and it only benefits them when you give them examples of people who actually do hate them for their penises and skin color.
Not really? They'd just make up examples and pretend they're real anyways. Actually, that's what they're doing. You never see anyone trying to support "our while maleness is under attack!" using evidence or facts, even if they technically could.
They do, but you just haven't actually looked to check. I'll give you an example of low-hanging fruit:
They can (and do) just cite that 60% of college students are girls, point out the number of ways schools let boys down and the assumptions about gender that are behind this, along with pointing out that 90% of the teachers that the boy will have are female, and point out evidence (from actual studies) showing teacher bias against boys, biases in prescribing ritalin to boys to control typical boy-behavior, and so on and so on. There's enough good factual evidence here to write a series of textbooks on the subject.
Now, you might argue and try and explain-away some of the above figures as "not bias", but consider that people often say that "only 40% of such and such are women" and we're expected to take that as proof of gender bias, and if you try and point out any flaws in the assumptions, i.e. do any sort of statistical adjustment to account for confounding factors, you're labelled a bigot in the Court of Twitter. The world is
full of activists spouting off half-truths and you're labeled the enemy if you try and have a debate on relevant facts. It's not just one side.
Boys have an overwhelming number of female teachers compared to male ones. Feminists talk about how important role models are for girls, so isn't it possible (based on the exact same logic) that the lack of male teachers is a big part of the failure of boys to engage in education? And of course, the reason for the lack is gender bias (which about as valid a claim as claiming that if 90% of college professors in STEM are male is purely gender bias, and this prevents girls studying STEM due to lack of role models).
EDIT: as a point, consider the "infamous" James Damore memo from Google, that racist sexist screed you've all heard about. Probably nobody's read it, and more to the point
wouldn't read it, because to admit you've read it is like saying you sat down to read Mein Kampf, or something
Let me print an excerpt:
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-circulating-internally-at-google/Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap
Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them:
Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
Women on average are more cooperative
Allow those exhibiting cooperative behaviour to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do. This doesn't mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn't necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what's been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
The male gender role is currently inflexible
Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more "feminine," then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.
Yeah, so right in the middle of the "anti diversity" screed he has a list of common sense ways that the gender gap can be reduced. His actual point of the entire memo is that there's a culture that
denies the difference between men and women, and it's this culture itself which prevents the gender gap being reduced in meaningful ways. James Damore then suggests ways to restructure technical and leadership roles in ways that play to women's known strengths.
EDIT: note that he's always careful to say "on average" for any gender difference, and at the end he notes the valuable progress of feminism, along with the need to allow more expression of typically female traits in males. The guy's whole text has been heavily misrepresented by pretty much all the sources.
James Damore is not some guy saying "diversity is bad" at all. That's highly misleading. What Damore uses as evidence is studies showing the role of biology on traits associated with gender, which is a very scientifically defensible position. Who he's up against
don't use science, they use ideology: they're hard-line "blank slate" people who reject the science. Damore's point is actually that Google's (and others) blank-slate ideology actually hinders efforts for diversity, because if you assume everyone is a "blank slate" then you can hand-wave away the need to
change the work to suit the people, because it just becomes a matter of molding the people to fit the existing jobs. Hence, you say the problem is just that there's not enough female role models, or that girls need to learn to code starting in kindergarten, rather than face the possibility that the type of work you're offering just isn't very appealing to girls for more fundamental reasons.
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