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100
User voted Men.
4 votes
Nov 2, 2015

We are talking about the world not the US, Canada, UK and other western countries. There are parts of the world where women can't vote, drive, restrictions on how they dress, whether they can be seen in public with a man they are not related too, etc. So as a whole it easier being a man than a woman in today's world.

-EDIT-

I see the question has been edited to restrict it to the western world.I don't like to delete posts or edit them without letting the reader know.

Now it's a much harder question, but men on the whole have it a little easier than women. Men don't get pregnant, and while it's sad to say there are many business that don't like to hire women of child bearing years, because of just that, but across all professions, women’s careers take a nose dive the moment they reproduce. Women on the average miss more work than men because of childcare, which is generally handled by women. Add to that the health checks, vaccinations, nursery registrations, interviewing nannies or childminders, which is generally left up to the woman. While women do have advantages in certain jobs, they are still held back in others. In some cases it a strength issue, some cases it because they can't easily travel in parts of the world where women are heavily restricted. They also can't serve in combat, etc. And while they do have advantages that men don't have, especially on the social networks, (in my experience women are much better at networking with other people than men) when you look at it in total men still have an edge over women. Part of that is the way we look at women, after all "they can fall back on their man" is an attitude that a lot of people still have. Also if someone career has to give way it's generally the women career that suffers. So all in all men have it a little easier in my opinion.

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100
User voted Men.
main reply
2 votes,
Nov 7, 2015

I think this is a good review. In my view, the causes of female disadvantage are rarely overt, vicious misogyny. Instead, it's a combination of subconscious biases, the inertia of institutions just being used to that being the way things done (e.g. the mommy track makes sense if we expect that women will be taking disproportionate care of the child, but that is not the norm we socially want anymore even if we want to certainly allow some to make that choice), and other gender-blind factors are to blame.

My favorite example is a rushed human resources officer. She's combing through 200 applications. She's trying to find excuses to narrow down to the top 20. Research has found that she's going to, on average, reject more of the female and black names. This was actually one of the major advantages of affirmative action schemes: Knowing that she actually had to try to FIND female or black names, she'd be consistently pleasantly surprised at the good candidates she could draw.

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0
main reply
0 votes,
Jan 11, 2016

You seem to forget that work and economic status are not the only part of life. There's much more than that. What about life expectations? Man must be successful. Whether in work, family or bed. Women are free to choose if they want to be successful. While man must work like a dog, woman can just enjoy life. Why do you think suicide is much more frequent in men?

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100
User voted Men.
1 vote,
Jan 17, 2016

The question is do women or men have it easier in today's Western world? You state women are fee to choose if they want to be successful, (something I disagree with) but ignore the barriers that they have to overcome to become successful. It wasn't that long ago when then most people felt (women included) that when a women went to college she was only going to get her Mrs. degree (to find a husband). And while more girls are getting into more advance placement programs in high school, that support tends to drop off in college. While boys not only get into advance placement class easier they generally have more support once they are in college. I'm also betting you've never had to take care of children, a house, and everything else that goes with it.

Why do I think suicide is much more frequent in men? You do know that women lead men two to one in suicide attempts, men are better at picking methods that will ensure death. It has more to do with how we try and kill ourselves. Men are just better at it.

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0
User voted Neither.
0 votes,
Jan 19, 2016

women lead men two to one in suicide attempts - could you update your post to add a source (use the src button) for this information? Thanks.

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0
User voted Men.
0 votes,
Jan 20, 2016

"There are roughly 30,000 suicides in the United States each year, and three-fourths of those are men. But the number of attempted suicides is at least 10 times that, and even that estimate may be low because many suicide attempts are euphemistically classified as lacerations or accidental poisonings when patients receive treatment in hospital emergency rooms.

Although suicide rates are lower among women, women lead men two to one in suicide attempts. So, Murphy says at least 200,000 women are involved in suicide attempts annually. But he points out that attempted suicide most often is not an attempt to actually end one's life. Its purpose, he says, is to survive with changed circumstances." [source]

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100
1 vote,
Jan 26, 2016

You cut out the key fact:

"An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95 percent of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It's most often an effort to bring someone's attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved. Suicide contains a solution in itself," he says.

That's what I thought when I read your part. Women lead men in attention-bringing acts, which doesn't speak good about women in general. It speaks that women are less sensitive because they don't care about playing fair and not hurting feelings of people around.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide

Considering the study that you posted, men still lead women about 5 to 1 in true suicide attemps. This brings back my original question. Why do you think suicide is much more frequent in men?

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100
User voted Men.
2 votes
Nov 3, 2015

The immense bulk of the sociological evidence is clear. In virtually every institution, being a woman affords one less options and less access.

From the wage gap (which is real, no matter what fraudulent statistical controls people like to attempt, and present in virtually every OECD country) to the second shift to the underrepresentation of women at the highest echelons of almost every political and economic institution (Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, senior partners in law firms in the vast majority of countries, venture capital representation, etc.) to the pink-collar job trajectory, women face quantifiable discrimination.

This combined with micro-aggressions and daily discrimination that the majority of women routinely claim they experience, and generally patriarchal and sexist values, give women, on average, a worse time.

It is crucial to note that this is an average. Race, class and socio-economic status, political power, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, able-bodied status, and a host of other variables have to be taken into account.

Let us consider a common counter-argument: Men in the military or police. In most countries in the Western/industrialized world, the likelihood that a man will be forced to serve in a military, policing or intelligence capacity is near nil. The men that enter those fields choose it, partially because they get a psychic reward in terms of confirmation of patriarchal masculinity and being given a hero's narrative. The fact that these fields are an OPTION gives men by definition more latitude and power: They could NOT serve, but some do, and that gives access to several resources that a comparable woman of the same socio-economic status, race, etc. will have infeiror access to. Meanwhile, women are underrepresented in the military and police of many Western/industrialized societies due to a variety of factors, from outright legalized sexism and discrimination to organizational culture to sexist values in the broader culture.

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100
main reply
1 vote,
Jan 11, 2016

You seem to forget that work and economic status are not the only part of life. There's much more than that. What about life expectations? Man must be successful. Whether in work, family or bed. Women are free to choose if they want to be successful. While man must work like a dog, woman can just enjoy life. Why do you think suicide is much more frequent in men?

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100
User voted Men.
2 votes,
Jan 27, 2016

I don't "seem to forget" that at all, Stefan: I talk about "micro-aggressions and daily discrimination", as well as politics. Being a woman is hard for life expectations too: Women are taught to be demure, to always be the good mother and worker, to be the "Supermom". Women these days have plenty of career expectations, but they also have a much higher pressure to be good domestically too. Men only have to succeed in one sphere, women two. I disagree totally that "women are free to choose if they want to be successful". Not only does a capitalist society promote work for everyone, but most newer families these days have to have two wage-earners. That is absolutely quantifiable in the "second shift" literature which is extensive. What I find remarkable about so many of these discussions is how often the people who are so resistant to the idea of gender equality have a mentality that conveniently flips between being stuck in the 1950s and being extremely worried about hypothetical future trends. You're just not describing most Western societies.

Gender differences in suicide are NOWHERE NEAR as simple as you make it out: The data is very complex. And your unwillingness to look at the massive gender micro-aggression literature is very, very worrisome. Women face constant challenges to their competence in almost every field of life. They face body challenges at magnitudes that men simply do not endure: For example, eating disorders are overwhelmingly a gendered phenomenon.

I also think that it's really revealing when men and people critical of feminism have to back off from the statistics of politics and economics to the vagaries of culture. That's usually a criticism lobbied at feminists, that they are talking too much about the subjective and the cultural.

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100
User voted Men.
1 vote
Dec 1, 2015

From a socioeconomic and cultural standpoint, on average men have it easier.

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0
User voted Men.
main reply
0 votes,
Feb 4, 2016

It is remarkable that this is even debatable.

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0
User voted Men.
0 votes
Aug 4, 2016

The results of this shocks me. While things are improving for women, women still have it very hard.

Facts and statistics don't lie. If you take the time to look, it isn't hard to find evidence that women still have a harder time than men.

Cracked.com did a great article on this just a few days ago. [link]
Just a couple of the points they cover include:

People are conditioned to view women as drama queens, fussy, overly worried and hypochondriacs. As such, there is an extreme problem with doctors refusing to believe women about medical problems.

Often, women complaining about harassment are ignored or dismissed as exaggerating. Did you know that a study showed that women get twice as many death threats and sexual assault threats compared to men? Yet when women say they get harassed all the time, many will treat it like its nothing, or assume it is things like simple name calling and the like.

Frequently, women who report rapes are treated as if they must be lying. Any sign of behavior that is different from what is 'expected' of a victim and surely they must be lying. Never mind the fact that only 2-8% are false reports, where as 10% of car theft reports are false. You don't hear people assuming someone reporting a car theft must be lying. The article even includes a perfect example.

Other articles they've previously done on the topic include:
5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained To Hate Women
5 Shockingly Outdated Problems Modern Women Face At Work
5 Uncomfortable Truths Behind the Men's Rights Movement

And the funniest of them is the photoshop contest:
If Men Had to Put Up With the Same Crap as Women

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0
0 votes
Sep 15, 2016

I have NO idea. Both sexes have it rough. Women have periods, sexual objectification, and lower pay, and men have a higher suicide rate.

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0
0 votes
Feb 1, 2017

first, the West includes Latin America, South Africa and Israel. two, both sexes enjoy same rights in western liberal democracies, so feminism is unnecessary. Western feminism doesn't have reason to be.

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