fuzzy post-it

dontneedfeminism:

Feminists tell us that men are more privileged in society, even though men make up 76% of the homeless population.

i am too lazy to reply to most of these (sorry!) because i’m far more interested in this bad math here

from your own link, and also some others i found, we get:

“In 2007, a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that of the population surveyed 35% of the homeless people who are members of households with children are male while 65% of these people are females. However, 67.5% of the single homeless population is male, and it is this single population that makes up 76% of the homeless populations surveyed.”

i am pretty sure you’re reading this wrong because the numbers don’t make any sense otherwise. this paragraph says that 76% of homeless people are single, not single males. that gives us a male homeless rate of 67.5% × 76% + 35% × 24% = 59.7%. still an imbalance, but rather less of one.

(your interpretation would mean that 76% of all homeless people are male, even though 35% of homeless household members are male and 67.5% of single homeless are male. you cannot combine two crossed subsets like that and end up with a larger total.)

i’m also curious why there are almost twice as many homeless women with children as homeless men with children. does this mean about half of homeless families have both parents, and half have only a mother? where is the father? is he separately homeless, putting him in the single population? prison? dead? fucking statistics.

IN CONCLUSION i suspect that a lot of this numerology (especially in regards to crime and violence and other serious tragedy) boils down to problems with poverty, and gender disparity in either direction is a weird symptom of how gender intersects with poverty rates. the poor get pretty fucked in the US and i don’t think anyone who claims to be progressive in any direction is opposed to fixing that.