Men in Norway are actually being discriminated against in certain ways. All in the name of "equality" of course.
I'll leave out military service for now, just noting that from this year on it is still compulsory for men, but now the registration is actually compulsory for women too! It's still voluntary whether or not a woman wants to serve though.
But the most notable place I've noticed discrimination is in higher education in Norway. Our politicians do no like what cyb noted about what people choose to study:
On the issue about gender equality or lack thereof in colleges, one observation a (female) professor of mine made was that even if there are more women than men in colleges in America, it is not equal in all colleges, and, more importantly, it's not equal in all fields necessary. For instance, there proportionally aren't a lot of women in the hard sciences. It's also particularly striking with the humanities, when it comes to Asians - there's a crapload more Asian females in the humanities than there are males.
Can't speak much about the amount of "Asian" students in humanities - I've never heard anything indicating that "Asian females" are especially likely to study those fields compared to other females.
However, it is very true that the hard sciences are dominated by men, and that in industrialised countries, the humanities are dominated by women. It seems to be that as society gets rich enough to allow people to study to follow their interests, women overwhelmingly chooses "soft" fields, the humanities, media and fields where they can "work with people", and while many men may choose some of those fields as well, the students left at the hard sciences are mostly male.
In developing countries where education for women is as common as it is in industrialised countries, we see that far more women are interested to study the hard sciences. They've grown up in societies that are still not flooded with luxury and leisure, and have internalised their desires to help make their societies better, as mathematicians, doctors, engineers and scientists.
But as I said, this isn't good enough for the Norwegian politicians, so they've decided to do something about it.
In Norway, higher education works in the way that you get a score based on your average grades from high school. This score - and only this score - is then used to rank people applying to universities to see who gets in. Simple enough: The best students in high school has the top choices of where and what to study.
Except that there are ways to improve your score:
- Every year after graduating high school, one point is added, until one is 25 years old.
- Military service gives to bonus points. As does the alternative civil service.
- Depending on where and what you apply for, your sex will decide if you get extra points.
Got that last one? In practice, it means that if you are a man, you will get bonus points when applying to one of the two veterinarian education available in Norway.
If you are a woman, you get bonus points for most engineering educations available, and for many other studies where politicians have decided that there are too few women. In addition, there are special funds and programs set up to lure more women to study hard sciences.
At my university this meant that the girls could use all the facilities everyone had access to, but that they also had their own computer labs (boys not allowed), with nifty extra stuff like fridges, microwave ovens and coffee makers included. In high school girls considering applying there were given plane tickets to fly there and got a free tour of the facilities and introductions to the studies. At the CS department they had their own organisation that got a few millions every year to arrange social events or educational events for girls only. This had its most obvious effect when three guys from my class was thrown out of an extra lecture on Discreet Mathematics just before finals, because the lecture was only for girls...
In contrast to the US in Germany usually photos are required when sending in an application. And I recently heard of a study according to which attractiveness helps men and harms women with their chance to get invited.
A study that confirms people are liars? I didn't think you needed science for that.
What are you talking about?
That study looks like the sort where people are put on the spot to give the answer expected, and then remarkably perform that way. It is not socially acceptable to judge women on anything but merits for a job, so anyone that does looks like a chauvinist pig immediately. To compensate, everyone will answer the opposite. How else do you explain the discrepancy between judging male appearance, from female? If hotness were really a liability, you would expect the judgemental attitude for both genders.
Actually, I'm gonna take a wild guess that the similar study I read about that was the same one. And the results have nothing to do about lying or otherwise misrepresenting the truth. It really isn't a misandrist or misogynist problem at all.
In fact, it turns out that attractive men and attractive women had a more or less equal chance of getting hired after passing the first application screening - provided that they had the necessary qualifications of course.*
However, attractive men were more likely than attractive women to pass the initial application screening. This effect is not seen if one compares the numbers on less attractive men and women. And really, it doesn't make much sense that people would choose away more attractive job applicants either, does it?
So the real reason? I'll give you a hint: What department usually does the initial application screening, and what kind of people usually dominates said department?
* It can also be noted that attractive people in general are more likely to be hired, receive favours or otherwise get help in life than less attractive people, but that's another topic (and from several other studies). Also, an attractive appearance is statistically correlated to high intelligence, sexy voices, etc., etc. But another topic again.
