Women have it easier overall in the U.S.

I think the fact that you have brought up that women are less confident than men eloquently demonstrates that we have an issue of women generally not being as aggressive with wage negotiations as men. This is a character trait that disadvantages women in terms of what they get paid compared to men. This despite the fact that women are more educated than men and that more women attends college. It"s quite unfair that men can excel more than women in paygrade just because of a certain gender trait. Men, consequently, have it much easier to make a decent earning than women do. http://yaleglobal.yale.edu... My opponent argued that with the advent of internet, and thereby more opportunities for advertisement, through sites such as Craigslist, prostitution is safer now than it has been before. The problem is, though, that escorts and prostitutes still work underground. Even though you can float the possibility of a market where predators would be screened out, the fact of the matter is that as the law stands such an improvement is currently not within reach since. As the University of Colorado law professir Scott puts it: "it currently criminalizes not just prostitution itself, but activities including technologies that advance or facilitate sex markets." As it stands, escorts online remain invisible, where they are vulnerable to predators." The problem, thus, still remains for female prostitutes. Even if there were studies that would show a drop in violence towards prostitutes, as opposed to the studies I provided, female prostitutes still fare worse than their male counterparts in this segment of the informal economy. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com... My opponent also argued that a bigger percentage of the homeless population are made up of men. While this is true, my opponent did leave out an important bit of information from the source he recited, namely that the study divided the homeless population into those who are members of households with children and single homeless people. By only presenting data for the single homeless population (which is dominated by men) and deliberately leaving out information concerning the other section of the homeless population it makes the male segment of the homeless population bigger than it actually is. In fact, if I recite the whole piece of information a slightly more optimistic picture emerges than that portrayed by my opponent. " 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 (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2007)." If I were to do a rough calculation based on this data on the total percentage of females and males respectively among the homeless population, the results will be as follows: 0,24 * 0,65 = 0,156 , 0,76 * 0,325 = 0,247. 0,247 + 0,156 = 40,3% are females. The remaining percentage, 59,7%, are men. This would be a slightly optimistic picture for men. However, there are alternative ways for women and men to avoid being counted in the statistics. It is reported that 50% of all women and children who are living in poverty have fled from a home where they have been afflicted by domestic abuse. Most of them go to domestic violenece shelters. However, those who do are not accounted for in the homelessness statistics since they are seen as having a home (albeit temporarily uninhabitable). This demonstrates how the picture of homelessness can easily get distorted. In fact, the fastest rising segment of the homeless population at the moment are women with children. Domestic violence is a serious issue for women. To just elucidate the immense gravity of domestic violence, The Bureau of Justice Statistics ranging from 1993-2001 shows that inmate partner violence is a crime that primarily affects women. Women accounted for a total of 588,590 cases of domestic violence, 85%, whereas men account for approximately 15% of the victims (103,220 total). It, thus, seems pretty obvious that one can not gloss over the fact that considerably more men are giving women a hard time on this paticular issue than the other way round. http://www.nationalhomeless.org... http://www.medscape.com... http://www.bjs.gov... I must clarify myself and the way I question the study you cited, that more men than women are raped in total. I wrote that "as far as we know, there could be just slightly more men than women raped or perhaps even a near 50/50% ratio." My point is that the study didn"t differentiate between how many that were raped and, consequently, how many that were subject to sexual assault. Since the article you cited said that there were a total of 216,000 SEXUAL ASSAULTS in all detention facilities, and since there is a clear legal definition between what counts as rape and sexual assault, being that rape is an act of forcible penetration whereas sexual assault would be if any party were to make any unwanted sexual advance against another subject, the numbers of rapes against men could amount to a close tie to the numbers of rape against women, when counting for the total numbers of rape in and outside of detention facilities. We don"t get any clue of that from the article referenced. The fact that no actual numbers are presented points to the possibility that the jornalist has no idea about the actual figures and has just made a dramatic title and ingress to gain readers. the point being that the article is therefore ambigious and misleading, to say the least. Even when being generous, the fact remains that a majority of the subjects of sex crimes are women. http://rapecrisiscnm.org... It is true that women live longer than men on an averige of 4-5 years. It is also true that men contract more kinds of cancers than women. However, there is a downside to women, as well. Major studies have been done to show that women live longer lives with different kinds of disabilites. There are essentially two ways to measure health expectancy: life span in terms of the number of years you live and then there is one who measures the number of years you live with any type of physical impairment. This is the so called male"female health-survival paradox. So basically, men die off faster whereas women do worse with regard to physical strength, disability, and other health outcomes. http://www.demogr.mpg.de... Concerning the studies you posted about supposed false rape charges, those studies have been cast in doubt by independent researchers who have looked ino those numbers in which the methodology used has been widely criticized, which has made the results not accord with most other findings. The problem with both these of these studies you referenced to, and in fact most studies that indicate a high percentage of false accusations, is that they in their findings, equate reports described by police as unfounded to those that have been proven false. Unfounded simply means lack of corroborating evidence, but in order to determine demonstrably show that an accusation has been falsely filed requires much more evidence than the supposed lack of evidence of an unfounded accusation. However, most methodologically rigourous research conducted has pinpointed 2-8% as an estimate for what the percentage of false reports with most certainty is. http://www.ndaa.org... http://www.splcenter.org... My conclusion is, as my opponent, that neither women nor men have it easy. Men and women encounter hardships and experience happiness in many different ways. I have attempted to refute my opponents thesis that women have it easier overall by showing data that illustrates that women struggle with various different dilemmas such as gender discrimintion, sexual victimization, poverty, lower wage earnings, etc. I think the information I have provided will suffice in order to establish that it is a rather pointless enterprise to try to show that women have it easier when taking into consideration all the plights that more women than men have to face every single day, whether it is an abusive husband, a low-paid job or living in abject poverty. When taking all these range of factors into consideration, my stance is that women don"t have it easier in the United States.