But that's not a random sample. Given the widely perceived bias against men, one would expect only the men with the strongest cases to try for custody, and you would expect them to have better outcomes than average men.
If as an experiment you randomly selected a group of men and got them to file for custody, their success rate would probably be lower.
> Given the widely perceived bias against men, one would expect only the men with the strongest cases to try for custody, and you would expect them to have better outcomes than average men.
Actually, even on close-to-even odds, men don't try anyway (losing has a much larger effect if you're a man). See my response in this thread elsewhere for why I declined to fight when my estimated odds were 3/5.
If it gets ugly the bias in favor of women gets stronger.
All of this is anedoctal but in my experience I saw many women willing to use false accusations of violence knowing it was a win win. They knew they wouldn't be punished even if it was proven the accusations were false. And that is a powerful tool to get custody.
And of course for younger children the custody to the mother is often enshrined into law directly.
Yes unfortunately you cannot protect group A from the actions of group B hermetically without hurting group B, if group A and group B interact.
Someone will be hurt, or by the actions of a member of the second group or by the societal actions to protect the second group.
I just wish the compromise was clear and we abandoned the kind of puritanical thinking that we "ought to protect group X" no matter what. We need to talk, qualitatively and quantitatively, about all the sides of the coin.
> If men file for custody they get 50/50. Men who ask for full custody also statistically win more often.
You're pulling that statistic from where? At least from the US census bureau, here are the stats from 2002 that go all the way back to 1994 [1]: "In the spring of 2002, an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lived somewhere else. About 5 of every 6 custodial parents were mothers (84.4 percent) and 1 in 6 were fathers (15.6 percent), proportions statistically unchanged since 1994 (Table A). Overall, 27.6 percent of all children under 21 living in families had a parent not living in the home."
The statistics you cite are related, but doesn't refute the point that men who ask for full custody win more often. I don't know if that's true or not, but it can be true and also only 1/6 custodial parents being fathers can be true. It simply requires that significantly fewer men ask for full custody.
> If men file for custody they get 50/50. Men who ask for full custody also statistically win more often.
That's a nice statistic. Where did you get it?
> You are doing disservice to both kids and men when you tell them they cant have it.
Well I apologise for that, every lawyer I spoke to during my divorce (maybe ... 10?) said not to bother, the odds of a court deciding in favour of the mother were 3/5.
Not bothering to file because of a 3/5 chance of losing seems crazy. It's actually pretty hard to tell 60/40 apart from 50/50, especially if there's lots of covariates.
> Not bothering to file because of a 3/5 chance of losing seems crazy. It's actually pretty hard to tell 60/40 apart from 50/50, especially if there's lots of covariates.
It only seems like that because you're looking at the raw numbers. When you look at the actual stakes, it's quite different.
Let's say we play a coin-toss game: Each time I win the toss, I give you $1. Each time you win the toss, you give me $100.
Would you play? Think it's not fair? Okay, lets make it fair.
Each time you win, you win $1m. Each time you lose, you pay $1m. Would you play against me (I'm not rich)? Would you agree to play against Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos/etc?
It's not just the odds that matters, it's the fact t, even on even odds, in some cases you stand to lose much more than the opposing side.
> That is completely absurd risk reward ratio to reject.
Not really. The impact of losing is "lose hundreds of thousands, be in debt for the next decade and have my work (and life in general) suffer", while still having to deal with having to then fight for access continuously.
The impact of winning was "losing hundreds of thousands, be in debt for a decade, and still have the risk of custody reversal in a future case".
The only winning move here is not to play[1] unless the odds are greatly in your favour - it's cheaper for the female so the female's impact in a win or a lose is substantially less.
Regardless of the risk/reward ratio, when 10 lawyers tell you not to bother, you'd be stupid to ignore their advice.
In any case, I still want to now where you got your statistics from.
[1] All I had to deal with after that was to enforce the contact. That took 3 court cases (luckily, all in my favour).
But women file for custody. Multiple states already have 50/50 being default custody.
Also, filing does not costs "hundreds of thousands". That is just not true. Poor people have those hearings and while it costs money, it costs significantly less.
Where are your 10 lawyers stats from? You realize that lawyers can just be repeating the same thing they found on google? Which could simply be a quote from a forum like this one.
This discussion requires the same standards for all arguments, and no appeals to authority.
But that's not a random sample. Given the widely perceived bias against men, one would expect only the men with the strongest cases to try for custody, and you would expect them to have better outcomes than average men.
If as an experiment you randomly selected a group of men and got them to file for custody, their success rate would probably be lower.