More men than women interested in FIRE/ERE?

[EdithKeeler]

I've been noticing lately that men seem to outnumber women on these boards considerably. Men also seem to outnumber women on the MMM boards and on the Motley Fool boards as well.

Why is that, I wonder? I doubt that women aren't interested in money, since many of us make and spend a lot of it. I know I am interested in early retirement, escaping the rat race one way or another, and several of my acquaintances IRL are as well.

Any theories? Do you disagree with my hypothesis?

[Jean]

Women have other options.

[slsdly]

I don't think there is a single reason. The one that always comes to my mind is that women face more pressure to conform to the consensus, and (IMO) that pressure largely comes from other women. I'm not a woman, so I can only speak from observation, but if I had to describe the dynamics of social enforcement among groups of women with a single word, I would use "relentless." I've found men to be more likely to shrug, or be disinterested, rather than attempt to convince other men (except on Internet forums ).

[Bankai]

1) Certain personality types seem vastly overrepresented here compared to general population. INTJs, for example, tend to talk to themselves in dry facts, figures & logic. This might not be preferred communication style for many women who prefer more narrative styles involving emotions etc.

2) Historically, men were responsible for providing for the family. This might be the reason women are less interested in this topic as in many households man is still in charge of finances.

3) Misogyny. It regularly raises its ugly head here. If a female start reading here with this topic for example, I'm not surprised her journey here might be over soon.

4) Self-fulfilling prophecy. The fewer women posting regularly, the less attracted new females are to start posting as they see this place as more and more male-dominated.

[Jason]

Any theories?

Send me a pic and I'll give you mine.

[TopHatFox]

Women have other options.

+1

Also, the current philosophy for the average young Western millenial woman is to be adventurous and more importantly, to develop a prosperous career. The end goal of ERE/FIRE is to choose when to work and usually prioritize other categories over work.

I also think when a guy turns 23, he’s bottom of the tottom poll, and is therefore more likely to seek out resources on how get more money/power...and stumble onto FIRE. Non-ironic movies present men as wealthy and ripped. Female equivalents as career-minded and powerful.

[The Old Man]

http://retireearlyhomepage.com/mbti.html
"Actually, there appears to be three "retire early" personality types. (For those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) the three most common types among Retire Early board participants were ISTJ, INTJ, and INTP.)"

In the MBTI, the T/F axis is not gender neutral. Approximately, 1/3rd of T's are women and 2/3rds are men.

[BRUTE]

I doubt that women aren't interested in money, since many of us make and spend a lot of it.

would EdithKeeler say that human females are as interested in money, on average, as human males?

[Black and white cat]

In addition to the good points that @Bankai made, I think it's also about the opportunities women have to actually pursue FIRE. The (unpaid and paid) work women do has been routinely economically undervalued (for example, roles that require empathy) and, therefore, it's more difficult to achieve ERE for some women.
I'd also say there's something going on in relation to risk/ change. Some of the suggestions around changes to lifestyle that could be made to achieve ERE are just less possible for some women to achieve. For example, it's often suggested the job hopping every couple of years can help your career and you can therefore achieve ERE faster. Because it is often women who take on roles caring for children and elderly family members, employment mobility is often less possible.

[jacob]

I think Bankai's points (3) and (4) have definitely made a difference around here in the past few years. Sexism has essentially been given a free run in US culture over the past couple of years and this has spilled over to much of the rest of the internet. So now, there's a lot more (too much!) gender stereotyping going around. Previously, a problem might be phrased as something like "I want to FIRE in 5 years but my wife is not interested" and the answer might be something like "Maybe show or talk to your wife about ... " And sometimes it was the other way around about talking to the hubby. IOW, it was recognized as being an issue with particular individual persons...

But now typical answers might be "This is because all women are ... whereas all men are ..."

Which is bullshit, but it's pretty much impossible to moderate or steer w/o turning into a PC nazi.

As a result, of course people leave. This is in turn creates the self-fulfilling prophecy. Systems-wise, the dynamics becomes bi-stable. It's either practically all the one state or all the other state. The same issue has been observed with politics. This forum has flipped left-right right-left a couple of times in the few years whereas before [the election of he who shall not be named] politics was never a public issue(*). It happens when tension is dialed up, something snaps, and one side disproportionally exits the discussion.

(*) But apparently definitely an unresolved non-public issue in the US just sitting under the surface.

So fundamentally the issue is that a critical mass of people have now developed a worldview where everything is explained in terms of gender. Once there's enough people explaining everything in terms of X in any forum, the X-minority simply leaves(*). My naive hope is that people eventually realize how stereotyping detracts from the conversation and their own public image. I prefer to err on the side of hope rather than ban too much but it definitely has costs as has banning too much, so ...

(*) If not from lurking then definitely from active participation.

[Jason]

Sorry, I do not buy the misongyist explanation. And its not just because I am cheap and/or am the the worse practitioner.

In order for a systemic culture of misongystic behavior to thrive, its got to be a head of the snake thing and its obvious there is no snake that needs its head removed here. Equating a discussion specifically addressing the topic of sexual misconduct that happens to contain misongystic views as being tantamount to misongy is a false equivalency. Its the internet. You got to sift through the ignorance.

Unless I have missed it, I have never seen one example of a person's opinion derided on this board because of their sex or sexual orientation.

I am on The Motley Fool Board. There is a woman who kills on the Markel thread. She's like Warren Buffet level understanding of the fulcrum between investment/insurance. There is not one inkling of sexism on those boards. They are just analyzing stock picks. She's helping everyone make money.

I think when discussing the issue in relation to the three boards specifically mentioned by the OP, IMHO, it begins and ends with the topic.

[jacob]

It's like how tragicomic or tragic vs comedic is a range and depends on where you stand. Any bad event is a tragedy if [you're in a position where] you cant afford it while it's often funny if your own cost is trivial. This explains why in a given incident or comment, some X will see it as "just a joke" while some Y will see it as an existential threat. It's a lot easier to be magnanimous with whatever if you're already wealthy.

Also---on the flip side---it's a lot easier to believe that whatever damage is being done or one is personally doing is trivial insofar one hasn't been personally impacted yet.

From a total systems perspective, the challenge is in dealing with the intermix of those perspectives/angles.

[Bankai]

In order for a systemic culture of misongystic behavior to thrive, its got to be a head of the snake thing and its obvious there is no snake that needs its head removed here. Equating a discussion specifically addressing the topic of sexual misconduct that happens to contain misongystic views as being tantamount to misongy is a false equivalency. Its the internet. You got to sift through the ignorance.

Unless I have missed it, I have never seen one example of a person's opinion derided on this board because of their sex or sexual orientation.

Disagree.

1) You don't need 'systemic culture of misongystic behavior' to deter people from participating in online forums. All you need is some misogynistic comments here and there that go unchallenged.

2) If I come across disrespectful or hateful comments about my nationality on a regular basis, I'm not going to 'sift through the ignorance'. I simply leave. Similarly, many intelligent, well-educated women who'd otherwise be interested in posting here, might drop out at the lurking stage after coming across some of these comments.

3) Again, you don't need someone's opinion derided because of their sex. This would be only one of many ways misogyny can manifest. And pretty bad at that, since it would likely attract some moderators to interfere. While more subtle, but no less harmful comments, often go unchallenged.

[joef]

From a evolutionary standpoint men are attracted to youth/fertility/ beauty while women are attracted to men for their social standing in the past this might have been best hunter who could provide the most food and had the tribe's respect; where today it is a man with resources, social status, and biological fitness.

Society may have evolved, but those biological markers of attraction are still hardwired in men and women. This is why marketers and advertisers will play into women's insecurity about beauty in marketing products that make them feel more beautiful. Conversely, with men, they play into financial insecurity to market products that convey success.

Therefore, men are and probably always will look at earning money and being wealthy as more important IN GENERAL compared to women and any forum that talks about investing would have a larger amount of men participating than women.

[Jin+Guice]

I always thought it was because the movement is lead by nerds. There are less female nerds. There are less females in STEM professions. There are less female programmers. I'm pretty sure finance is male dominated as well. All of the subfields are male dominated.

I find this forum less misogynist than most places I inhabit, including real life. This is especially true when considering the predominance of males and nerds here. I wouldn't claim that there is no misogyny and that this isn't a contributing factor, though I'm not convinced that it is. If you explained this forum to me and then asked me what I expected the male/ female ratio to be I'd honestly probably guess less female than it actually is, especially after reading 1 or 2 blog entries.

I technically found out about FIRE, 2nd hand, from an all female stripper forum, so maybe there's some hope.

[EdithKeeler]

Women have other options

Expand on this, please. What options do women have that men do not?

[Kriegsspiel]

How about:

Job-Signalling Independence Hypothesis

I wonder if it's a result of the (relatively recent) push for girls to become "strong independent" women by getting and holding down a job. It seems like there is a lot of pressure put on girls, starting at a very young age, telling them that they should be looking to get a college degree and then go to work in a high powered job. Or alternatively, to get ANY job so that they don't need no man. But the main thing seems to be that they need to have a job. Clearly, being financially independent is a higher rung of independence than a job, but working a job is a more highly visible signal of independence.

It might be tough to break out of that intense conditioning and consider a job a means to accumulate capital like an EREr might. It's clearly tough for males, who have always wrestled with the latent compulsion joef mentions. They might feel like they are 'letting everyone down' instead of 'hacking the system,' since they have had a way of escaping the rat race for millennia: being a housewife.

Being a housewife is looked down on currently, and housewives back in the day were most likely the household experts in ERE skills like budgeting & household money flows/shopping, cooking, mending clothes, etc. I imagine there are females who are interested in the ERE skills, but they consider themselves housewives and don't seek out websites related to FIRE.

[Kriegsspiel]

Expand on this, please. What options do women have that men do not?

[7W5]
Women can use financial/other resources provided by men provided mutually satisfying contract within the context of human relational environment.
[/7W5]

[EdithKeeler]

A couple of people have commented on this thread re. misogyny in this forum and other boards. I'm not sure it's misogyny (ie, hatred of women) but rather sexism (prejudice against women) on these forums, and even in this thread... and I suspect the sexism may scare off some women. I don't think it's really intentional or conscious sexism, but maybe just some bro-talk, mostly. I agree with Jacob:

a critical mass of people have now developed a worldview where everything is explained in terms of gender. Once there's enough people explaining everything in terms of X in any forum, the X-minority simply leaves(*).

I guess I've just stuck around because in some ways it doesn't bother me that much (why get mad about some comments on a message board) and in some ways I'm sort of inured to it--sexism is pretty much dominates the world we live in.

That said.... I know a lot of women who make really good money, who are in positions where they can reach FIRE. My stepbrother's wife, for example, recently retired as an admiral in the Navy. She's been the primary breadwinner of her family (my stepbrother has been a stay home dad all these years) and now the ex-Admiral is set to start cashing in in the private sector if she wants to... but is also contemplating scaling back.

The (unpaid and paid) work women do has been routinely economically undervalued (for example, roles that require empathy) and, therefore, it's more difficult to achieve ERE for some women.

I'm gonna give that a "Yahbut." Yes, a lot of women make less than men for the same job (yeah, I've been the recipient of this myself) and a lot of women do work in low paying jobs. BUT--a lot don't. There are plenty of female lawyers and doctors and engineers and programmers who are making really good coin who could be interested in FIRE. I DO think, though, the fact that women live longer than men, combined with the fact that we are often paid less or work in careers that pay less, make us tend to want to work longer to cement our security. (Interestingly there are studies that indicate that women tend to be slightly better investors than men, even though we tend to invest in the stock market less).

Brute asks

would EdithKeeler say that human females are as interested in money, on average, as human males?

Yes, I'd say that women are as interested in money as men. I'm curious why anyone might think we wouldn't be as interested. We all need to buy things, pay rent or mortgages, get insurance, etc. I'm not sure there's any reason why men and women would think in significantly different ways about money in general. I do suspect that some women may have a lack of confidence about money and investing, etc. for some of the same reasons women may tend to have less confidence about math stuff, etc. (Back to that pesky sexism thing again...).

Also, the current philosophy for the average young Western millenial woman is to be adventurous and more importantly, to develop a prosperous career. The end goal of ERE/FIRE is to choose when to work and usually prioritize other categories over work.

I don't quite understand your point here, THF. I'm not talking just about millennials or just ERE, but also FIRE. As an old Gen-xer women, there's was a lot of emphasis placed on our generation having a successful career, too (there's a thread around here somewhere talking about some of that). Being career-minded and having that emphasis in your life can lead to the idea of financial independence, and the potential for RE, at least. I'm not sure the end goal is to "prioritize other categories over work." At least not necessarily. I know men and women who want to leave the corporate rat race to do OTHER work, often, work for themselves, or work at a lower-wage or more fulfilling job, etc.

Anyway.... I think it's an interesting discussion. As I mentioned, I do know women IRL who are interested in FIRE and/or who are planning to retire early. But not a lot on the boards, perhaps for reasons discussed here.

[joef]

Expand on this, please. What options do women have that men do not?

Women can avoid professional, paid work by being a stay at home mom and therefore they wouldn't need to think about ERE. Personally, I plan on marrying a woman in the future and this is the arrangement I will have with her, as I would want her to be a full time mother who does not have career obligations while the kids are younger. She would never need to do professional, paid work again the rest of the marriage assuming she took care of the household chores and cooking, as I would cover the family costs. Many men want an arrangement like this, and it is rare to hear women who would want what I just described for their husband.