The boys club

[Nemmerle]

Hey, uhm, isn't it kinda really sexist to assume women can and will accuse you of sexual harassment or even rape to get their way?

Doesn't seem to be. It does happen, and it functions fine without the assumption that it will happen in any given instance. The probability is relatively small, most people are 'okay', but the consequences are severe enough that people prefer not to run the risk for no personal benefit.

 

[NPC009]

Hey, uhm, isn't it kinda really sexist to assume women can and will accuse you of sexual harassment or even rape to get their way?

Doesn't seem to be. It does happen, and it functions fine without the assumption that it will happen in any given instance. The probability is relatively small, most people are 'okay', but the consequences are severe enough that people prefer not to run the risk for no personal benefit.

Karadalis did paint a picture of fear, though, practically putting 'interacting with women' on the same level as 'getting in a stranger's car'. If this truly is a common mentality in the US, it's a problematic one, as it will only increase gaps between genders.

 

[Nemmerle]

Karadalis did paint a picture of fear, though, practically putting 'interacting with women' on the same level as 'getting in a stranger's car'. If this truly is a common mentality in the US, it's a problematic one, as it will only increase gaps between genders.

Yeah, and it's not going to be addressed by pretending it doesn't exist. There needs to be protection for the accused in the systems that surround the interactions or it's damaging for everyone involved. That seems to be the position that we're in at the moment in this regard.

The symmetrical position would probably be a girl who doesn't go drinking with a group of men because she's afraid of getting assaulted. The probability's low, but trivialising her concerns, calling her sexist, saying that her feelings are invalid... things along those lines are not going to address the problem.

 

[NPC009]

I don't want to deny the possibility of people abusing the system, but I do wonder if we're dealing with an actual issue (rather than an handful of incidents) or the fear of the issue. Fear can be really difficult to deal with...

 

[Nemmerle]

I don't want to deny the possibility of people abusing the system, but I do wonder if we're dealing with an actual issue (rather than an handful of incidents) or the fear of the issue. Fear can be really difficult to deal with...

Seems to me the solution would be much the same in either case, make the system more equitable. It's hardly desirable on any front, and not just with respect to this issue, that people are tried before the court of public opinion as much as they are by the legal system.

As for the prevalence... estimates seem to be a bit all over the board, understandably considering the nature of the thing. The standard of evidence has to be fairly high before it will be recorded as false across a variety of statistics rather than just unfounded or withdrawn/dropped/etc.

The US DOJ reported about 8% in 1997[footnote]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape .[/footnote]. Which broadly agrees with UK Home Office Figures[footnote]Ibid.[/footnote]. If we're low-balling it, we're looking at 1.5%[footnote]Ibid. Theilade and Thomsen (1986) quoted in Rumney (2006)[/footnote] of all reported rapes.

The FBI reported 85,593 rapes in 2010[footnote]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#United_States[/footnote] which would be 1,284 false accusations a year, going by the lower bounds estimate. If we go with the DOJ/HO figure then we'd be looking at 6,847.

Mind you, that's just rape. Doesn't include the other things that people can be accused of that are going to ruin their lives - rape and sexual assault in the more general sense. And the figures here are muddy enough to begin with considering the difficulties in reporting well before you start putting the uncertainty of 'Were they lying or was there simply insufficient evidence?' On top of it.

 

[NPC009]

Seems to me the solution would be much the same in either case, make the system more equitable. It's hardly desirable on any front, and not just with respect to this issue, that people are tried before the court of public opinion as much as they are by the legal system.

In the case of fear, changing the system would just be the start. People would have to learn to trust the system again, which is easier said than done. Personally, I don't think it could be done without having people relearn how trust eachother.

As for the prevalence...

What makes everything even more muddy is that some types of victims likely won't even try to report. Men, for instance. So... eh, we don't actually know anything about anything, do we? That's really depressing...

 

[Phasmal]

It's good that we've apparently got to the place where we're lauding "Beware of women, they'll falsely accuse you of rape/sexual harassment" as a reasonable position for a person to hold rather than an irrational, deeply misogynistic view of women that is being used to justify what amounts to discrimination in schools and workplaces. And we got there through the use of statistics on "unfounded and false" rape statistics that seem to bounce around in definition from "any rape that couldn't be proven" to "we actually have evidence that the victim made the entire thing up" which is just fantastic.

What's even better is that those scary looking statistics about whatever percent only apply to the actual accusations, not women in general. So, if you want anything even remotely close to an idea about the risk of women falsely accusing you of sexual assault, you have to pretty much compare the number of false accusations with the total number of women, rather than just the women who have accused someone of sexual assault.

Oh thank god I'm not the only one seeing this, I thought I'd gone a bit mental.

This thread's been super depressing so far, especially now we've reached the 'don't even interact with women they'll ruin your life' part. Like... jeez. How is that okay.

Just... yikes.

Spoiler: Why did we end up here

 

[Something Amyss]

If we're low-balling it, we're looking at 1.5%

Since you cite Wikipedia and reference one of the studies from the Rumney report, let's look at one of the conclusions of that paper:

Rumney's second conclusion is that it is impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" because many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies.

So when you're "lowballing," you are still doing so on an issue with difficult to determine numbers, reporting bias, and poor methodology. Given the challenges explicitly mentioned in such studies, it's unlikely to favour even the number claimed here.

 

[Flathole]

SPOILER WARNING:

men and women have different bone structures, hormone levels, brain structures and overall bodily composition

as a result it is inevitable that each are treated differently. this "different treatment" can be obvserved in any strictly-sexual species with exclusive males and females (that is, non-hermaphodites).

I hope this clears up a few things!

-Doggy

 

[The Lunatic]

On the topic of the rise of false-rape claims that are occurring in colleges and so on in America.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/colleges-slammed-with-lawsuits-from-men-accused-of-sex-crimes/

It seems the matter is now starting to get quite heated with legal action and so on.

Be interesting to see if these cases establish a precedent and from now on these incidents are investigated more fairly, as opposed to "She said you did it, and regardless of evidence, your life is ruined."

 

[Nemmerle]

In the case of fear, changing the system would just be the start. People would have to learn to trust the system again, which is easier said than done. Personally, I don't think it could be done without having people relearn how trust eachother.

Oh! I'm reasonably optimistic on that front. People trust each other all the time. That seems like the natural state of things when systems can be depended upon not to give defectors an edge.

The really difficult balance is that you want people who've been attacked to come forward, and yet you don't want a system where it's someone's word [nothing] against another person's word [also nothing].

How long it would take to get there once we had a properly functioning system... your guess is as good as mine :/

What makes everything even more muddy is that some types of victims likely won't even try to report. Men, for instance. So... eh, we don't actually know anything about anything, do we? That's really depressing...

Pretty much, yeah. Fear and ignorance, what a lovely position to be in all round. :\ Which is also another reason to get a more equitable system! I mean wouldn't it be great if we had a system that actually made an effort? >_> If the numbers were vaguely trustworthy...

-sigh- :|

So when you're "lowballing," you are still doing so on an issue with difficult to determine numbers, reporting bias, and poor methodology. Given the challenges explicitly mentioned in such studies, it's unlikely to favour even the number claimed here.

It could be higher and it could be lower. I quoted the minimum figure given in response to someone who asked if it was a handful of isolated incidents and noted myself that this was a muddy area with a bunch of problems, other than which the figures were presented entirely without commentary, so I'm not really sure what your point is. 15/1000 is not an implausibly high number. One would not be surprised to find that it's true that 15/1000 people are malign liars, as one would be highly surprised to discover that the 40/100 figure was true.

If you've a better number?...

 

[LawAndChaos]

I love some of the posts in here about the whole false accusations thing.

"Men are wary of entering relationships with women in college because of prolific false rape cases where people accused of rape were condemned by society and presumed guilty until proven innocent, (even though they were innocent) so therefore men are unwilling to enter casual sexual relationships with women because they do not want to be falsely accused of rape, aware that they will be utterly destroyed should it occur."

equals

"never trust women ever, they'll accuse you of rape or harrassment, RAWR RAWR"

But hey, rather than choosing to clear the air about the fearmongering that both sides have propagated willingly, ruining the concept of intimacy and watering down the definition of rape, let's just swing this back to "misogyny misogynist misogynist" rather than addressing the fact that BOTH sides of the argument are resorting to fear-mongering, and spin it as evidence of discrimination against women.

That'll fix everything you guys!
(inb4 next post accuses me of being misogynist)

But honestly this isn't some one-way street. Negative stereotypes and perceptions go both ways, as there are girl's clubs and boy's clubs alike. They key to all this is being willing to co-operate.

What disappoints me about all this, is the fact that there is no co-operation. One side turned this adversarial, and the other side decided eye for an eye was an acceptable response.
Ignoring concerns and issues raised by one side of the debate for the sake of your own does not contribute to productive discussion, especially when you make ignorantly dismissive statements like "you're obviously just being sexist" being the order of the day.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

And "various reasons" isn't really grounds to enact social change, dude.

But the number disparity from first year to the current year was dramatic enough for our instructor to make us do a full stop and have a conversation about it. We're the ones who are going to be making hiring decisions down the road. If we're presumably the learning culture that turned the women off of the program,[footnote]I don't know all the "various reasons", I didn't even know the girls in the other sections that much at all[/footnote] is that going to be reflected in how people stop engaging in the industry period? Its worth looking at, regardless of the reasons. I want to hear the stories of people who don't fall into the white male screenwriter category and if I can help increase the diversity of stories available, that's grounds enough to enact social change. Dude.

[sub][sub]Glad to see things are mostly civil in here. Just started the thread to reflect on the conversation I had in class and to see how people would respond here.[/sub][/sub]

 

[Tsun Tzu]

And "various reasons" isn't really grounds to enact social change, dude.

But the number disparity from first year to the current year was dramatic enough for our instructor to make us do a full stop and have a conversation about it. We're the ones who are going to be making hiring decisions down the road. If we're presumably the learning culture that turned the women off of the program,[footnote]I don't know all the "various reasons", I didn't even know the girls in the other sections that much at all[/footnote] is that going to be reflected in how people stop engaging in the industry period? Its worth looking at, regardless of the reasons. I want to hear the stories of people who don't fall into the white male screenwriter category and if I can help increase the diversity of stories available, that's grounds enough to enact social change. Dude.

[sub][sub]Glad to see things are mostly civil in here. Just started the thread to reflect on the conversation I had in class and to see how people would respond here.[/sub][/sub]

Sure. Fine. Good intentions. I get it. Cool. Nothing inherently wrong with that, aside from that whole road to a hot place thing.

You're stumbling at the first hurdle, however, if you do presume that it was the culture that "turned those women off the program" rather than considering the potential myriad reasons that are available. And, ya know what? At the end of the day, your class lost 48 guys and 37 girls. If you're looking at the gender ratio, it looks a lot more dire, but flat numbers? Not so much.

How did that conversation go, if I may ask? How did you professor broach the subject? If it was like your OP, then it may have come off just a bit accusatory, thereby slanting the entire issue before it could be properly/objectively examined.

Are you, the remaining 32 guys, a bunch of sexist assholes who would treat women differently in your chosen field? Did any of you plan to deprive female coworkers of hours, promotions, etc. simply due to their genitalia? Do you all make crass sexual jokes while repeatedly nudging an elbow into your female classmates' ribs?

Did the lot of ya have any real idea why you lost those female classmates? Have ya spoken to them?

What did the remaining three women have to say? I'm genuinely curious. I'm also curious what they would have to say outside of the classroom setting where, due to the professor's seeming insistence that there is a definable problem, that being a boy's club, there's automatically precedent for negativity and potential for retroactive offense simply due to the framing...but that's me assuming based on what little information you've provided and your word choices.

There really wasn't a lot to go on here.

And BAH.

I'm down with diversity and more of the womens doing whatever. I'm not down with the dismissal of objectivity and lack of appropriate follow-up before claims are made.

[small]Dude. I used "dude" as a casual means of addressing ya with no malice in it...why do I get the impression that you specifically used it in return to be snarky?[/small]

Side Note: One of my jobs is at a restaurant, part time delivering pizzas, and I mostly hang around with the girls who work the phones/wait tables.

There is a ridiculously surprising amount of blue humor. Like, it's sex jokes, sex puns, period jokes, discussions about drugs/alcohol, complaints about boyfriends/husbands, and flirting near constantly...and the delivery guys aren't the ones perpetuating it. Hell, I've had my ass and chest grabbed/spanked/pinched more times than I can count. Not a big deal to me.

I've worked at a few other such places, with varying gender balances, and met with a similar tone, albeit with varying subject matter, ie. guys generally talk about girlfriends/wives/games/sports rather than boyfriends/husbands/netflix/weight management.

My point being...I don't think it's right to frame this as a "boy's club" when it could just as easily be a case of that particular culture being- well, crass. And, by all means, discuss it. I'm not telling you you shouldn't talk about this stuff. I'm just saying, maybe, try to approach it as neutrally as possible?

 

[NPC009]

In the case of fear, changing the system would just be the start. People would have to learn to trust the system again, which is easier said than done. Personally, I don't think it could be done without having people relearn how trust eachother.

Oh! I'm reasonably optimistic on that front. People trust each other all the time. That seems like the natural state of things when systems can be depended upon not to give defectors an edge.

The really difficult balance is that you want people who've been attacked to come forward, and yet you don't want a system where it's someone's word [nothing] against another person's word [also nothing].

How long it would take to get there once we had a properly functioning system... your guess is as good as mine :/

One party being very afraid of being raped and the other being very afraid of being accused of rape, doesn't exactly scream 'trust' to me. I'm from a slightly different culture, though. Perhaps American college life is closer to a Law & Order episode than I'd like to believe.

 

[Nemmerle]

One party being very afraid of being raped and the other being very afraid of being accused of rape, doesn't exactly scream 'trust' to me. I'm from a slightly different culture, though. Perhaps American college life is closer to a Law & Order episode than I'd like to believe.

In that context, I agree with you. My point was more... people trust each other and the system a lot on other subjects. We drive - and there's so much trust that other people aren't going to screw up in that. We are around each other socially, to some degree or another. We have a vast range of assumptions about how people are going to interact... assumptions which don't hold for every culture.

And, for all the - perhaps over-dramatised - original claims on this point, (I wouldn't tend to say that boys go that far at college as a general rule - though I can't comment directly on the American college experience,) people still afford each other some trust in this area. It's not like boys never invite girls into their groups. We had girls in our groups in uni in the UK and seemed to get along fine with them, we had laughs together. I find it hard to imagine that doesn't ever happen at American colleges, that would be incredibly surprising to me.

That feels like the norm, you know? As an aspect of humanity, I don't feel as if we like to go around arming ourselves up against the eventuality we're going to be screwed over. It's tiring and ick. Like this feels like one of the bits that we've got wrong, there's something here pushing against what's natural - and if we fix the system and give it time I think people would get used to trusting each other again? :/

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

How did that conversation go, if I may ask? How did you professor broach the subject? If it was like your OP, then it may have come off just a bit accusatory, thereby slanting the entire issue before it could be properly/objectively examined.

It began with taking the curriculum aside to talk about the issue in an even manner, and had it go around the room. Some of the guys were surprised that some women feel excluded from getting opportunities to make the art they want but the gay minority spoke up mirroring the sentiment that films from their perspective will likely not be made and that their orientation would effect hiring opportunities if they present themselves that way.

We then broke into separate research and returned to the discussion after people found reports regarding the ratio in the industry in all departments. It was similar to the disparity in our classroom. Here's one of the links I remember being passed around. There were others for the American market but I can leave you to google that.

https://www.actra.ca/press-releases/2013/06/ground-breaking-report-identifies-gender-inequality-in-the-canadian-film-television-production-industry/

The conversation resumed from there, never accusing us as the root cause of the women leaving but suggesting that our bystander effect was just as cold when genuine juvenile sexism appears on set. And yes, a few of the more moronic people in my year could fall under the category of sexist asshat.

Did the lot of ya have any real idea why you lost those female classmates? Have ya spoken to them?

I've spoken to seven of them. When I asked them specifically about how it felt to be the only girl on camera team, grip and electrics or whatever, four of them responded that it felt dominated by the opinions of the guys and that they weren't heard. The other three merely said that the cost of the program was what made them drop off. Some of them are working, some have moved to other fields. The tricky thing about approaching this subject is that nobody seems to ask these questions. Rather than answering 'its for a forum thread', I just had to reference the fact I was thinking about that discussion. I'm not really going to delve deeper into the affairs of people I barely knew two years ago and who aren't even living in the same city these days.

What did the remaining three one women in the classroom have to say? I'm genuinely curious. I'm also curious what they would have to say outside of the classroom setting where, due to the professor's seeming insistence that there is a definable problem, that being a boy's club, there's automatically precedent for negativity and potential for retroactive offense simply due to the framing...but that's me assuming based on what little information you've provided and your word choices.

Well, will call her Tara, said that she does feel compelled to work extra hard just to stay viable as a hire compared to guys who meet up at parties, drink and then get jobs without ever actually proving their worth to the producer of the student-indie production. She does work her butt off and when we talked to her outside of the classroom, she didn't change what she said so it wasn't her just reacting to the classroom atmosphere. She actually feels that way.

As for the other two in the program? I can't ask them for personal reasons. They're not friends. Moving on.

Dude. I used "dude" as a casual means of addressing ya with no malice in it...why do I get the impression that you specifically used it in return to be snarky?

As read originally, it felt like the whole sentence was a "you don't have all the information so why even talk about this here" comment. That's what got under my skin. If that wasn't the intent, I apologize. I just was responding to imagined sarcasm with sarcasm then.

 

[Something Amyss]

If you've a better number?...

Whether or not I have a better number is really irrelevant. You cited this paper through Rumney, and Rumney's conclusions go to the unreliability (the challenges listed are fare more likely to offer false positives of false rape allegations than negative). And they do not support the notion that it could be higher. That the number is not impossibly high is also not relevant, as it doesn't make it reliable, either. The low end of unreliable is still unreliable. Whether it's believable or reasonable doesn't make it true or useful as any sort of metric. The fact that it ends up on the low end of false crime allegations doesn't make it a useful metric, either. The fact that we know this data is unreliable is the issue.

Rumney, along with many of the studies it cites, is full of caveats and warnings that demonstrate the data is inadequate. That's actually the point the paper makes. This is beyond muddy. The proper answer really is "we don't know."

Actually, let me clarify. The answer to NPC's question, far as I can see is "the fear of false rape accusations."

Because we're not reacting to facts and hard numbers. We're reacting to unreliable data and this idea that it's a common occurrence. At this point, for her question, the number of false rape charges is irrelevant. The fact that we've got multiple states and nations who wish to legislate without understanding the issue first indicates a fear response. False rape allegations are being treated as an extraordinary occurrence without any evidence that there is sufficient prevalence to merit it.

It'd be great if we had more reliable numbers. But as it stands....

 

[Nemmerle]

Whether or not I have a better number is really irrelevant. You cited this paper through Rumney, and Rumney's conclusions go to the unreliability (the challenges listed are fare more likely to offer false positives of false rape allegations than negative). And they do not support the notion that it could be higher. That the number is not impossibly high is also not relevant, as it doesn't make it reliable, either. The low end of unreliable is still unreliable. Whether it's believable or reasonable doesn't make it true or useful as any sort of metric. The fact that it ends up on the low end of false crime allegations doesn't make it a useful metric, either. The fact that we know this data is unreliable is the issue.

Rumney, along with many of the studies it cites, is full of caveats and warnings that demonstrate the data is inadequate. That's actually the point the paper makes. This is beyond muddy. The proper answer really is "we don't know."

Actually, let me clarify. The answer to NPC's question, far as I can see is "the fear of false rape accusations."

Because we're not reacting to facts and hard numbers. We're reacting to unreliable data and this idea that it's a common occurrence. At this point, for her question, the number of false rape charges is irrelevant. The fact that we've got multiple states and nations who wish to legislate without understanding the issue first indicates a fear response. False rape allegations are being treated as an extraordinary occurrence without any evidence that there is sufficient prevalence to merit it.

It'd be great if we had more reliable numbers. But as it stands....

If you want to say that we just don't know, no data, then you start off with a flat distribution across the possibilities. Under ignorance priors the probability is high, P = 0.985, that the occurrence is higher than 1.5%. To move from there, you have to have data. And if your position is that all this is beyond muddy and we don't know, then you don't have that.

The position I'd take, if I were taking a position, is that the curve's weighted towards the low end - the <||= 1.5% end of things. It seems to me that most people are decent enough and considering the seriousness of the thing and the motivation against defecting I'd be inclined to forward the allowance that it's lower than the false complaint rate for other serious offences. But I'm not going to get into a long discussion to support that the number is low when the original response was just me doing my best to provide something to NPC's inquiry.

That's a lot of effort to go to when NPC and I seem, (I may be wrong about their position,) to have concluded our discussion amiably with the agreement that a better process in this regard would help regardless of which option is true. Like, maybe we'd be having that discussion if the numbers had mattered to NPC, but as it is it seems like arguing for the sake of arguing.

... Are you actually interested in this? Do you think that the number's significantly higher, such that I wouldn't be wasting my time arguing for a low number? I mean I'm not trying to be mean to you here, if you are interested I'll have that discussion, but I don't want to spend my time arguing around a subject I dislike for a position that I suspect we both already hold, (i.e. that it's rare.)