Thursday, June 28, 2007

Statistics about the hardships of men

When I teach sociology methods, I talk about how people use statistics to highlight given causes. To show how this works, I have the students create a list of ten statistics that demonstrate how women have it worse in our society than men. Then, they need to the same thing with statistics demonstrating how men have it worse.

The students are always surprised by how easily they can do both. Given the publicity given to women's causes, such as work place advancement and domestic violence, its interesting for them about parallel issues for men.

Here's a list
of "men have it bad" statistics that's kind of interesting. It covers some pretty broad areas, such as men having it worse in terms of education, health, and crime.

6 comments:

Knumb said...

Gunnery Sargeant Hudson, USMC, used similar statistics when inspiring us to invite women to our pre-commissioning class party.

He said, for every 10 girls you invite, one will come. So, he asked, how many will come if you invite 100?

"10, SIR!"

Is that good enough?

"NO, SIR!"

If you invite 1000, how many will come?

"100, SIR!"

Good enough?

"NO, SIR!"

He worked his way up to 100,000. In truth, if his ratios were accurate, we must have invited about 750. 25 guys. It was a *fun* party.

So, to tie this in to your post, we short chromosomes have to try harder sometimes, but it's worth it for the company of the fairer sex.

Brad Wright said...

That's really funny... I suppose we can use statistics to motivate just about anything!

Ben Byerly said...

The moral of the story seems to be that since we are not as smart as women . . we have to get past killing ourselves and getting thrown in jail if we are to have any chance at surviving. After that, we can contribute to making life hard on women.

Knumb said...

Statistics, powered by a drill instructor and young men who hadn't seen many women for 12 weeks.

Brad Wright said...

LOL, Ben. You have succinctly summarized these stats!

SARA said...

ohh you poor poor men!