Hacker News Reader

Comment by infamia | Hacker News Reader

In your example (incarceration) of "institutional sexism and racism", it's all about how the data is typically segmented and presented. For instance, white males receive harsher sentences than any other combination of race or gender (except black males). Additionally, white males have higher incarceration rates when compared to females of any race. Given these facts, how can "institutional sexism and racism" be objectively proffered when considering white males? If anything, they are far worse off than average. Some may find these statistics surprising, but it's mainly because of the way the headlines are consistently presented and segmented (i.e. almost always white males vs. black males). These numbers are even worse when you dig further into the data and look at the specifics of the circumstances (i.e. gender sentencing disparity/incarceration is a thing).

https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

View on HN

Thanks, that is an interesting point about sentencing that I was not aware of. It is interesting that in the prison population, White groups are under-represented (compared to the population), but it is also true that females are under-represented. [1]. I agree that it is partly about how data are segmented, and probably also about equity is considered (i.e. in the process of sentencing vs across the life course).

I concede the point about sentencing (but not incarceration rates), I suppose some other examples of the institutional sexism and racism I was thinking of would be things like:

- There is a broad gender pay gap (14 to 24%) across the US workforce, even when controlling for variables such as part-time work and parenthood[2] - Fortunte 500 CEOs are 70% white male, whereas the US population is about ~36% male, (based 73% white total). [3] - Government over-represents white males, e.g. about 78% of the House/Senate combined are White and and 24% women [4,5], although this is getting better

My worry is that (political party notwithstanding) some people will interpret single incidents like this as evidence of broad "reverse discrimination." While that is true in this single incident, it does not seem to be true in society considered more holistically.

Thanks again for pointing this out.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/818001/rate-of-imprisonm... [2]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-019-00743-8 [3] https://thesocietypages.org/specials/fortune-500-ceos-2000-2... [4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/08/for-the-fif... [5] https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/slideshows/116th-congre...

I think if we worry overly much about how the fringes will react to the truth, we'll never get anywhere. I think it is a grave mistake for us to ignore anyone's issues, and the drumbeat of racism/sexism often drowns out legitimate issues that concern men (i.e. criminal and civil injustice, college enrollement, mental health, etc.) which likely has a polarizing effect on some (and especially white) men. I'm concerned about both ideological fringes, some on the right will behave exactly as you've described and use it as a weapon, while others on the left will dismiss legitimate concerns as something like "mansplaining" or other divisive/dismissive language. Both of these actions just radicalizes, weaponizes, and polarizes the discussion which is exactly what both extremes want. I'm not sure how to combat this phenomenon of small but highly energized segments of the population from herding the masses one way or another other off the brink (e.g. modern Turkey).

> There is a broad gender pay gap (14 to 24%) across the US workforce, even when controlling for variables such as part-time work and parenthood[2]

That study doesn’t even take into account years of experience but instead estimates it based off of a model that doesn’t take into gender itself.

So it’s pretty fatally flawed in the assumption that a woman 45 years old with a child has the same expected experience as a 45 year old man with a child. The heavy expectations on women to child-rear in the US mean that expected experience between men and women of the same age is going to be significantly different. Their failure to take this into account could explain a significant portion of the divergence in the pay gap as ages increase (the gap is small at young ages).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com