Related: How we end up with different intuitions about problems
Yes, I realize it’s more complicated than women vs. men, but I think this is by far the most common pattern.
There’s a valid way in which many women feel less powerful than men. They may have been raised in families where men dominated. They may have worked in the many industries where casual sexism and harassment are common (restaurants come to mind). They may have experienced sexual violence from men, and they almost certainly have female friends who have experienced it. They may be very aware of their physical disadvantage if they’re smaller than most men.
There’s also a valid way in which men might feel less powerful than women. In a white-collar environment, getting a reputation as someone who harasses or discriminates against women is a big deal. Because well-intentioned people want to take sexism seriously, and because scandal is interesting, relatively minor situations (including completely reasonable mistakes or misunderstandings) can blow up. There are special programs and initiatives to help women in particular, and almost no overt initiatives to help men in particular.
The typical woman has good reason to worry that she could be discriminated against, taken advantage of, or attacked. And the typical man in a white-collar setting has good reason to worry that he could be misconstrued as a vile sexist, which could seriously hurt his reputation and career. Each of them understandably feel vulnerable.
This resembles joint over- and under-diagnosis. It seems pretty likely to me that most cases of sexual violence, unwanted sexual attention, and sexism aren’t addressed. And I’d guess that a significant portion of concerns about these bad behaviors by men (though probably not the majority) are distorted or misunderstood to be more significant than they actually were.
Framing this problem in terms of sensitivity and specificity is awesome. I realized in briefly thinking about it that criminal justice (are they guilty? Are they not?) often seems to have the same problem, and maybe loving relationships have the problem in some issues too (do they love me? Or do they not?).
What goes almost totally unreported are the “norming” pressures that men are subject to in the workplace and elsewhere, to behave like the other, often objectionable, men. I know, poor us, but that’s point one.
Point two is how the objectionable men, through this norming, can dominate a workplace culture such that all men are under “suspicion” if you will, making people sensitive to even less-objectionable behavior. I would hope that after a generation or so of living under “modern” workplace expectations, the amount of objectionable behavior as well as the over-sensitivity will diminish.