I am not a frequent diarist, but sometimes a topic comes across that is so in my wheelhouse I can’t help myself. My day job is risk assessment and mitigation, so when I first hear about the Man or Bear question, I immediately understood why women were answering, “Bear,” it’s basic risk assessment strategy. Reading comments to sepiasiren’s diary I was shocked at how many men here on DKos were offended by the overwhelming response, since we think of ourselves as the enlightened ones. So I thought I would try to step back, take the emotions out of this and lay out the rationale.
First off, what is risk? Risk is a combination of how likely something is to happen with how bad the outcome is going to be. For said walk in the woods, there are a myriad of things that can happen. You can fall while walking (medium probability), get bit by a mosquito (high probability), or encounter a bear (low probability).
Then you look at both what is the worst that can happen and how likely that is to result from the situation you find yourself in. How bad it is is called severity and how likely that bad outcome happens is the probability of that outcome occurring given the situation (call it POGS, for simplicity). For falling, you could badly sprain your ankle, leading to death of exposure (high severity, low POGS) or end up picking yourself up off the ground with your legs dirty (low severity, high POGS). Mosquito bites could give you a bloodborne pathogen (high severity, low POGS) but most likely it will just make you itch (low severity, albeit annoying and high POGS).
So when looking at risk, the high severity outcomes are what we are looking for and trying to reduce, even though they are typically the least likely to happen.
This situation is tough to put actual numbers to, because good data is hard to come by. The first is encounters in the first place. Since the premise of the question is you actually encounter the man or bear, that initial risk is set to 100%, even though in practice you are a lot less likely to run into a bear than another hiker, unless you are way off the beaten path. I’m assuming you are far enough out in the wilds of Yellowstone that both are equal.
How likely is it that an attack (high severity) happens? National Parks Traveler lists bear attacks in Yellowstone as one in 2.7 million visits and In Defense of Animals has that figure of 2.1 million. Most attacks come from the bear being provoked, so those numbers seem reasonable of you just ignore the bear.
Statistics on men are more difficult to determine. There are estimates on how many sexual assaults occurs, but very little data on how what percentage of men are committing these assaults. I’ve seen estimates from 4% -16% on the high end for at least one instance, but one fourth of them are repeat offenders that account for up to 90% of rapes. On that high end, that’s 1% of men. According to the Cleveland Clinic, that 1-4% lines up with the percentage of people with antisocial personality disorder. To get to a man who is prolific, let’s say 0.1% of men.
Then it is 1 out of 1,000 men who would be likely to perpetuate an assault. Stranger assault is around 7% of assaults according to RAINN, so let’s reduce that by another factor of 100 to 1 in 100,000 men since again these are usually repeat offenders. There are a lot of assumptions here since we are working with fragmented data. I will lower the chance per encounter by another factor of 100 since there is a chance our one theoretical man would choose not to attack for whatever reason.
That leads us to a one in 2.1 million for any given bear encounter and one in 10 million for any given man encounter. Women know that most likely, a random guy we run into will cause us no harm.
EDIT: Thanks to my fellow quality professional, JeffinQC for pointing out in the comments I should be more scientific about this next section. I have updated to incorporate these changes.
We’re missing one other factor here that can change the whole equation: Detectability, which is how likely you are to correctly identify a potential issue. The final risk calculation is occurrence X severity X detectability. Detectability is scored on how risky it is to misidentify. Being able to reliably detect something that can lead to harm creates a lower risk and not being able to detect leads to a higher risk.
The typical bear does not want to attack a human, so the detectability is high (lower risk). It’s a bear and you know what to do about it. 0.01% of men do want to do a woman harm. But a woman does not know if that guy is the 999,999 or the 1 in that moment of the encounter, so the detectability is low (higher risk). The skews the equation of risk in favor of the bear, since the bear is a known threat and the man is unknown.
In summary, women prepare for the worst using the data we have and how good we are at assessing our situation. We know that most likely that random guy means us no harm. But those bad guys exist, and unlike a bear, we can’t tell if they are dangerous just by looking.