LogFAQs > #975205689

Well, adjl has already done work in this topic, so there's not much more for me to add. I will just toss these on the pile for reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6463078/

Lots of interesting (and somewhat sickening) factoids there, but the one that I want to highlight is that two separate analyses of several hundred male students at two universities both found that of those that had suffered sexual abuse as a child, 78% reported a woman as the perpetrator. Admittedly, the sample size isn't great (total number of abuse victims from both studies is 81), but it does highlight the issue that there is a substantial undercount of female abusers.

adjl posted...

It's a little more than that. It's an attitude that reinforces restrictive gender roles for both men and women, with consequences that go quite a bit further than a teenage boy having to work at mcdonalds instead of babysitting the neighbour's kids. It keeps men out of ECE, which means most boys don't get male teachers until middle school, which not only reinforces the idea that child care is "for women" (if you spend your formative years never seeing a man taking care of kids, you're inevitably going to think it's not normal), but also contributes significantly to the overdiagnosis (and subsequent overmedication) of ADHD in young boys, which can translate into poorer long-term academic outcomes and higher rates of criminal activity later in life. For that matter, it's even got smatterings of the same pearl-clutching fear that leads to trans women being assaulted for trying to use the "wrong" bathroom, which I hope all of us agree is bad.

At its core, this is a question of saying "I'm not comfortable with hiring a male babysitter," but rather than questioning why that discomfort exists and whether or not it should, he's just latched on to whatever statistics he can find to support it, ignored the context or the magnitude of the actual numbers, and called it a day. That's not good critical thinking, as evidenced by the obvious disconnect between "I'm not saying a majority of men are abusers" and "I would never hire a man as a babysitter because of the risk of abuse." Acknowledging and avoiding inappropriate generalizations at an intellectual level while continuing to act on them in practice is just hypocritical.

And this is a good summation of the issues I have with this discussion.

The assumption that undergirds the "I would never hire a male babysitter" viewpoint is that men are abusers until proven otherwise which, I shouldn't need to say, is extremely sexist. It would be like someone saying, "Oh, I'd never hire a black person as an overnight security guard for my business! What if they stole something?" - it's dressing up bigotry in the mantle of "can't-be-too-careful!" concern, while thoroughly abusing/misusing statistics to boot.

Moreover, as adjl mentioned, it really does have real world consequences. Men are being pushed out of the childcare sphere and that's to the detriment of kids - boys in particular. Any profession benefits from having a diverse array of voices to offer experiences and opinions; homogeneity is almost always a cause for concern. It's why there was and is such an effort to get women into STEM fields, and the current situation in the education profession is no less acute.

At present in North America, ~70% of all teachers are women and that number jumps to over 90% when talking about early childhood educators. That's a downright catastrophic imbalance, and one that has consequences felt throughout the field. I personally don't think it's a coincidence that the relative rates of boys' and girls' graduation rates track strongly with the gender balance of educators. Back when boys represented the majority of graduates, educators were mostly male; as women became the majority of educators, girls' graduation rates surpassed boys' and the gap has continued to widen ever since (in fairness, this isn't the only factor and I'm not even sure I'd say it's the main one, but I do believe it is a factor). Boys' graduation rates have been stagnating and even declining in some regions for decades, yet there doesn't seem to be any great push to try and address it or even acknowledge that it's an issue.

When boys see almost all women in educational settings, it reinforces the notion that education is feminine and stupidity is masculine (a trope that has been omnipresent in pop culture for years and is only now starting to be toned down); the lack of male role models in a school setting can help foster the impression that both childcare and intellectual pursuits aren't something men are supposed to do. As well, with fewer male voices doing program planning and setting curricula, the risk arises that the material becomes unintentionally tailored to learning styles more accessible and interesting to girls. We've known for years that girls and boys have different learning styles (boys tend to excel with more "hands-on" learning, applying concepts to jobs and tasks, where girls tend to do better with a more structured, conversational approach to learning); having men help plan and structure how classrooms work and what material is covered in what way will help keep boys more engaged and give them a better shot at making it to graduation.

This situation sucks for everyone. It sucks for men who are told, explicitly or implicitly, that childcare is "women's work" and they're not welcome; it sucks for the women who then have to take up the slack and do all the childcare work themselves; and it sucks for the kids who are robbed of good childhood role models.