[Balgair]

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.

There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty.

Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason).

Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.

[nerder92]

This comment was so useful to me, as a man i consider myself to be sensible enough to not be an harasser but it's true that from the standpoint of a white male it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through.

I think exactly this is the reason why many mans perceive the sexual harassment and the sexist argument has overkill sometimes, basically it's an issue cause by a low exposure to it.

Thank you for this comment, i'll use it as an argument in sexism discussions trying to help other fellow mans to understand it.

[js2]

> it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through.

“10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman”

https://youtu.be/b1XGPvbWn0A

[Ewigkeit]

Yes, this is what it's like. Most of the men seem harmless but when someone starts to follow you it gets scary. This was in a populated area thankfully. A few years ago I attended a women who code meetup and two men decided to try and follow two women home, arguing that it wasn't illegal to walk on the street etc. They had to be threatened with someone calling the police and the women had to delay going home and stay with the group leaving the building before it was clear the men would leave them alone and they could safely walk away.

[matt-attack]

I would love to see this same experiment repeated in other cities. For some reason this seems very specific to NYC. Has anyone tried this in Los Angeles for example?

[sporkland]

It's definitely a thing in San Francisco.

[Balgair]

Yeah, not a problem!

Word of caution though, I may be misremembering the model and may be totally off base. I couldn't find the reference very easily, so if you'd like to use this argument yourself, try running a similar model through Excel/Python/R first. It'll give you a pretty good idea of the issues involved.

Happy coding and empathizing!

[mirimir]

Maybe it's a sexist thing to say, but in my experience, men are far more likely to make overt obnoxious comments.

On the other hand, it's my experience that women are far more likely to share obnoxious comments with their friends. But I admit that's based on a small sample, just close female friends and lovers, and wives. And perhaps I'm not the sort of guy who encourages such sharing by male friends. Or even has such male friends, for that matter.

[pelliphant]

Sure, Assume that there are twice as many men in this room, then if a sexual remark is made by a random person, then it will twice as often be made by a male. If the target of said sexual remark is always of the opposite sex, then a specific sexual remark made against a male will have twice as many males to choose from, meaning that a particular male has half the chance of receiving each comment than a female would.

So as a summary: if there are twice as many males in the room and everyone is equally likely to make a sexual comment against the opposite sex, then females would get 4 such comments for each comment a male gets.

Now, for normal everyday examples like walking down the street, asking a question in a class, taking the train, etc.. Does it seem likely to be twice as many males in this "room"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio says that there are 1.01 males to each female, I would say that this is not nearly enough to account for this difference.