Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university, and the gap is widening

[AngryAmish]

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being-outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap

“IT’S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York. One school charges £25,000 ($38,000) a year and has a scuba-diving club; the other serves subsidised lunches to most of its pupils, a quarter of whom have special needs. Yet both are grappling with the same problem: teenage boys are being left behind by girls.

It is a problem that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.

The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling."

[CountAllVotes]

1. Man Smart, Woman Smarter

I could have told you that!

& recommend!!

[elleng]

2. Nothing new here.

[bhikkhu]

5. Who says something needs to be done?

But when it comes to equality, I think of a line from that Rush song - "and the trees were all kept equal, by hatchet, axe and saw". Wrong way to go, of course. The general good approach would be to celebrate the achievements of girls, while seeing whether there was some systemic error keeping males from the same level. Given the wage gap, its not immediately troubling.

[cyberswede]

13. LOL - you're making someone have a sad.

But their messages go *poof* in under 30 seconds.

[Marr]

42. Holy shit-- I've literally never seen that before.

lol-- what the hell happened there? Some kind of curse-word suppressive fire?

[cyberswede]

44. Nah just someone with too much time on their hands.

I suspect spring break at the junior high.

He's signed up almost 50 times today...just to get off a pitiful handful of posts that disappear before anyone can even read them. Rather sad, really. Poor thing.

[Marr]

46. lol, that's kind of sad. Hey, deleted guy-- if you're reading this...

a girl probably would've spotted the pattern after a couple of deletions.

lmao.

[cyberswede]

48. *snerk*

[elleng]

52. Sorry I missed the post (maybe.)

[cyberswede]

53. Nah - you would have just had to scrape it off the bottom of your shoe.

[elleng]

54. Thanks for saving me, swede.

Was out checking out the geese!

[cyberswede]

6. The patriarchy hurts boys, too.

There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart

That notion isn't coming from women or girls.

[Igel]

9. It is, from some.

Not all.

That's the problem: The categories aren't just "boys" and "girls," but lots of subgroups and subcultures. Jocks have one attitude; but I know others in AP courses that have a real rivalry going on for top grades. This cuts across economic class and ethnicity, so I see kids with GPA-mania in AP classes suddenly trying to become popular with their "other" cohort and flunking out into regulars classes. On occasion it's because of a girl in that "other" cohort.

[arcane1]

19. As a kid, I got that message clearly, from Fonzie and Vinnie Barbarino.

There was a time when getting a good grade was an embarrassment. How sad

[cyberswede]

20. ...and every "nerd" character on tv being shown as a loser.

Too bad.

Fortunately, my son is a voracious reader. It makes a difference in all his classes.

[arcane1]

22. Exactly.

[Victor_c3]

41. When I was a kid I'd always say "don't make fun of nerds. One day you're going to work for one" n/t

[seabeyond]

27. damn straight. an obvious DUH. and us feminists are working really really hard to help these boys

not to believe this bullshit. time for men to step up.

oh. and us mothers with sons.

[stevenleser]

39. Yep, that's the issue. nt

[KitSileya]

7. It wouldn't surprise me if this is a reaction to increased equality.

A cultural thumbing on the nose from 'male' culture, in the sense of - "You're evening the playing field? Well, then, we're not going to play anymore!" I don't think it's at all deliberate or even conscious, but it is a typical reaction from most children whose advantage is taken away, that they immediately assign what they lost to 'not important anymore.' Men in a general sense were incredibly coddled children before women's lib managed to gain a proper foothold in our culture.

Of course, it muddies the field that incredibly disadvantaged children also have that reaction towards things they have no chance of attaining; minority children, for example, declaring that schooling is not important when they see there's very little chance for them to succeed in schooling, because the deck is so stacked against them. However, I don't think anyone besides deluded MRAs can claim that (white) boys are now so disadvantaged in comparison to (white) girls that their rejection of school is based on the latter premise.

[cyberswede]

8. Hopefully the programs Sweden and Austrailia are trying will bear fruit. nt

[Igel]

16. There's a bit of subconscious discrimination.

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/02/01/study-boys-equal-ability-get-lower-grades-girls


Look, this isn't an easy question to come to grips with. Even ignoring the different socialization that boys and girls get (girls quiet; boys rambunctious) and plausibly different hard-wired activity levels (speaking in statistical generalizations there).

Part of the problem has also been changing demographics, something we don't dare discuss. Low SES kids are a bit more anti-intellectual than middle SES kids; guess which families' fertility's fallen off in the last 20-30 years and which has held steady.

Social climbing is also important. It's a commonplace in sociolinguistics to point out that women tend to be bearers or adopters of social norms that tend to move them up a rung in the social scale. Even in the '60s, women with aspirations to social climbing were more likely to adopt middle-class norms and push those norms on their families (because it was better for their kids and family income) while their breadwinner husbands were more into group solidarity and would dispose of middle-class linguistic norms that their mothers and wives had pushed on them. Edith Bunker versus Archie Bunker.

And, yes, this plays into education levels, high-school quality and drop-out rates, and that has a strong effect on later unemployment numbers.

I'd also point out that a lot of low SES minority kids I've had the duty to teach have sometimes been wildly misinformed. They were low achieving and had been for a while, and found as justification for not learning the notion that "schools don't want people like me". Having had a wife on a small liberal arts university admissions committee, having known the dean of admissions at a large state school, having known numerous faculty members on numerous admission review committees at both kinds of schools, I knew better. But they preferred to believe their cousin so-and-so or their uncle what's-his-name because it reinforced their narrative, provided a great excuse for not doing anything, and made them comfortable with the idea that their relatives' failures didn't reflect on them, their families, or their group. In other words, their confirmation bias stood between them and accuracy. And while HBCUs may provide an out for blacks, there are no Historically Latino Colleges and Universities.

[Nay]

55. I think there is also a touch of the attitude that if girls/women are doing it, it's not an

activity worth doing. It's girlish, icky, and if FFS the girl does better than I do, I won't be a MAN.

College and schooling in general has now been equated, in men's minds, to 'distasteful' female activities like shopping, sewing, etc.

It doesn't help that the job market still blows. Obama's call for more tech education is a hollow one; he and the industrialists are shipping hi-tech jobs offshore as fast as they can, and they keep enlarging the number of slave H1B visa holders to make matters even worse.

[The2ndWheel]

17. It's about need

Men are needed less these days. White men are needed less these days. Americans are needed less these days. Human beings are needed less these days.

Just another example of our inability to take every variable into account. The same way our environmental predicament is one of there being limits to the planet, there's only so much to go around for every person. Everyone can't have everything.

When was union membership at the highest in this country? The 50's/60's. That was before civil rights and women entering the workforce. With more people available to do the work, every individual isn't need as much, so each individual isn't worth as much in the big picture. A lot of the rest of the world opened up as the 20th century unfolded. American wages have not had to keep up, because Americans aren't as needed to do the job, or pay for the product. Unless you have a skill that most people don't, you're screwed. Most people don't have the ability, energy, money, or time to get such a skill, so people are going to get screwed.

It's a global competition. People on this board are saying we need to break up the big monopolistic corporations, as competition means lower prices. Well it works the same way with labor, whether we want it to or not. Not only are we competing against each other, but now automation is increasing at a more rapid pace.

At some point there will need to be a basic guaranteed income of some kind. There are just too many people chasing too few jobs, because you're just not needed. I don't know how a basic income would work on a global scale, or even a more regional scale, because again, it's a finite planet. Even if you just give money to people for their basic survival, those resources have to come from somewhere.

Plus we have reduced birth rates in the developed world. The developing world is picking up that slack through immigration. We don't know how to slice the pie into smaller pieces. We've always been able to grow the pie. Our system is based on more people doing more things. More consumers. More taxpayers. More young people.

We can't account for every variable. Interesting times ahead.

[Adrahil]

23. We need to change how we socialize boys.

Boys are socialized to be aggressive, and non-intellectual. They are taught to embrace violence and sports (and best of all, violent sports), And they are taught to eschew anything feminizing, like the arts or reading. That has to change.

The whole idea of gendered activity is harmful to begin with, in my view.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

40. I'd like to see 'weapon' toys disappear from the shelves.

We shouldn't be teaching children that guns are 'toys' or vice versa.

[FLPanhandle]

25. All these "message auto removed"

This topic must be honey to the trolls.

[OKNancy]

26. one troll with a tiny dick

[arcane1]

36. I believe the correct, PC term is "Ineffective Penis"

[cyberswede]

28. I think this troll's junior high must be on spring break this week.

Lots of effort to sign up 25 times in order to post 13 posts...that are seen by maybe 3-4 people before they go *poof*

[seabeyond]

29. i dunno. we get an awful lot, year around, it seems. nt

[cyberswede]

30. Agreed. But this special little snowflake is the same kid.

Over and over and over.. Sad, really.

[seabeyond]

31. snowflake. yes. precious. i love. lol. thanks for the giggle. nt

[FLPanhandle]

33. Eventually he will get bored and go back to his playstation

Obviously doesn't have any friends if he has the time to do that.

[arcane1]

38. Superior races and genders don't need friends.

[11 Bravo]

43. Are they all from one poster, and does anyone have any screen captures?

[arcane1]

49. Yep, it's the same loser every time. Nobody loves him, so he comes here to spread hate.

"I'm superior to women and black people, as evidenced by my constant trolling" is the gist of the posts.

[LittleBlue]

35. IIRC the part of the brain that assists in communication is 20% larger in girls

It apparently explains why girls, on average, learn to speak and read at an earlier age. We could dump vast resources into catching up boys to girls in reading, but that might be a total waste. We can't change the structure of the brain.

[seabeyond]

45. i do not think your facts are correct and i believe they have been disproven. that this is myth....

that we cannot get beyond.

or i simply have a family of boys that are exceptional, cause fuggin all of them are quite capable and excel at conversation and communication, endlessly.

i believe what you are talking about, the boys easily catch up and they are not sitting out there in limbo. and the more that parents actuall do this with their young boys, there is not the discrepancy. we tend to use communication on our girls, and not on our boys, because of preconceived shit.

[LittleBlue]

47. It's called the corpus callosum

The corpus callosum -- the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the right and left sides of the brain -- had a thicker measurement in female fetuses than in male fetuses.

Observations of adult brains show that this area may remain stronger in females. "Females seem to have language functioning in both sides of the brain," says Martha Bridge Denckla, PhD, a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Consider these recent findings. Researchers, using brain imaging technology that captures blood flow to "working" parts of the brain, analyzed how men and women process language. All subjects listened to a novel. When males listened, only the left hemisphere of their brains was activated. The brains of female subjects, however, showed activity on both the left and right hemispheres.

This activity across both hemispheres of the brain may result in the strong language skills typically displayed by females. "If there's more area dedicated to a set of skills, it follows that the skills will be more refined," says David Geary, PhD, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.

http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/how-male-female-brains-differ

In the entire sample (n= 316), controlling for brain size and age, the average CCA was significantly (P< 0.03) larger in females.

http://m.cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/10/2514

Hard to disprove an actual scan of the brain showing this part is larger in girls. If you have evidence to showing this is not the case, I'd like to read it.

[One_Life_To_Give]

50. Anti_Intellectualism?

Not new, been a strong undercurrent for decades. Maybe more so now or perhaps just more visible with the lack of opportunity for a High School graduate or worse a dropout.

School is work, it's delayed gratification. May take many years before the fruits of those labors come home. Certainly not too hard to come up with lots of idea's on why it's not worth waiting another xx years for the reward. And if they don't see someone they can identify with who did all that and is better off for it. Then it's not surprising that kids become more likely to take the easy way out.

Besides the Real Hero's are the Patriots and the Kardashian's. Anybody who really want's to be a success in America knows they need to be a Football hero or a Reality TV Star. Aside from Obama how many of the last 10 years worth of Nobel Laureates can you name? How many from the Patriot's and Seahawk's starting lineup?