Meaning, she was in charge of her own household and out of her parents domain. Once women started working as more than librarians, nurses, teachers, etc... they were able to have more freedom. They no longer needed to be married to have freedom. They could work and live on their own which started to decrease women needing to be married to leave the parents home.

In terms of education, women have always been able to study as much as men. The reason why there are more women in college is because these days men are not as dependable as they use to be. That is the truth. Where men were worried before about what their families, friends and community though of them when they got a girl pregnant kept them dependable and making sure they were at lease financially responsible for their kids. These days, girls get pregnant and the man is no where around. (This is not all men. There are plenty of men that are willing to take responsibility and have, and I applaud those men.)

In terms of hook ups, these days it is no longer a "boys will be boys" type of thing. It is now perfectly fine for women to say I am horny and I want to hook up and not be thought of as a slut. (Though that thought still has not been completely eradicated sadly.)

In the end, those that want to get married will and those that don't, won't. You also have to remember that not everyone is made for marriage. Some people are better off being alone with occasional relationships and some are perfectly fine with being alone.

Society will take care of itself and there will always be enough children being born. Right now, this world is not lacking human bodies. This world is lacking men and women with good sense.

JMHO


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## Dr. Feelgood (May 24, 2016)

lucca23v2 said:


> Right now, this world is not lacking human bodies. This world is lacking men and women with good sense.



I saw a t-shirt the other day that said, "We already have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?"


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## lucca23v2 (May 24, 2016)

Dr. Feelgood said:


> I saw a t-shirt the other day that said, "We already have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?"


Exactly!!!!! Lol

Sent from my SM-N920P using Tapatalk


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## bigmac (May 25, 2016)

Actually birth rates are plummeting all over the world. In many countries lack of young people is or will soon be a major problem.


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## Tad (May 25, 2016)

bigmac said:


> Actually birth rates are plummeting all over the world. In many countries lack of young people is or will soon be a major problem.



Or at least a major challenge. Post-war society structured itself around the baby boom in most western countries, with a very pyramid shaped demographics (more younger people than older people in any two age groups you chose). After the boom stopped in the mid-sixties, we began to see a lot of angst in a lot of places, because right away the tale end of the boom didn't have the same opportunities that the earlier births in the boom did (they didn't have as many opportunities to baby-sit or work summer camp, when they graduated there were not so many new jobs for teachers, etc). Granted that the oil shock and (in the US) the Vietnam war helped change things too.

I'd say we've more-or-less adjusted to a more stable population profile (barring some who pine for the 'good-old-days'), but it took quite a long time, and it has come with more inequality. Now dealing with an inverted population distribution is going to be a whole other shift. Certainly it has been very challenging in Japan, the first country to hit that. The US will be one of the last to go through it, as their birth rate was up near replacement levels -- with immigration keeping the country growing slowly -- up to 2008. The financial crash had a predictable impact on birth rates, but less predictably they have still not recovered, it looks like they've settled in noticeably lower than they were. 

We don't really have any good models of what a healthy culture and economy looks like in a country with a sustained below-replacement birthrate. Not to say that it is impossible, just that none of the countries experiencing it so far seem to have gotten things working well, in one way or another.


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## fat hiker (May 25, 2016)

Tad said:


> Lots of great posts in this thread
> 
> Hiker: perhaps better to say "Still gravitating towards"? After all, those trades have always been male dominated .... it is just that many that used to be male dominated no longer are, while certain fields just haven't appealed to women in the same way.
> 
> (and for what it is worth, women's enrollment in engineering seems to have stalled or even slid back a bit, from what I've read/heard. Frustrating for the field as a whole, possibly a relief for nerdy young men who are lagging their female peers in overall maturity, so less apt to be as effective at being a student. (I'm taking it as a given that higher maturity tends to give better studenting skills)



There was, for quite a while, a movement away from the trades - Canada since the 1980s has been importing welders and plumbers and machinists and cabinetmakers and other tradespeople, and programs to train them were withering away - but now those trades are (finally) growing again, so I would say "again gravitating towards". 

Women's enrolment in university engineering programs has stalled at certain universities - others are not seeing a ceiling happening. It seems to depend, no surprise, on whether the university in question has any female engineering faculty to serve as mentors/role models.


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## fat hiker (May 25, 2016)

lucca23v2 said:


> This is interesting.
> 
> In terms of education, women have always been able to study as much as men. The reason why there are more women in college is because these days men are not as dependable as they use to be.



Well, perhaps since the 1980s women have always been able to study as much as men - but before then, there were real and imagined barriers to women in many fields - the further back you go, the more real the barriers were. Only two fields were open to my mother at university - education and nursing. Not the chemistry and architecture that she and her best friend wanted to study.

And "men are not as dependable as they used to be"? No, I'd say the change is that society no longer chastises or socially punishes men who don't stay with the woman they impregnated. It used to be that everyone, men and women, 'knew' that if a guy got a gal pregnant, the next step was marriage - and divorce was impossible. This change to not pressuring the men to stay is bad, in that men should support their partner and child, and good, in that the rate of spousal abuse and violence against mothers and children has gone down.

Again, JMHO.


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## bigmac (May 27, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> There was, for quite a while, a movement away from the trades - Canada since the 1980s has been importing welders and plumbers and machinists and cabinetmakers and other tradespeople, and programs to train them were withering away - but now those trades are (finally) growing again, so I would say "again gravitating towards".
> 
> Women's enrolment in university engineering programs has stalled at certain universities - others are not seeing a ceiling happening. It seems to depend, no surprise, on whether the university in question has any female engineering faculty to serve as mentors/role models.




Canada and the United States are quited different when it comes to traditional male occupations. Blue collar jobs are still a substantial portion of the Canadian economy and the people (mostly men) in these occupations are held in much higher esteem than their American counterparts.

This helps explain why Canadian families are generally in better shape. Lots of blue collar guys can still support families in Canada (I had no problem paying my mortgage when I was a labourer with the Edmonton Public Works Dept.). In the United States blue collar guys become more marginalized with each passing year.


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## bigmac (May 27, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> ...
> 
> And "men are not as dependable as they used to be"? No, I'd say the change is that society no longer chastises or socially punishes men who don't stay with the woman they impregnated. It used to be that everyone, men and women, 'knew' that if a guy got a gal pregnant, the next step was marriage ...




I have an alternate interpretation. It used to be that a young blue collar guy who got his girlfriend pregnant was in a position where he could get married. He could make good money at the local factory, mill, mine ... . In the United States those days are over. Today most young blue collar American men can hardly support themselves let alone make any meaningful contribution toward the support of a family unit. Under these circumstances the pregnant girlfriend is actually unlikely to even want to get married. Why would she want to get hitched to a guy who is likely to have a negative rather than positive impact on her finances.

This situation was examined in detail in a recent book from Oxford University Press:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marriage-markets-9780199916580?cc=us&lang=en&


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## Dr. Feelgood (May 27, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> This change to not pressuring the men to stay is bad, in that men should support their partner and child, and good, in that the rate of spousal abuse and violence against mothers and children has gone down.



Indeed. There are quite a few nineteenth-century American ballads in which the young man murders his sweetheart when she reveals she is pregnant and presses for marriage. He generally is hanged in the last verse.


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## lucca23v2 (May 28, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> Well, perhaps since the 1980s women have always been able to study as much as men - but before then, there were real and imagined barriers to women in many fields - the further back you go, the more real the barriers were. Only two fields were open to my mother at university - education and nursing. Not the chemistry and architecture that she and her best friend wanted to study. Again, JMHO.



Well, they could study more than education and nursing before the 1980.. the Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 was passed which protected students against discrimination on basis of sex. But before this there were professional women. Some were doctors and lawyers. 

You have to remember that women were denied the ability to get degrees because if they did, then they would be entitled to everything that came with it... like equal status, voting rights, being able to give opinions in how the colleges should be run... etc.


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## Tad (May 30, 2016)

There has been pretty steady evolution over the last century or so, from shockingly repressive and formalized discrimination to &#8216;simply’ ongoing cultural expectations, priorities, and structures. I look at this through the lens of my Father’s family. His mother was one of three daughters, I knew the other two as the spinster aunts that lived together, who we visited occasionally. See, after school they had found decent jobs for a major company, but if they were ever to marry they would be required to quit. Those two chose work over marriage and family (and frankly seemed pretty happy from what childhood memories I have of them). That was what you face if you were born around the start of the twentieth century.

My father studied engineering in in the fifties, and recalls that the engineering department would hold a &#8216;Godiva Parade’ through campus once a year, where they would hire a local stripper to recreate Godiva’s famous horseback jaunt. It was tradition, and nobody thought much of it that he can recall, it was just what was done. For the most part the engineers dated nurses, because they were the majority on campus, however one of his good friends got involved with one of the handful of women studying engineering at the time. They got married after she’d completed three of the four years, and of course she didn’t come back to study for fourth year, no matter her marks or ability. She would have been allowed to finish up school as a married woman and to work, but it was strongly against social expectations, and well she came from a &#8216;good family’ and didn’t want to cause any fuss you know.

I studied engineering in the late 80/early 90s. My class had a bit over ten percent women, which is honestly more than I’ve seen in most of the companies I’ve worked at since then. We didn’t have Godiva Parades …. But did still parade through campus once a term singing “Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride….” (I think I have the start of the chorus right). It seemed a bit rude, but it was tradition, right? And some of the women in the program would be part of it and singing as loud as anyone else, so I figured it was OK… (yes, I’d like to go back and knock some sense into my younger self). Nobody questioned the right of the women who were in the program to be there, that I ever heard, and for that matter women were over represented in class leadership &#8211; in hindsight I think that what tended to happen was that the sort of women who would go into engineering at the time were much more apt to have very strong personalities, compared to many of the guys who were pretty typical nerds, so naturally more of the women filtered into leadership roles.

I’ve spent close to two decades working for technology start-ups (I was with more traditional companies before that), and there is much less than ten percent of the tech part of the work force in these companies that are women. Typically start-ups in my field carefully hire carefully selected people who already have a fair bit of industry experience …. and who are willing to work very long hours at times and/or travel at the drop of a hat. (my particular role isn’t nearly as bad as most in these companies, thankfully). Perhaps it is no surprise that the few women in technical jobs in my current company who have kids have all been in roles that permit a fair bit of their work to be done from home, and they mulit-task their evenings by logging in remotely to launch new simulations, then doing domestic duties until those are done, check on them and run new ones, etc. (Some of the guys with kids do this too, but that is a minority &#8211; most of the guys with kids who are putting in long hours have spouses who are home in the evening to keep the home fires burning). Although how much is the hours, and how much is the rather macho culture driving away women, and how much is women anticipating these things and ruling out working for a place like this before even checking it out, I don’t know (the women who do work here seem to love the place, btw.)

(I can't claim to be an exception to this: my wife chose to stay at home with our son full time until he was seven, then she sought part time work where she'd work mornings so as to be home for him at lunch and right after school, and it was only when he was well into high-school that she accepted a full time position, but even then 8-4 because she didn't want him home alone for too long in the evenings. She's made this her priority, which has left me able to work until six or six-thirty each night. Early quitting time by many standards, but certainly not compatible with getting supper on the table at a reasonable hour)


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## fat hiker (May 31, 2016)

lucca23v2 said:


> Well, they could study more than education and nursing before the 1980.. the Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 was passed which protected students against discrimination on basis of sex. But before this there were professional women. Some were doctors and lawyers.
> 
> You have to remember that women were denied the ability to get degrees because if they did, then they would be entitled to everything that came with it... like equal status, voting rights, being able to give opinions in how the colleges should be run... etc.



Exactly my point.

And Title IX only applies in the USA - and not very evenly in the USA either. Equality is a long, hard, slog.


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## lucca23v2 (May 31, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> Exactly my point.
> 
> And Title IX only applies in the USA - and not very evenly in the USA either. Equality is a long, hard, slog.


 

It is not that they couldn't study other subjects, it is more that they were dissuaded from pursuing those studies. Remember that there were women doctors and scientists back in the 1800s. There were not a lot but there were some.


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## bigmac (May 31, 2016)

The fact that women have many more opportunities now is great. As the father of four daughters I wouldn't want it any other way. However, we must still deal with the unintended consequence of greater equality of the sexes -- greater social stratification causes by assortative mate selection.


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## fat hiker (May 31, 2016)

lucca23v2 said:


> It is not that they couldn't study other subjects, it is more that they were dissuaded from pursuing those studies. Remember that there were women doctors and scientists back in the 1800s. There were not a lot but there were some.




"Dissuaded" is a nice, polite term for the sort of truly enormous pressures that were put on women to study only 'acceptable' fields. 

Hats off the pioneering women who didn't buckle under the pressure!

But, in the name of all those who didn't get the chance to study what they wanted, let us still pursue equality now!


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## bigmac (May 31, 2016)

Also interesting is the changing effect of education on marriage over the years. Two of my father's aunts went to graduate school before WWII -- neither married. They were proof that the old adage that men didn't want to marry smart women was true. Today things have totally changed. Today it is the most highly educated women who are likely to marry and stay married.


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## Crumbling (Jun 2, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> "Dissuaded" is a nice, polite term for the sort of truly enormous pressures that were put on women to study only 'acceptable' fields.
> 
> Hats off the pioneering women who didn't buckle under the pressure!




Ironically many of those 'acceptable fields' were in core STEM Fields such as Mathematics, Statistics, Logic, Theoretical Physics etc. etc. etc. This is why women like Ada Lovelace, Edith Clarke, Grace Hopper, Katherine Johnson .. The team of female 'Computers' who programmed ENIAC... even had a foot in the door.

Fields which women have been pushed out of as they gained 'prestige'.


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## fat hiker (Jun 2, 2016)

Crumbling said:


> Ironically many of those 'acceptable fields' were in core STEM Fields such as Mathematics, Statistics, Logic, Theoretical Physics etc. etc. etc. This is why women like Ada Lovelace, Edith Clarke, Grace Hopper, Katherine Johnson .. The team of female 'Computers' who programmed ENIAC... even had a foot in the door.
> 
> Fields which women have been pushed out of as they gained 'prestige'.




I hadn't thought of the early computer field - based on math - that way. Thanks for the reminder! 

Crystallography was another field open to women - though after Watson and Crick, who relied on a woman cyrstallographer for their breakthrough but didn't acknowledgeher - that one got closed to women too.

I must admit, I was thinking even further back, my mother's time, when teaching, nutrition and nursing were the only 'acceptable' fields - and then, only until you got married!

WWII changed some of that attitude.


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## bigmac (Jun 2, 2016)

fat hiker said:


> ...
> 
> WWII changed some of that attitude.



For a short time. Most women (especially middle class women) were sent back to the kitchen until the women's movement of the late 60s and 70s.


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## Green Eyed Fairy (Jun 4, 2016)

bigmac said:


> For a short time. Most women (especially middle class women) were sent back to the kitchen until the women's movement of the late 60s and 70s.



You must have read The Feminine Mystique...


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## bigmac (Jun 5, 2016)

Green Eyed Fairy said:


> You must have read The Feminine Mystique...



A very long time ago. More recently I read Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ which covers a lot of the same topics. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_Against_American_Women


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