============================================================================ THERE IS A COLUMN FOR WOMEN. THERE IS A COLUMN FOR ETHNIC MINORITIES. WHERE THEY CROSS, FOR MEN, THERE IS OFTEN NO FIGURE AT ALL. ============================================================================ This is not an argument about who suffers most. It is an argument about what a table can produce. A measurement built on one axis cannot show you a group that sits on two, and the group that sits on two here is minority men. By Mikal Monslaup with Claude (Anthropic) Kairunen on X Rickmyrolls on Reddit The reporting, the reading and the conclusions are mine. Claude did the searching, the counting, the checking and much of the drafting, and argued back when a claim was thinner than it sounded. Every figure here has a primary source you can open, because neither of us is asking to be believed. First published: 19 August 2026 (2026-08-19T10:30:00+02:00) Canonical: https://unformentoo.org/counted-by-race-counted-by-sex.html IN SHORT ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Intersectionality exists to catch a group disadvantaged on two axes at once and invisible to instruments that measure one axis at a time. * Applied to minority men it is frequently not applied. There is a column for women. There is a column for ethnic minorities. Where they cross, for men, there is often no published figure. * The United States publishes that cross. Ten of the 29 tables in the Bureau of Justice Statistics prisoners release cross sex with race. * It shows something no single-axis table can. In US prisons there are 25 sentenced Black men for every Black woman, against 13 men for every woman overall. * The sex ratio is not constant across ethnic groups. You cannot get that from a race table or from a sex table. Only from both at once. * The UK's flagship ethnicity statistics service publishes school exclusions by ethnicity, crossed with local authority, with reason, and with type of school. Not with sex. * The US Sentencing Commission spent years unable to estimate the male and female difference at all, because its model compared everyone to White males. * It said so in writing, changed the reference groups, and found that women received sentences 29.2 per cent shorter than men after controls. * That was the largest demographic effect in its own table, and the fix cost a change of baseline. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01. TWO COLUMNS, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN THEM The objection this piece answers is a fair one, and it is the strongest objection this campaign faces. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The best argument against everything on this site is that men who suffer are usually suffering as poor men, minority men, migrant men, and that sex is the wrong axis to build anything on. It is a serious argument and it deserves a serious answer rather than a slogan. Here is the answer. Nobody has to choose. The UN's own Global Study on children deprived of liberty asks states to address the overrepresentation of boys and of children from ethnic or racial minorities and from disadvantaged socio-economic groups, in one sentence, as three named axes at once. The problem is not that anyone chose the wrong axis. It is that the instruments were built one axis at a time, and a table built on one axis cannot show you a group sitting on two. There is a column for women. There is a column for ethnic minorities. Where those columns cross, for men, there is frequently no published figure at all. That is a claim about statistics rather than about anybody's intentions, and the rest of this piece is three worked examples of it: one country that publishes the crossing, one service that does not, and one agency that noticed it could not ask the question and changed its own method until it could. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02. WHAT THE CROSSING SHOWS WHEN SOMEBODY PUBLISHES IT The United States crosses sex with race as a matter of routine, and the result is a fact no single-axis table can produce. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Bureau of Justice Statistics releases its prisoner counts as 29 tables. Ten of them cross sex with race or Hispanic origin. Table 10 is a true cross-tabulation: sex at the top, then race within each sex. Everyone knows prisons hold mostly men. The national ratio at the end of 2023 was about thirteen sentenced men for every sentenced woman. What a single-axis table cannot tell you is that the ratio is not the same for everyone. The sex ratio among Black prisoners is roughly three times the sex ratio among White prisoners. You cannot get that from a race table, and you cannot get it from a sex table. It only exists when both are crossed. Say plainly what this is and is not. It is not a claim that Black men are treated worse than Black women, and it is not a ranking of suffering. It is one number that becomes visible only at the intersection, and which no amount of single-axis reporting would ever surface. It also settles a technical question before anyone raises it. The cross-tabulation is not difficult, expensive or novel. A national statistics office publishes it every year as a matter of course. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03. AND WHAT HAPPENS WHERE NOBODY PUBLISHES IT The UK government runs a service built specifically to show ethnic disparity. On this indicator it does not carry sex at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ethnicity Facts and Figures is the British government's flagship service for exactly this kind of question. On permanent school exclusions it publishes rates by ethnicity, and it crosses ethnicity with local authority, with the reason for exclusion, and with type of school. It does not cross it with sex. We downloaded the underlying national data file on 19 August 2026: 1,633 rows and eleven columns, none of which is sex or gender. Be precise about what that does and does not establish. It establishes that this service does not publish the crossing. It does not establish that no UK source does: the Department for Education presents sex and ethnicity as separate pupil characteristics for the same statistic, and its table builder may permit combining them. We could not confirm either way and we are not going to assert it. What we can say is narrower and still worth saying. On the service a British minister, journalist or campaigner would actually open to ask about ethnic disparity in exclusions, the sex of the excluded child is not a dimension that exists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04. THE AGENCY THAT COULD NOT ASK, AND THEN COULD This is the whole argument in one federal agency, with dates, and it is not a story about concealment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The United States Sentencing Commission has reported on demographic differences in federal sentencing for years. Its method paired race and gender and compared every pairing to one reference group: White males. In November 2023 the Commission wrote down what that method could not do. "The Commission's prior reports analyzed demographic differences by pairing race and gender. White males were used as the baseline for comparisons with all other race-gender pairings. This approach, however, does not provide an estimate of the differences in sentences between males and females generally, or permit comparisons among females of different races." -- United States Sentencing Commission, Demographic Differences in Federal Sentencing, November 2023 Read that twice. The question of whether men and women receive different sentences was not refused, avoided or suppressed. It was not a quantity the model produced. Everything was measured against White males, so the comparison did not exist to be reported. The same paragraph says what they did about it: separate baseline reference groups, so that the report could assess differences by gender while still comparing races within each sex. Then they ran it. The largest demographic effect in the Commission's own summary table is the one its previous method could not produce. Women received sentences 29.2 per cent shorter than men after controlling for everything the Commission can observe. Now the part that matters most, and the part a careless campaign would get wrong. Nobody hid this. The Commission identified the limitation in its own method, published it, fixed it and reported the result. That is what a statistical agency is supposed to do, and it is exactly why this example is usable and an accusation would not be. It is also the cheapest possible answer to the objection that adding a measurement is a burden. The change here was a reference group. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The argument for a men's column is not that men suffer more than women, and it is not that sex matters more than race. It is that a column is how a thing becomes countable, and things that are not counted are not funded, not targeted and not fixed. Minority men sit at the crossing of two axes that are both measured, separately, all the time. The crossing is where they disappear, and it reappears the moment somebody publishes the table. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DOCUMENTS THIS RESTS ON ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- BJS Prisoners in 2023, Statistical Tables (NCJ 310197) https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2023-statistical-tables USSC Demographic Differences in Federal Sentencing https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2023/20231114_Demographic-Differences.pdf ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCE NOTES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Every figure here was taken from the publishing body's own data file rather than from a summary. The BJS ratios are computed from the counts in Table 10 of Prisoners in 2023. The UK finding comes from downloading the permanent exclusions national file and reading its column headers. The sentencing figures are quoted from Table 2 of the Commission's report and the methodology paragraph is quoted verbatim. Working files are in the repository under research/. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOFTENED OR OMITTED FOR ACCURACY ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * {"wanted":"Governments refuse to publish statistics on minority men because the results would be inconvenient.","published":"Instruments were built one axis at a time, and a table built on one axis cannot show a group sitting on two.","why":"We found no evidence of refusal and did not look for a motive. The US publishes the crossing routinely, which is hard to square with any theory of deliberate suppression."} * {"wanted":"No UK source publishes school exclusions by ethnicity and sex.","published":"The Ethnicity Facts and Figures service does not publish that crossing.","why":"The Department for Education presents both characteristics for the same statistic and its table builder may permit combining them. We could not confirm it either way, so the narrower claim is the one we make."} * {"wanted":"The US Sentencing Commission hid the sex difference in sentencing for years.","published":"The Commission's method could not produce that estimate, it said so in print, and it changed the method.","why":"The opposite of hiding. Writing it as concealment would be false and would discard the strongest evidence in the piece."} * {"wanted":"Women are sentenced too leniently.","published":"The Commission estimates that women receive sentences 29.2 per cent shorter than men after controls.","why":"The report estimates a difference. It does not say which sentence is the correct one, and neither do we."} ============================================================================ This document is generated from the same source data as https://unformentoo.org/counted-by-race-counted-by-sex.html. If the two ever disagree, the page is the one that was rebuilt last; both are regenerated together. ============================================================================