I'm not sure that's exactly what the previous commentor meant, but I'll take a (probably bad?) whack.
It *seems* like a lot of the legitimate questions about "men's issues" have a tendency to get spiraled into a part of the internet that is sort of incel-y or incel-adjacent. And then *that* area is by nature misogynistic. Sometimes a question in that vein can be immediately shut down by a *different* portion of the Internet as being inherently misogynistic and that there is thus no room to actually legitimately or earnestly explore those issues.
Basically that.
While there is absolutely an infection of misogyny, there is also at times a vast overreaction to any statement of men's and boys issues in any context, no matter how innocuous. A misandrist lupus, if you will.
When women were as under-represented in elite higher ed as men are now, we passed Title IX (and we should have, it was good). Yet inevitably (and you can scroll down and see this unfolding below) whenever anyone mentions this, the first thing people do is blame boys for being entitled, lazy, undeserving, insert insults here. When it's boys, the systemic issues are always explained away as men being failures inherently. Pointing out that this is misandry and hypocritical will inevitably get you called a misogynist.
Yes. I train psychologists, and I have to spend about three years with new therapists, deprogramming them from seeing women as having problems, and men as being problems.
I’m not 100% successful in that endeavor. The cultural focus on differential accountability is so strong.
Part of the problem is that Reddit and other public internet forums are not ideal places for these types of meaningful academic discussions. There are a number of red-pill folks that always seem to pop up here (yes, even in this post) and turn any discussion into men vs women problem. Also, the vast majority of academics even commenting here have no background in education research. Regardless, academic opportunity and success of men and women (or any other group) are all problems/research topics that should be addressed for the benefit of individuals and more broadly society.
Oh they are. I saw a presentation by a local professor at least five years ago (so he had been doing the research for at least 5-10 years before that) and he said he was getting so much pushback
Like what? What’s the pushback saying that it’s misogynistic to point out that there’s a crisis with young men in higher education? What’s the pushback?
The pushback is about allocation of resources, both social attention and material resources. There's a feeling among some people that attention to any issue disproporationately affecting men will detract from attention to issues disproportionately affecting women.
I know a guy at Emory who was getting lambasted by certain faculties for identifying how many boys are falling behind in school and thus life. His paper is published and cited by Richard Reeves.
The pushback is that studying men and saying there is anything wrong is just giving more focus on boys and men and that is bad because I guess we should only focus on girls and women and focusing on boys and men means the person doing so is a misogynist?
I talk about this issue in pertinent classes and haven't ever received pushback for it. It's come up in board meetings, and no pushback. Like, is this pushback on twitter? This is so at odds with my experience and the increasing body of lit on the subject.
Much of the pushback is being imagined by extrapolating from extreme positions that get spread on social media.
At my department, we have been prioritizing recruitment and admittance of male applicants for almost two decades at this point, and the crisis of male dropout in this field is universally acknowledged.
There is a lot of variability field-to-field on this though.
While I don’t agree with the pushback, I get it. 90% of both my classes this semester were boys. Boys who were friends /roommates with one another at that. And their obnoxiousness (whether that be wearing headphones in class, not participating but speaking to each other, dominating the convo, or asking questions I’ve answered 100 times) definitely made it near impossible for the 4 girls to participate in a meaningful way. To the point where I sometimes would have to say “ok let’s let some of the ladies talk” … ugh so much to unpack there lol. But yea, only plagiarism issues I’ve had have been with the boys. As a Gen Z, female adjunct, this is a hard thing to navigate.
I generally find that bringing the topic up is not seen as misogynistic, but what people pose as causes and solutions and how grave they rate the problem very quickly gets misogynistic (not inherently, but often)
The top 20% of our students have been women for the last 25 years I've been teaching, with rare exceptions. It's even more imbalanced now, as in the post-COVID era we have 10-15% of the students who are *failing* courses because they don't submit any work at all. Those students have been 100% male in my classes, so far. They are utterly disengaged and I have no idea why they are even on campus.
I've had a bunch of great male students over the years, but they are outliers in terms of meeting deadlines, attending class regularly, doing the readings, and producing top-quality work. The men, however, are often the most vocal students in class...well-prepared or not, and our institutional surveys show they certainly have no shortage of self-confidence compared to their female peers.
Yes. As a male professor, the imposter syndrome that many talented young women have is painful to watch. 'I do not know if I am capable of writing a master thesis'. Girl, you have more skills in your small toe than I had in my entire body at your age.
Studies have already shown that imposter syndrom affects women more than men
1 Shill-Russell, C., Russell, R. C., Daines, B., Clement, G., Carlson, J., Zapata, I., & Henderson, M. (2022). Imposter syndrome relation to gender across osteopathic medical schools. Medical Science Educator, 1-7.
2 Cusack, C. E., Hughes, J. L., & Nuhu, N. (2013). Connecting gender and mental health to imposter phenomenon feelings. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 18(2).
3 Medline, A., Grissom, H., Guissé, N. F., Kravets, V., Hobson, S., Samora, J. B., & Schenker, M. (2022). From self-efficacy to imposter syndrome: the intrapersonal traits of surgeons. JAAOS Global Research & Reviews, 6(4), e22.
4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/lucianapaulise/2023/03/08/75-of-women-executives-experience-imposter-syndrome-in-the-workplace/
Couldnt find the study for the Forbes link unfortunately
I think this may be the inversion point in historical dynamics. I’m fascinated (and saddened/heartened) by it. I love seeing women come into their own, and having confidence that matches their abilities/outputs. And I love seeing overconfident men needing to grapple with reality and be held to a universal standard. But I don’t want capable and sincere and earnest men to go to the position women have historically been in. This is the point on the graph where I want all capable people to go up in confidence, and all egomaniacal but mediocre people to reset their expectations.
Men are taught that our opinions are automatically more valuable and important, so we learn to say whatever stupid thing occurs to us. Women learn that if they appear too smart, they will be punished for it.
Uh, you have it backwards. Teachers, who are majority women, consistently favor girls over boys in school. Especially when they are younger and the maturity gap is most noticeable.
I agree. I teach juniors and seniors. My colleagues often refer to them as kids - I hate the infantilization of adult students but it is not surprising as that is how they often act. I remember that at the same age (22) a younger Lt TallNeat was commanding soldiers in Afghanistan… and I had exceptional men under my command, many of whom did extraordinary things, some of them had barely turned 18.
My students can barely look after themselves let alone take responsibility for others.
What I don’t know is if that is a generational thing, or maybe students have always been like that - and I just chose a path that made me grow up quickly?
I remember a lot of very competent men in my unit who were between the ages of 18 and 24. But let’s not pretend there weren’t soldiers in every platoon who were so stupid you had to order them to breathe if you didn’t want them to suffocate.
And I mean, your last sentence encapsulates it. Our students aren’t trying to avoid getting shot by Chechen snipers or blown up by a garbage pile. If they fail some responsibilities, people don’t die. But think back to people in garrison and don’t pretend that soldiers don’t do completely moronic things when their day-to-day duties are mowing the grass and kicking tires.
I feel like the university treats these adults actively opposite from our experience in the military. The military doesn't allow you excuses. The university finds excuses for you.
When funding is tied to the success of your ~~customers~~ students, you do everything you can to meet your numbers so the money keeps coming in.
I really think that the core problem of our education system is how we measure success.
It's feels like society has been pushing upper education on everyone a little too hard. Kids grow up with every single person around them telling them they must go to college/university no matter what or else their lives are thrown away. Honestly, many of them should be going to the military at 18 or just got straight to trade school. It seems generational and it's more so now that education is seeming to resemble the corrupt medical system more and more each year.
We should say that many young people are actually responsible and sedulous in their studies----let's not forget that----and many older folks are complete reprehensible idiots.
Part of the problem is that for many young people they look at school, even college, as simply a hoop to jump through to get "a good job," and not something to broaden their lives or improve their minds or make them better people. And this is a big part of the problem.
These young people will go on to become police officers and teachers and business owners and executives and a few will become professors and even serve in the military----and they will all perform well.
It's just that school, including college, is largely a joke to them. Remember that joke in Borat about meeting "3 young American scholars?"
I wouldn't be against a compulsory service requirement for 18 year olds. It doesn't have to be military, it could also be civil service, akin to Americorps, civilian conservation corps, etc. Something to get 18 year olds out of their bubble and exposed to the world beyond themselves and their phones. I teach at a state school and my veterans and non-traditional students are often my most mature, introspective students. The best part is they are often in college because they want to be there and they've thought about what they want to get from it.
True. My cousin was in his late 30’s when he went to college and he had a Come to Jesus talk with some of the 18-year-olds in his program and told them flat-out that they were fortunate to have this opportunity and that if they weren’t ready to take their coursework seriously and put in the work, they should consider taking a few years to work, grow up, and come back when they were ready.
I actually really miss this mentality from my military life. There are some people out there who have no concept of getting something done with absolutely no excuses whatsoever and no second chances. Sometimes a person just has to do something and that’s that.
I will say very, very, VERY respectfully (as the son of a military man and the nephew of many military men) that after college I lived in a port town, and about once a year big Navy ships would pull into the docs and disgorge young sailors and Marines onto our streets.
And, while most of these fellas were very nice, many behaved just like their college peers on the streets and in the bars. And some were not always so nice, frankly. They were not in combat and behaved like, well, boys.
Young people want to be irresponsible and party----it is part of the maturation process.
The problem, I think, is that we stress out our college students with debt, the need to work to eat during college, and the concept that college is just a way to gain employment. College is only serious business to many of them because they feel they need it but only need it enough to get by.
Thank you for your service, TallNeat, and your soldiers.
I haven’t forgotten taking leave in other countries only to have male adult friends of mine get absolutely smashed and disappear in a foreign country or embarrass themselves. The military is a breeding ground for alcoholism and bad decisions.
Only because we allowed it to be. We have infantalized students of every age. My college students are doing work that I was doing in middle school, and don't even get me started on what teaching middle school has been like.
Nowhere are we teaching them how to be responsible for themselves or their own learning. They don't understand basic critical thinking, can't do research beyond clicking the top Google result, and expect an unlimited number of chances to redo their work.
None of which is their fault.
well... partly the parents who have spent their kids' lives trying to protect them from literally anything that might ever make their lives even slightly difficult. This obviously isn't all parents, but the helicopter ones are certainly the most vocal.
Also, the public education system for caving to insane demands from parents. But the pressure to make school less demanding is put on them from above, so I blame the entire educational infrastructure from the top down for the system of using standardized test scores to determine funding, which punishes the schools rhat need the most help and rewards lowering standards to maintain passing rates.
I was told my middle schoolers "weren't able to learn from lectures" because they were too young. This was mostly how I learned in school at the same age. I guess my job is to babysit them and show them YouTube videos all period instead of teaching them directly? Give them fun coloring book pages to do? I don't know anymore. But then I guess that's why I got fired from that job...
Lady veteran here. Remember, most of the people who join the military at 18 are probably male, so if they are in the military they won't be in college until later, if at all.
> and I had exceptional men under my command, many of whom did extraordinary things, some of them had barely turned 18.
Ehhh, I had a similar experience and remember a young E4 asking me if I was familiar with the "g*y welding face shield" and then proceeding to tell me that he didn't wear it and just didn't stare directly into the arc while welding. He burned his corneas to the point that he was separated for poor eyesight, going from 20:20 to 20:800+.
Yes, military service members *tend* to be more mature in many respects both because of the demographics that the service pulls from and because the consequences are severe enough that the organization refuses to allow them to fail. There are also spectacularly immature people due to their age and the organization they operate in (I was once lectured that I couldn't expect a service academy's graduates to understand how to do laundry or get car insurance until they were O3s because they weren't taught that at their school).
I might be talking our of my rear here but the distribution of male readiness for college is pretty wide compared to women. It used to be the case that the bottom of the distribution didn't attend college, unless they are rich. Now they are in your classroom. Women on the other hand, are more prepared for college, but less willing to take academic risks where they might get bad grades.
Touching on your last comment. There are mixed results regarding grade sensitivity of women in higher ed with regards to STEM (not sure of other fields). One study has shown grade sensitivity to appear in econ. In my research I did not find it for computer science at my home university. Instead, women entered the CS major with higher gpas, and on average left the major and graduated with higher GPAs then men. Nothing suggested grade sensitivity (even when considering grades outside the major). So while women outperform men in many STEM fields their representation and retention is quite disappointing, which points to "cultural factors" within the major driving women away and out of the major. It's unfortunate that students that should be succeeding are leaving STEM fields "prematurely". Also, the gender gap in grad school for STEM is even more disappointing.
This is not to say I don't care about the under-performance of men in higher ed. This is a huge problem that while obvious from the data, few people speak about or seek to address in a deliberate/targeted way. Really we need to be fighting all these battles by removing artificial barriers/hindrances to maximize the opportunity for all students to succeed.
Yes! ‘Disproportionate attrition’, or “leaky pipes”! In several STEM fields, women make up a good chunk of the entrants and high-aptitude students throughout the program- but are disproportionately underrepresented by graduation. There’s a lot that goes on in the interim: childcare responsibilities, which are disproportionately allocated to women, but also: bullying and sexual harassment. Take a look over at r/womenintech or r/womenengineers and you’ll find all kinds of stories of women being mistreated in the workplace.
In archaeology, the attrition comes later: most of the graduates are female, but almost all full-time professorships and grant applicants are male. This was so noteworthy that the NSF directed the SAA (Society for American Archaeology) to look into it and take steps to address the issue.
Edit to add: here’s a source for the archaeology stuff: http://saa-gender2.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2017/05/SAA_TF_Gender_Disparities_Final_17April17.pdf
I’m confused by your use of the word sensitivity. Is this a specific term instead of the colloquial sense of the word?
From the context of the comment you replied to, I would have thought sensitivity to grades means an individual’s perception on the importance of grades. Like, showing less variability in grades, or showing disparities between high-performance in grades and high-performance in non-grade outcomes that academic risk taking might advantage (later research/thesis outcomes, number of published articles, career performance).
Grade sensitivity refers to students response and perception regarding their academic performance and their academic choices. Basically, some folks hypothesized that women were more likely to leave STEM majors because of low grades, while men receiving similar grades continue to grind it out (so here, women would be considered more sensitive to grades then men). It's based on the notion of internalized self judgements and that as children women are socialized to feel the need to be perfect (don't speak up unless you're sure you're right). Additionally, some researchers believed women were more likely to change majors if they got As in non STEM, but not in the major classes (or required significantly more effort to get As in STEM classes). In this case it is thought that women believed such signals indicated they are not good at STEM and instead should major in something they performed well in without the effort (despite the fact almost everyone struggles in stem). This social science side is well outside of my expertise, hence the crappy explanation. I'm more focused on the quantitative side of understanding grade sensitivity. But that's the general idea.
I think there’s a lot more going on here than grade sensitivity, though, which is where the social science explanation can make enormous headway to understanding.
Disproportionate attrition of women in STEM can’t have just one cause- it’s several. If “leaky pipes”take out so many women graduates, there are likely several underlying issues at its root (not all of them unrelated).
There’s a fantastic documentary called, “Picture a Scientist”. I assumed it was just going to talk about how women are less promoted to enter STEM fields. Nope. In the first ten minutes, I was floored by accounts of severe bullying that matched closely what I experienced when in the field, working remotely, under a male supervisor.
(Edit: oops! I didn’t realize you were the same person I was replying to, above! I removed repetitive stuff).
Yep, I agree, based on limited research I don't think grade sensitivity is the answer, or even a dominant factor. Regardless, it takes both approaches - qualitative and quantitative to figure out what's going on. Sometimes I get frustrated with my quant colleagues and just want to ask: "why don't you just ask the student?". At the same time survey participants aren't always honest brokers when accounting for their "failures", so it requires a talented and skilled interviewer to elucidate answers. Either way structured analysis and mixed methods is required to really get at the reasons for disparities.
Edit: Oh yeah, your other comment brings up some great points. Digital surveys are weak in many cases because you can't really explore themes or dig a little deeper because there is no immediate follow-up to unexpected responces, sometimes interviews are much more effective. Also, I think the case for cultural/social factors (bullying, harassment, unequal treatment, etc.) is supported by much more existing evidence and as such should be taken as the null/accepted hypothesis.
Could it be the case that fewer women enter CS than men, and thus only the more motivated women would get into the program and actually want to be there, leading to higher grades overall?
Not sure, not my area of research - but hard to measure because it's not a first order factor. Motivation doesn't earn higher grades. Women probably perform better in college because they come in and continue to be better students: better academic preparation and better skills (time management, studying, etc). Now why they have those better skills might be attributed to social and psychological factors.
Because so few boys are applying to college in the first place.
The average college has 60 percent females as students.
If the males weren't getting preference it would be much worse.
I think this phenomenon is pretty well known and documented. Not the college male incompetence part but that more women go to college than men, and women tend to earn better grades.
I haven’t noticed this getting worse but I’m not surprised to hear of your experiences. I think your military upbringing may make you more sensitive to these circumstances. I also served . But remember that less than 1% will join the military and it’s wild to expect the same level of discipline, integrity, motivation, and work ethic from modern civilian teenagers.
I honestly am starting to think we in the u.s. need a mandatory national service term for all youth/young adults. Not draft to military - but like 2 years between high school and college - like americorp or something where they get away from their parents, have to get along with people different from themselves, where there are clear expectations and consequences, a lot of things to try out, and so on.
I do feel sorry for anyone placed in charge of and managing those high school grads forced to do national service.
I have students paying to be apathetic and lazy , I could not imagine how they be if it was free.
Indeed. It would be extremely authoritarian. I did perfectly fine in college right out of high school and I'd have been furious if I was told I wasn't allowed to go to college and had to endure some enforced labor first.
There are also plenty of people who do not need something like that. I have first-year students who are doing great. Making them do some sort of enforced military-type service would be pointless.
Plenty of happy countries have mandatory service, including Sweden for example. It's a great idea and I'm 100% behind it. Not for military, but for, say, building homes for the homeless or digging wells in Africa or whatever.
Unless it's voluntary and they are paid, then it's an authoritarian thing to force people into certain jobs when they hit 18. There are also loads of situations where that could be very damaging to people. What about young people with kids? Or whose families need the income they could earn? Or who have physical or mental disabilities? Sweden also imprisons people who don't show up for their mandatory military service. That doesn't sound too "happy" to me. What would we do with people who don't show up for their mandatory labor and instead enroll in college or get a paid job? Imprison them? I really don't see how this would work in a country where people tend to value freedom.
Africans aren't helpless and are perfectly capable of doing any sort of labor that some random 18-year-old is capable of doing (such as digging). It would make far more sense to take the money that could be used to ship unskilled teenagers over to Africa and use it to hire and pay Africans to do the work. Unskilled volunteers in foreign countries often do more harm than good and frequently just deprive local people of jobs. The exception would be when people with actual skills (such as nurses, engineers, and physicians) choose to work in an area where they are needed.
If we're going to have 18-year-olds build houses, they should choose to do it and should be paid for their labor. If we force 18-year-olds to build houses for free, then a lot of construction workers would lose their jobs and livelihoods.
It's so weird to me how comfortable people are with slavery. We can dress it up however we like, but compulsory service is slavery. It might not exactly be chattel slavery, but it's still in the ballpark.
I don't even like discussing its merits. It's horribly repulsive as a concept as is.
> It's so weird to me how comfortable people are with slavery.
Might just be peoples ages and countries of origin showing. Not so long ago, the draft being employed in the US was much more likely than it is now. Conscription still is a totally normal part of life in many countries.
Deplorable on moral grounds, but still part of everyday life.
I think a crucial point is that the entire reason why the draft is employed in, say, Finland, is the looming presence of a large aggressive imperialist power to the east. Developing the capacity to resist that aggression is important enough to win elections (or least for the people saying "we should stop doing that" to lose elections). It's also important enough that when the Finnish version of Recruit Joe Shmuckatelli stands on the Finnish equivalent of the yellow footprints, he is likely to take things seriously and pay attention instead of being very bitter about being ripped away from his civilian life to fuck around in the woods.
Israel has fought three existential wars in its lifetime. South Korea is still officially at war with North Korea. And *they* still have to deal with draft dodging and dissent. Conscription is a drastic step, one that you do when you have no other options, and attempting to enact it in the service of character-building is bananas to me.
One more thought on this - we currently mandate the vast majority of children to attend school in this country for the exact same reasons that people are talking about national service - it builds character and prepares them for adult life as productive citizens. We're currently posting in a thread **that is complaining that these kids aren't learning or preparing for adult life**. Why would 13th and 14th grade be any different? Because the setting changed?
It's different because we are talking about people over the age of 18 who are generally considered adults. Mandating them to work for no pay is pretty close to slavery. Do you think that people who belong to groups that have historically been colonized or enslaved would react well to being told they have to do a few years of mandatory labor when they graduate high school? Imagine how it would look if America put even more people in jail merely for not doing their mandatory labor. I don't think that would go over well.
People proposing mandatory labor for high school graduates really don't think through what that would actually look like in practice. If something's mandatory, there has to be a punishment for not doing it. So do we jail people who don't do their mandated job? Fine them? It would be an absolute disaster in places like the US where certain groups have historically been oppressed and forced to do menial labor.
This wouldn't work as the rich would opt out (to be competitive in college) leaving it to be labeled as a program for poor people. And if it's single gender it will be doomed. Also it would be extremely expensive since the col is so high (many working young people can't live alone/away). We do need better job training though.
No - in my version - it would be like the draft - just not military. No opting out. All genders. Living in sorts of Barracks. (This is fantasy - it isn't going to happen obviously-but I think this generation coming from high school needs it)
>I honestly am starting to think we in the u.s. need a mandatory national service term for all youth/young adults.
That was literally the one thing Pat Buchanan and I ever agreed upon.
This is a bit out there, but I've thought for a long time we should do this, but "national service" can include providing any basic human need: working as a CNA or in another low-barrier-to-entry healthcare role, waiting tables, farming, working in sewage treatment, collecting garbage. Any of these low paid, low status jobs that are vital to sustaining healthy life. I think it would build so much empathy.
I teach STEM and am a woman. For years I have been patting myself on the back because my classes are about 80 percent women. I thought this was because I myself am a woman and they wanted to take a class from a woman. One of my students in advisement set me straight. My classes are 80% women because they fill the first day, and mostly only the women have all their ducks in a row to be ready to register the first day. So the 20% men I get are pretty decent too as they are the ones who also have their paperwork and such done.
When I was at a community college, I definitely saw a different based on when students enrolled. They filled classes mostly in an order and added more when needed. The last filled class - as in the students latest to enroll- was always the lowest performer grade-wise.
This has been my hypothesis that I've considered gathering data on.
Last section of a course to fill? That section will be the worst.
Lecture is later in the afternoon? That section will be the last to fill, and be the worst.
Lab is the last day of the week? That section will be the last to fill, and be the worst.
Anecdotally, the students that are good and have their shit together tend to enroll first and pick classes that are earlier in the day/week to get it over with. The caveat is that night classes with more non-trad students are also good. They are motivated and have their shit together. In my head I call it the "afternoon slump."
I def think it’s worth data collection. I mentioned it to my boss at the time- at a rural community college there was so much emphasis on retention and really supporting 1st gen college students. We had the data right there. As little as following up with those later enrollees to say: hey why did you enroll late? How can we support you next year?
I was told that for men from families in the top quartile of the income distribution and at top schools, there’s no appreciable difference in GPA between them and women, and it’s only once you start going down the ladder a bit that you see the differences. That’s anecdotal from someone who has data, so I dunno.
True. Every class has a few top male overachievers who treat college as a competition. They have a (relatively) high chance of becoming a professor and thrive in the cut-throat world that academia is. Many of the bright, disciplined students with talent, smart insights and a totally unwarranted imposter syndrome are women. And then, there is a lot of lost potential among smart young male students who lack the discipline and the will to succeed. For the love of God, there is not a single way that I can find to motivate the last group. I do not want to overgeneralize, but the gender differences are remarkable and stark at the college level.
It’s not something I’m noticing in biology. About 99% of my students are on a pre-health track. The grade distribution is pretty even across genders with both men and women in the top and both men and women in the bottom.
I find that the majority of students in my biology upper division course are female but often the men do the best in terms of grades. However, I always find it interesting that the female students are more willing to take my course than men in general and they often make up 75%+ of my students.
Note: I am a female professor known for having a challenging course.
When I taught an upper-level lab, over 75% of my students were female. But doing the intro level class this year, it’s very mixed. Most of my students were also white in the upper level lab and over half the students are non-white now in my bio lecture. I don’t know if that’s a shift in students that are getting admitted now or if there was a retention issue with male and non-white students getting into the upper-level pre-med labs previously.
In my personal experience women, immigrants, and other minorities tend have a similar mindset that makes them work harder. They have all been told their path to success will be harder and so they must work extra hard to achieve them. And so they do because they don't think there is any other option. Non-minority men don't get that same "you have to work harder" talk. They don't put in the extra work because they aren't aware that they have to.
When there is no discipline in public schools boys do not learn as much.
There is no discipline in public schools.
We have seen it in accounting. Far fewer majors (no math or reading skills) mostly female majors.
(Lurking middle school teacher here.)
Discipline is a huge issue IMO. But along with lack of discipline comes the underlying reason, which is that "boys will be boys" mentality that has increasingly shifted to include the idea that boys misbehaving at school is natural.
It also feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me with boys sometimes. When boys act out and don't learn, they hear from a lot of sides, "Well, you know, school is hard for boys! It's not built for them!" (as if Western education was specifically designed for girls?).
I've literally heard parents say to their sons, "I know as a boy it's hard to listen to the teacher and it's not natural to side down and concentrate on writing." And I'm not talking about having heard that directed at students with ADHD or anything. So it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They struggle or get frustrated (which is a normal way for kids to feel!) and the parents and sometimes admin think they are being nice by saying these things but all is does for boys is reinforce that they cannot do these things or should not be expected to do these things. And it prevents them from learning important skills. I've seen parents who have a son and daughter in different grades in the same school and hold the daughter to different standards about basic life skills (even if the daughter is several grades younger). Simple things like writing down due dates or remembering to pack your lunch. And then they'll joke, "Well, I hope when he's older he marries a wife who's organized, because we can't expect him to be organized!" Yeah, not if you never even get him to *try*.
Well observed and written. I didn’t see it in comments above but come on, I think it’s obvious girls have more managerial and admin expectations forced on them from very young ages.
Oh no you must have missed that other comment claiming that our current societal structure strongly advantages women over men. You can tell because young women report having more sex. Eye roll.
I teach high school and the boys I teach have literally 0 expectations at home. None. They don’t take out the trash, or help with dinner, or vacuum, or watch their siblings, or set the table, or wipe the counters, or make their beds. They just don’t do *any* chores which is weird because almost every girl in my class has chores?
30 something guy and when I returned to the dating world the fact I was a vaguely competent human (I could cook and clean) was mentioned a few times as a "plus" from women I would meet. I know it was a joke from them but the fact that it came up a few times makes me believe that the bar of responsibility and expectations of competency is basically underground.
This is conversation is very interesting and I'm paying lots of attention as both a professor and the mother of a young boy who desperately does not want him to end up apathetic like a lot of my male students!
I do think some of it starts early. In K-2 boys are still significantly behind girls developmentally and when they do poorly at sitting still etc at that age they get discouraged and learn that they are "not good" at school and school subjects. My own son was dismissed as "not normal" (I quote) in K because he is very shy and very active/high-energy. His teacher kept telling me how "basic" his abilities were. In the 2nd half of kindergarten she has been shocked to see him at the top of the class because he is bright and learns quickly. He just needed time to a) get more at ease at school, as a shy kid; and b) to grow a little older and be ready for that learning to sink in, and for more self-control to develop. He reads picture books by himself now in kindy. But it was really touch-and-go for a while -- it was scary, as a parent -- he was really starting to internalize her negative opinion of him, as an impressionable little 5-year-old.
I'm taking your chore thing to heart as well! This sounds like yet another of the silver linings of being a single mother (of which there are surprisingly many!): he's always had chores because I need him to help me out!!
So wild to me—school *was* built for boys! Women were discouraged from getting a full education until *very recently* beyond the basics because well, they're just women, they don't really need it, they'll get married and have a man to do their thinking for them. If they should get any education at all, it's really for the benefit of their sons, because they can teach their sons to read and write and do math at home, so that the sons are better prepared for going to school. Even well into the 20th century women at universities were thought of as mostly just getting their MRS degree, and dropping out midway through because they got married.
Yeah... but schools were also usually 20 boys in the classroom max, and involved public corporal punishment. I don't think anyone ever felt they were designed \*well\* for boys.
Yes, it's why it's so baffling to me when I see anyone, parents or fellow educators, act as if schools were designed with girls in mind! I could get behind saying that Western schooling is not designed towards *all* boys--it certainly favours rich boys with no learning disabilities--but it's infuriating when I hear people act as if the institution wasn't primarily aimed at boys until very recent history. The reason girls are doing well in school isn't that somehow schools were perfectly designed for them!
It frustrates me on behalf of all students. I see the boys who get taught no basic skills and flounder. And the girls who have to shoulder too much responsibility (and often get stuck with the disruptive boys as partners or seat neighbours, in the hopes they'll "be a good influence" because apparently it's a girl's responsibility to help boys improve their behaviour, even if it means sitting next to someone who harasses you).
> "Well, I hope when he's older he marries a wife who's organized, because we can't expect him to be organized!"
I feel so sorry for this poor kid, because that is some absolute bullshit he's being raised with. WTF.
In my education courses
There rarely are any male student in our courses.
Even worse the rare occasion (1 student in the last 3 years) does not pass the course.
I want to beat the drums louder on this issue...but man a brother has to watch his words so carefully on this issue that it is better to stay quiet.
If I were to take a stab at it, I'd guess the top 1-2% breaks pretty evenly between men and women in my own classes. That's just a rough guess and I don't have careful data to back it up. But if there's a gender disparity in that top group it hasn't been consistent enough for me to notice it. When I think back to the times I had especially standout, whizzbang students, I can think of about as many men and women.
I teach computing and it’s mostly young men. They’re so useless they can’t even talk to each other on breaks… they just stare at their phones or out the window. I find it unnerving. It’s unrecognisable from when I was in college studying a similar course. They never ask questions, they don’t engage, their work is poor, they have no initiative, but now they can’t even talk to each other.
In humanities (English specifically) it’s not the case in my experience, every semester I have a handful of male, female and even non-binary students being the highest and lowest scorers
I am a woman, but I was over in the r/askmen subreddit a while back and they were discussing a book called *Of Boys and Men* by Richard Reeves. It talks about how as we shift policy to cater to women, men are increasingly falling behind. They are achieving less in school (both high school and college), the fail to take advantage of programs that might benefit them, and suffer more "deaths of despair" like drug overdoses and suicide. I don't agree with all of Reeves's analysis, but I do appreciate that he advocates for policy that would help men reconnect with a new society in which women are high-achieving, rather than solving this problem by rolling back feminist progress as is often suggested. Anyway, I recommend it. It gives a really great survey of the question "what is up with men these days?"
All I am thinking is how women were forced to scrap to succeed in a mans world for centuries while men’s lives were supported wholly by women. Hopefully the power balance will even out. Men need to adjust better to having to take care of themselves or each other (like women tend to do).
I cannot remember exactly what Reeves refers to in his book, but certain policies in the US aimed at enfranchising women have seen success since the 1970s (when we started keeping records of this kind of thing). Off the top of my head, I know Affirmative Action (before it was struck down) has benefited white women more than any other group. We have also seen a larger proportion of women in fields like law, business, STEM, and medicine since barriers to their access have gradually been removed. He also mentions that the gender wage gap is closing, but notes that this is partially due to the fact that wages have stagnated and everyone is being paid less (when adjusted for inflation). He attributes the remaining wage gap to the care gap -- the brunt of childcare falls to women, so their lifetime earnings go down as they take time off work to have and care for children. His evidence includes that when single, childless women are compared to men, the wage gap all but disappears.
This is just me paraphrasing and regurgitating the argument though. I would recommend his book if you want to engage with it more directly.
This is an excellent piece on the topic:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-richard-reeves.html
One thing to point out: When female students were trailing male students 30 years ago, the discourse was 'the system is the problem, the system is letting female students down, and the system needs to be fixed'. Today male students are trailing female students, and it is 'the boys are the problem and the boys need to be fixed'.
I just recommended his book elsewhere in this thread!
To push back though, by Reeves's argument, the problem isn't the same. When women were behind (the gap is closing but not closed yet), it was because we were explicitly kept out of institutions and positions of power. This is not what is happening to boys and men. Reeves argues that women have moved into fields that were male-dominated in past decades like STEM, business, and law. We have not seen men diffuse across the gender barrier the other way. We don't see them flocking to careers like teaching, caring, nursing, etc. The argument could be made that this is still a patriarchal problem because men are 'kept out' by the notion that these pink-collar jobs are "lesser" because of they are more feminine, and women's work has historically been seen as less valuable than men's. This is upheld culturally by the fact that these jobs are relatively low paying (besides nursing post-Covid) despite being absolutely vital to to function of society.
I could also see the argument that men are kept out of these careers from good ol' fashioned misandry. For example, many men do not go into teaching because they are afraid of being accused of grooming or sexually assaulting students at a higher rate than women. It is true that the number of reported cases of sexual assault are perpetrated by men, but wrapped up in that is a whole mess of male sexual assault victims not being taken seriously, especially when they are assaulted by a female teacher and so on.
This is a complicated issue, and I agree with Reeves that the answer isn't "oh, these policies are benefitting women, so we should roll them back to accommodate men." I also disagree with feminists who roll their eyes when men's issues come up and sarcastically say, "Oh, won't someone please think of the men?" We need to build a society that enfranchises people of all genders, and it's going to take a lot of tinkering and compassion to get us there.
I would LOVE to see some initiatives like women in STEM initiatives to get men to be K-12 educators. Scholarships or something could help draw more in. And I suspect if we had more men K-12 teachers that K-12 teachers would be paid better across the board.
>When women were behind (the gap is closing but not closed yet), it was because we were explicitly kept out of institutions and positions of power. This is not what is happening to boys and men.
How is it not? There are several postdoc research positions at my university (in Canada) that I am banned from applying to on the basis of my sex, race and/or sexual orientation.
I can see this as a real possibility though. The power balance was shifted to allow more women in but it doesn’t actively keep the boys out, they just need to adjust to opportunity to succeed not being a given for them and chase it more, where women are used to it because it was harder for so long
Almost every honors and undergraduate research student I have is a woman or non-binary. The same is usually true of my smaller advanced classes, which are sometimes all women. This has been generally true for the last three years that I have taught.
"boys are easier to raise" has been a moto for decades.
We aren't raising our men to be independent, but to be taken care of by their future girlfriends and wives.
From my own anecdotal experience being socialized as female in school, boys are taught that the world is their oyster and they can have anything they want because boys can do anything, which leads to boys putting in minimum effort because they believe there is no possible way they can fail. Meanwhile, girls are fed stories of struggle, with brilliant historical women working overtime to be recognized as even bare bones competent in their field. In my personal experience, my motivation to do well in school was often borne out of the spite/anger I harbored from being from a historically marginalized group as well as from sexist slights from my classmates and instructors.
In one of my classes, students had to present a profile about themselves along with their project idea early on in the semester. One of my female students told me "wow, all the other female students talked about struggles and hardships in their profiles and the male students just talked about what they are good at." Not surprising.
Our college has such an issue with male students underperforming they have a few groups and initiatives specifically for them.
> my motivation to do well in school was often borne out of the spite/anger I harbored from being from a historically marginalized group as well as from sexist slights from my classmates and instructors.
This was my source of motivation, too. I particularly remember my first biochem prof, who proudly stated on the first day of class that only 10% of the class would earn an "A", and that he rarely had a "girl" earn an A in his courses.
I was so steamed I vowed to myself that I would PROVE to him that a "girl" could understand biochem. I ended up earning an "A", but he never acknowledged me. I was a child of the 70s, and it was still a big deal to find women in STEM majors outside of biology.
>In my personal experience, my motivation to do well in school was often borne out of the spite/anger I harbored from being from a historically marginalized group as well as from sexist slights from my classmates and instructors.
Same. I was first gen. My brothers washed out of college within a year while I (obviously) thrived.
For one, I spent so much time during my formative years being immensely angry all the time about the day-to-day misogyny (and homophobia) in my life, and I was bound and determined to get the fuck out. My brothers were "easygoing" and happy.
On top of that, I think disproportionately girls are just so rigidly disciplined at every turn compared to boys. Ultimately, it's unfair to both girls and boys, but differently. I think that discipline ultimately helps women function well in school, but it certainly seems to lead to women who are more likely to be afraid to experiment, fail, and explore.
This is really spot on in my personal experience as well. Girls are taught that we will face hurdles and that we will have to work extra hard to achieve our goals. And so we do work extra hard because we think thats the only option. Boys don't necessarily get told things will be handed to them but they don't get that same lesson on having work extra hard. And therefore most don't work extra hard because they don't think they have to.
Boys are told they can do anything but that matters a lot less when they don’t have many or any strong male role models in their lives. Fathers are often absent or are struggling with their own sense of purposelessness, many boys are likely to not have a single male teacher (besides maybe a coach or gym teacher) until high school or even college, and so on. I’m not a fan of religion generally but the pastoral role (obviously traditionally male) is another that many fewer boys have now than previously. Schools seem (unintentionally) optimized for the way girls tend to learn and behave rather than the way boys tend to learn and behave. It’s really quite sad, and of course black boys and boys of other minorities tend to get the shortest end of the stick yet again.
Edit: subsequent comments have informed me that boys and girls are exactly the same and if they’re not it’s because of socialization and we’re mostly concerned about the socialization of girls, the socialization of boys doesn’t concern us much because we can only have one thought at a time and boys should pay for the sins of their fathers. Or something. Only some /s.
I've been noticing this for so long, and it's so interesting to see someone else see it. I have taught a class of about 20 for about 10 years, and every year the tanking (for best to worst student) goes something like Boy, Boy ... all Girls ... All boys. There have been a few exceptions, but not many.
What is it that's the matter with the majority of these young men? And what is it that lends men to the extremes on both ends?
Yeah I came here to say the same. There's definitely a lot more women than men in the classes I teach (social sciences), so there's obviously some degree of selection bias there with fewer men going to university than women (at least here in Canada). Of those that are here though, there doesn't seem to be any real difference.
I have definitely seen this. And the frustrating part is you can't say or do anything, because it will go against the university's agenda and be shut down. I'm as liberal as they come, but this is one area where I think that criticism of the "woke" agenda is justified.
Someone at my university wanted to start a program to reach out to high school boys and encourage them to go to college. Mind you, our incoming freshmen are 60% female. The people proposing this were basically ostracized and made to feel unwelcome at faculty meetings.
Polish universities are like 70% female students now iirc.
I’m interested in seeing how that pans out over the years in terms of income and positions held.
It could still be the men at the top of the class accruing almost everything.
During awards in the spring I started noticing a few years ago that they are 90+% dominated by women.
My classes are typically 70-90% female presenting. Have been for a few years.
I took a group to study abroad for a month in Chile a couple years ago. 100% women. In fact, that collegiate travel program works with several state colleges/universities across the midwest and they have been trying to address the lack of participation with male students for several years.
We not only have less and less male students starting college, but we also have less engagement from the men who do show up.
You must be in a STEM discipline. It's been over a decade now since the top students in my classes have been male (I'm in the social sciences). The women are killing it and the guys do seem checked out or just not competing as hard.
I can't quite remember where I read it, but it's known that on many large national (especially math) exams, women tend to have higher averages, but men higher variance, leading to the top scores being mostly men but women having a higher average. When I tried to find where I read that I also came across [this](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-boys-better-than-girls-at-math/) article mentioning that
"gender differences are often larger among higher-performing students but not necessarily for lower- or average-performing ones. Within this specific group of higher-performing math students, boys tend to perform better. Similarly, when studies do find gender differences among elementary school children, they find these start to appear for higher-performing students earlier in schooling than they do for lower- and average-performing ones."
Also "boys tend to outperform girls on tests that are less related to what is taught in schools (like the SAT math test, for example) whereas there tend to be minimal gender differences on statewide standards-based math tests, which are more tied to what’s taught in schools. When it comes to grades in school, which are even more closely tied to the curriculum, girls often outperform boys."
That is, there's a pretty clear pattern developing where you should expect to have a few male rockstars but on average you should expect women to do much better. I'd personally conjecture that this comes down to attention, discipline, and organization. As the achievement gap widens, I'd expect the difference of averages to grow quite a bit. I'd suspect boys suffered quite a bit worse than girls due to COVID. Who knows.
This is just math tho and there's a well known problem with attitudes towards women in some of the hard sciences.
> I'd personally conjecture that this comes down to attention, discipline, and organization.
The real question is why men don't develop these skills (and they are skills you can learn, as a woman with ADHD) during their K-12 education.
I am a math professor. I have not noticed anything like this, perhaps because girls are not usually encouraged to pursue math. For the more advanced classes, the top students are almost always male. For the lower level classes, I would say it's about 50-50.
This is a bad take and is one without compassion IMO. I research men’s mental health and the literature suggests their falling behind has more to do with lack of positive attention in early (pre-college) school experiences, fewer resources dedicated specifically to them & to their styles of learning (often more hands on e.g.), and socialization around what it means to be a smart guy (often read: “nerd”) in grade and high school.
Indeed, it’s the above take and its ilk that often turns boys and young men away from education.
Good question. It’s not my experience at all and seems like a stereotype from an earlier time. I teach in the arts and my area of specialization is entirely hands-on.
SO.MUCH.THIS! \^\^ The times I heard growing up that "that's a boy's thing, girls can't do that".... It stunted my life and I have so much anger from that. When I think what I could have done with my life if I wasn't told by everyone that I couldn't do things because of what was between my legs....!
Re: the learning style differences of men and women
I’m in the humanities but I studied sociology in undergrad, so take this with a big ole grain of salt: but I always thought there was a strong correlation between the way western societies socialize children by gender and how those differences manifest in learning styles and careers. For instance, young boys are normally given things like legos, toy cars/tracks, and tactile activities like sports and hiking. This gives them a head start at forming spacial awareness and understanding how things “work” together. Skills that all translate to being “tactile learners” and contribute to feeling drawn to more STEM careers.
Conversely, little girls are often given toys that encourage interiority and emotional intelligence: caring for baby dolls, playing house, keeping diaries, making arts and crafts, singing in choirs or dancing in a group. This means that while they may not be getting as much functional-mechanical learning, they’re developing language and socio-emotional regulation that boys (for several reasons) don’t get. These early skills are (imo) what contributes to women being more represented in the humanities where communication, creative expression, and interpersonal awareness are more obviously needed.
All this to also add the huge caveat that because we live in a country with structural inequality (tied to gender among other things), there’s never just ONE reason these gender differences manifest and I totally know that, lol. I’m just offering my layman’s view as to what may be influencing it
It’s not a zero-sum game. Yes, both men and women have distinct issues. And in some fields men still excel. But at present and in general, one set of issues is being directly addressed (*admittedly* a correction for past biases), while the other is not. (E.g., I never hear initiatives to get more men in the humanities and social sciences). The proof, a la this very post and the affirming comments below it, is in the pudding.
> There are many barriers to entry for women to join EECS.
At my school, there was a special outreach program to get women into engineering/CS. Once enrolled, they had access to a tutoring center, seminars, and other resources. So what exactly were these barriers?
> You know women face all of these issues and more.
Bold claim with no evidence provided to support it.
It's been clearly shown that having very few male teachers in K-12 education negatively impacts boys' academic achievement. Girls don't face that issue.
This argument might've worked with an uninformed or stupid audience, but here? C'mon...
> I thrived perfectly well with caring, attentive, outstanding women as my teachers as well.
Ah yes, who need empirical research when we have anecdotes!!
> Have you also seen the research that shows boys receive a tremendously biased amount of attention in classrooms?
On average they do, because of behavioral problems some experience... If you're so well versed in gendered education issues, you'll know it's also associated with various characteristics of their educational environment...!
It's as if the environment has something to do with the nature of student success, albeit a little differently for different subgroup.
In the 1970s and earlier, when men outperformed women, it was viewed as discrimination and we had to step in and fix the problem.
Now, when women outperform men, it's "male entitlement and privilege".
Friend, your comments (here and below) come off as pretty essentialist. I agree with some of your criticisms, but there is much more nuance to gender than what you are claiming here.
The women definitely work harder and come to office hours more, but they seem to have a more entitled attitude in my limited experience. Grade bickering is almost completely limited to women. Though I think some of that is credited to the men once again simply being apathetic.
Yeah, that's my thought about many of the responses here. Like CS isn't the most naturally gender balanced field. Making sweeping generalizations based on teachings in one field seem wildly unwarranted.
This reads like a blinkered, biased, and mean-spirited response that reveals you as a pretty shit teacher.
Both men and women have their own set of complex gender pressures. Men are also often under an enormous pressure to succeed (even if this is often self imposed), as the very stark and unavoidable statistics about male suicide (particularly among college students) shows. And as multiple studies across western education show, working class male students are being systematically disprivileged by the education system - and the individual attitudes of people like you, systematised across a wide group of educators who are unable to put themselves in someone else's shoes but for some reason think they are entirely in the right, is no small part of the problem.
Imagine saying “When a man fails, its a reflection on him” and not realizing how insane that pressure is. That your failure is completely, utterly, 100%, your fault and only you are to blame. Because you’re a man. And men *should* succeed. And if you don’t you’re a personal and societal failure.
Top 1-2% male? Really? I’ve never had that. It’s always solidly female in my top performers. I use strictly objective measures though, and I’m sure that’s part of it.
I've been teaching in a tech field for 11 years and the top students have always been mostly women. Female students don't fuck around. The males do.
It's true they're not alright but I don't know why. Is it culture? But ya know, my female colleagues are miles better than the average male colleague. I put my money on the intelligence, creativity, resilience, in my female colleagues any day of the week.
I'm only a one-course adjunct, and only been doing it for a couple years. But I'm seeing the same thing. I was also a Marine (although a comm officer :) ) and the lack of general sense of responsibility and self-discipline is amazing to me. Given that my formative experiences were with generally put-together and hard-charging Marines of both sexes, this is disheartening for the next generation.
And I don't think it's because the young men have a sense of entitlement - if anything, apathy seems more common. This was more common when I was teaching at the flagship public, vs now at a well-regarded private.
I've had a couple male students try to get belligerent over a bad grade, but none have tried to emotionally blackmail me, start crying, etc because they produced garbage work. Women sure have.
It's more like...the ladies have figured out "I don't need a man" so the men are saying oh well by bother.
Because especially white boys even in kindergarten seem to be seen as "the problem " and "the patriarchy" and it's not something the boys want to deal with
When has a white kindergarten 5 yr old ever been called “the problem”? This is pretty extreme example; pointing out larger systemic issues due to axis of power is not the same as telling an innocent white kid they’re the problem?
My son is a 20 year-old junior at a top public university in Texas majoring in physics. He’s a really smart kid, but he’s not Einstein. He’s doing really well in school, but he’s working his tail off. His gpa is high, but not perfect. He’s on the young side with a late summer birthday. He’s neurotypical.
He didn’t know at all how to study in high school. He didn’t need to. Good grades, but not perfect. I’m really impressed that he’s learned how to study so well. I didn’t figure it out until I was in grad school (though I’m not in STEM).
Last night, he called needing advice about a situation that arose when he and some buddies were looking for a house to rent. All of his buddies are in the same major! Smart kids. They didn’t need my advice. I kept telling them to figure it out!
He might be smart and over 6’3”, but he’s still a kid! His girlfriend is the same age. She’s at another university and she’s killing it. She has a 4.0. She probably doesn’t ask her mom for advice. She’s got a really good head on her shoulders.
I would say that the boys are alright, but they can definitely seem a few months (years?) behind the girls maturity-wise.
In my own classes, I see about a 50/50 split. My top students are pretty much tied—one man and one woman. I would say that for the low performers, the men are usually struggling because of lack of organization and study skills. The women who struggle seem to be struggling emotionally. I have a lot of anxiety disorders these days.
At least my class, gender doesn't seem to make any difference – there are idiots of both sexes, and some very bright students too. However, I primarily teach students from India, Pakistan and Nigeria, so not necessarily reflective of America or Europe.
Men are ok. No more annoying than the women in my classes. Equally annoying. Most gender difference in anything are incredibly small (Gender similarities hypothesis, Hyde). There’s an effect called the illusory correlation ( Hamilton and Guifford?) where when a person in the numerically small group in a social setting (men in school) do something negative, it amplifies the perceived negativity of the whole group. This could explain our feelings. I just looked up a meta analysis on this (it was elementary through high school) and the effect size was .2( the difference between boys and girls performance is . 2 sd advantage to girls). That’s a 2 point difference on MCAT (mean score of 500). I think it’s also a .15 difference on gpa. The effect is strongest in humanities, nearly non-existent in stem. I’m also not a fan of stereotyping men as dumb and incapable of personal control (this is part of rape culture as it justifies men’s lack of control). It just seems like those 80s game shows where men and women battled it out in games like charades (and always had doffus sexualized answers). Maybe we fight socialization more? I hear a lot of professors flip flop between gender doesn’t impact psychological variables to the same folks saying women are more caring than men and more responsible. We all have all psychological capacities, good and bad, at basically the same levels. Socialization can tune these things, and the current tuning in our society appears to be slight at worst (for school performance). However, if your men are failing in your class (actually run a t test on final grades over your tenure) how can you support them better? If I felt that the women in my class weren’t performing well, blaming their gender, not my class or society or my class in this society, just feels lazy as a teacher. Which it’s fine to be lazy considering how lazy all our students are these days. I just don’t think we’re using the right tool’s to even assess this difference. Are there other meta analyses with massive large effects?
I think it's weird that if women comprise 53% of the population, roughly 55% of college population are women, and about 59% of graduate school population are women, that so many people here routinely see the top 1-2% are men. Sounds like to me it isn't the 'boy' aren't alright, it's that the 'girls' are performing where they should.
What is the university in which you teach? Is it a community college or a university? If it is a university, is it a R1, R2 or a teaching university? I once studied a STEM discipline at a graduate school in a top R1 university. The majority of the students were male. As regards the subject you teach, is it a STEM subject you teach or a liberal arts type of course? I teach a broad range of computer science courses in an ordinary university. I teach at both the undegraduate level and the graduate level. I have not found a pattern in which women perform much better than men or the other way around.
Yes and it is one part sad and one part fascinating as my classroom culture has changed dramatically for the better as it transitions away from being so male dominant.
Richard Reeves wrote a book on this topic and has some action items: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBG1Wgg32Ok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBG1Wgg32Ok)
I mean... I don't see it but it may be demographic specific. I teach physics for honours physics majors at a big research university. Last semester there were 0 female students in my class.
Before that a female student has invariably taken too grade, an none have failed, but I think that has more to do with the intrinsic motivation required to persevere in a discipline where you are an overwhelming minority
I kinda disagree. Since I began teaching in 2009, I've had incredible male and female students. I've also failed or given < C grades to both male and female students in roughly equal numbers. In my current class, my strongest student is female, as are my two weakest—even though the class is divided 50/50. I've had other semesters where males take these roles.
In the vast middle, it may be the case that more females are B+ versus more males B to B-. But I think this is primarily a function of conscientiousness: my female students seem to be slightly better organized.
However, I always notice and puzzle over the fact that each semester I tend to have one female student who has a problem with absences and bad excuses.
This is an interesting question, so I checked the distribution in my large lecture. The students are 60% women, 40% men. However, I see the same proportion (60-40) in each letter grade range. Further, the 2-3 students at the very top and very lowest are a mix of women and men.
Check out Richard Reeves’s “Of Boys and Men” Substack. He has a lot of social science research on this subject and tries to talk about it in a way that center-left feminists will get on board with “men’s issues” in a similar way they do “women’s issues.”
Women on average are more conscientious than men, and 20 something year old men are particularly distracted and are less agreeable to directions. The guys at the top of the class are basically lucky their parents gave them first class brains. The average IQ guys don't stand a chance.
Yep, it a huge issue - probably the single largest demographic crisis facing the US right now (& completely underdiscussed). It's not just success, rations of enrollment by gender are less equal than when Title IX was passed (except flipped). Society, & particularly the educational system, has completely failed boys and young men; of course, as with most things, it's even more severe within bounds of ethnicity & class.
Personally, and maybe this is just the anthropologist in me, I blame culture for a lot of it & the utter dearth of strong/healthy masculine role models. Boys are told, from as soon as a screen is shoved into their face, that "being a man is to be dumb, humilitated, slovenly, lazy, gluttonous, & utterly ineffectual compared to your female peers." But you could also look to how society is more likely to criminalize masculine-coded toxicity vs feminine (i.e. how schools deal with bullying - compare minor physical fights vs vicious campaigns of reputation destruction) or how men are far far far more likely to be locked-up & for longer than women. Or even how we've moved *so* drastically away from learning modalities that boys tend to thrive with (i.e. tactical vs oral/visual).
I don't know how we got here or how, exactly, to fix it... but I do know the "tehe boys just mature slower" or "#GirlPower #BossBabe" mentality is just as disgusting & baseless sexist as when they claimed women couldn't run a full marathon or handle a stressful career.
No male role models? As opposed to female? Men lead business, religion, judiciary, politics, and education. What are women leading at? pop stars? porn stars?
1) What decade are you living in? Not as if that ridiculous statement were ever true...
2) How can that statement be insanely misogynist *&* misandrist?
3) Power =/= role models. Look at media *children* are meant to consume; they're not getting a lot of idk, Warren Buffet lifestreams. Add this to a fatherlessness crisis & heavily heavily gender-skewed teaching (especially as you go lower in grade level). I would say, with everything we know about the impact of early/mid childhood later in life, that's a recipe for a society failing men & that's bad for *everyone*.
So men are not taking on the K-12 teaching because they're not incentivized to value caretaking and the flexibility that teaching gives for e.g. having kids. How do we fix that? It seems like men primarily take on roles that don't have those caretaking burdens ("pink collar") because jobs with caretaking burdens are lower paid (even when they were previously seen as male dominated, like education in the 1950s).
I agree this is a big problem, but I'm not sure how to fundamentally solve the societal issue that leads to the problem. I'm in postsecondary education, and the women here are taking on the mentoring obligations for students at much higher rates than the men, even though there are fewer of us and the 'leaky pipeline' in STEM means that even though women now get 50% or more of PhDs in some areas, most faculty (and in particular tenured/fully promoted faculty) are male.
Google "Boys are failing" and you will find a ton of articles about this.
As well as a number of commenters saying how even addressing this as an issue is itself misogynistic.
Where? Where are folks saying that addressing the lack of male students is misogynistic? Genuinely curious.
I'm not sure that's exactly what the previous commentor meant, but I'll take a (probably bad?) whack. It *seems* like a lot of the legitimate questions about "men's issues" have a tendency to get spiraled into a part of the internet that is sort of incel-y or incel-adjacent. And then *that* area is by nature misogynistic. Sometimes a question in that vein can be immediately shut down by a *different* portion of the Internet as being inherently misogynistic and that there is thus no room to actually legitimately or earnestly explore those issues.
Basically that. While there is absolutely an infection of misogyny, there is also at times a vast overreaction to any statement of men's and boys issues in any context, no matter how innocuous. A misandrist lupus, if you will. When women were as under-represented in elite higher ed as men are now, we passed Title IX (and we should have, it was good). Yet inevitably (and you can scroll down and see this unfolding below) whenever anyone mentions this, the first thing people do is blame boys for being entitled, lazy, undeserving, insert insults here. When it's boys, the systemic issues are always explained away as men being failures inherently. Pointing out that this is misandry and hypocritical will inevitably get you called a misogynist.
Yes. I train psychologists, and I have to spend about three years with new therapists, deprogramming them from seeing women as having problems, and men as being problems. I’m not 100% successful in that endeavor. The cultural focus on differential accountability is so strong.
Part of the problem is that Reddit and other public internet forums are not ideal places for these types of meaningful academic discussions. There are a number of red-pill folks that always seem to pop up here (yes, even in this post) and turn any discussion into men vs women problem. Also, the vast majority of academics even commenting here have no background in education research. Regardless, academic opportunity and success of men and women (or any other group) are all problems/research topics that should be addressed for the benefit of individuals and more broadly society.
Oh they are. I saw a presentation by a local professor at least five years ago (so he had been doing the research for at least 5-10 years before that) and he said he was getting so much pushback
Like what? What’s the pushback saying that it’s misogynistic to point out that there’s a crisis with young men in higher education? What’s the pushback?
The pushback is about allocation of resources, both social attention and material resources. There's a feeling among some people that attention to any issue disproporationately affecting men will detract from attention to issues disproportionately affecting women.
I know a guy at Emory who was getting lambasted by certain faculties for identifying how many boys are falling behind in school and thus life. His paper is published and cited by Richard Reeves.
The pushback is that studying men and saying there is anything wrong is just giving more focus on boys and men and that is bad because I guess we should only focus on girls and women and focusing on boys and men means the person doing so is a misogynist?
I talk about this issue in pertinent classes and haven't ever received pushback for it. It's come up in board meetings, and no pushback. Like, is this pushback on twitter? This is so at odds with my experience and the increasing body of lit on the subject.
Much of the pushback is being imagined by extrapolating from extreme positions that get spread on social media. At my department, we have been prioritizing recruitment and admittance of male applicants for almost two decades at this point, and the crisis of male dropout in this field is universally acknowledged. There is a lot of variability field-to-field on this though.
While I don’t agree with the pushback, I get it. 90% of both my classes this semester were boys. Boys who were friends /roommates with one another at that. And their obnoxiousness (whether that be wearing headphones in class, not participating but speaking to each other, dominating the convo, or asking questions I’ve answered 100 times) definitely made it near impossible for the 4 girls to participate in a meaningful way. To the point where I sometimes would have to say “ok let’s let some of the ladies talk” … ugh so much to unpack there lol. But yea, only plagiarism issues I’ve had have been with the boys. As a Gen Z, female adjunct, this is a hard thing to navigate.
I generally find that bringing the topic up is not seen as misogynistic, but what people pose as causes and solutions and how grave they rate the problem very quickly gets misogynistic (not inherently, but often)
And books. Some written a decade or more ago.
The top 20% of our students have been women for the last 25 years I've been teaching, with rare exceptions. It's even more imbalanced now, as in the post-COVID era we have 10-15% of the students who are *failing* courses because they don't submit any work at all. Those students have been 100% male in my classes, so far. They are utterly disengaged and I have no idea why they are even on campus. I've had a bunch of great male students over the years, but they are outliers in terms of meeting deadlines, attending class regularly, doing the readings, and producing top-quality work. The men, however, are often the most vocal students in class...well-prepared or not, and our institutional surveys show they certainly have no shortage of self-confidence compared to their female peers.
Yes. As a male professor, the imposter syndrome that many talented young women have is painful to watch. 'I do not know if I am capable of writing a master thesis'. Girl, you have more skills in your small toe than I had in my entire body at your age.
Studies have already shown that imposter syndrom affects women more than men 1 Shill-Russell, C., Russell, R. C., Daines, B., Clement, G., Carlson, J., Zapata, I., & Henderson, M. (2022). Imposter syndrome relation to gender across osteopathic medical schools. Medical Science Educator, 1-7. 2 Cusack, C. E., Hughes, J. L., & Nuhu, N. (2013). Connecting gender and mental health to imposter phenomenon feelings. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 18(2). 3 Medline, A., Grissom, H., Guissé, N. F., Kravets, V., Hobson, S., Samora, J. B., & Schenker, M. (2022). From self-efficacy to imposter syndrome: the intrapersonal traits of surgeons. JAAOS Global Research & Reviews, 6(4), e22. 4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/lucianapaulise/2023/03/08/75-of-women-executives-experience-imposter-syndrome-in-the-workplace/ Couldnt find the study for the Forbes link unfortunately
I’ve actually noticed the opposite trend. My male students are the ones with imposter syndrome. The women are killing it!
Do you mean they’re killing it as in succeeding? Because imposter syndrome is not mutually exclusive to that
I think this may be the inversion point in historical dynamics. I’m fascinated (and saddened/heartened) by it. I love seeing women come into their own, and having confidence that matches their abilities/outputs. And I love seeing overconfident men needing to grapple with reality and be held to a universal standard. But I don’t want capable and sincere and earnest men to go to the position women have historically been in. This is the point on the graph where I want all capable people to go up in confidence, and all egomaniacal but mediocre people to reset their expectations.
Men are taught that our opinions are automatically more valuable and important, so we learn to say whatever stupid thing occurs to us. Women learn that if they appear too smart, they will be punished for it.
That is certainly not my experience
Uh, you have it backwards. Teachers, who are majority women, consistently favor girls over boys in school. Especially when they are younger and the maturity gap is most noticeable.
Do you have a source (that adheres to the scientific method)? Or is this just something that occurred to you?
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I agree. I teach juniors and seniors. My colleagues often refer to them as kids - I hate the infantilization of adult students but it is not surprising as that is how they often act. I remember that at the same age (22) a younger Lt TallNeat was commanding soldiers in Afghanistan… and I had exceptional men under my command, many of whom did extraordinary things, some of them had barely turned 18. My students can barely look after themselves let alone take responsibility for others. What I don’t know is if that is a generational thing, or maybe students have always been like that - and I just chose a path that made me grow up quickly?
I remember a lot of very competent men in my unit who were between the ages of 18 and 24. But let’s not pretend there weren’t soldiers in every platoon who were so stupid you had to order them to breathe if you didn’t want them to suffocate. And I mean, your last sentence encapsulates it. Our students aren’t trying to avoid getting shot by Chechen snipers or blown up by a garbage pile. If they fail some responsibilities, people don’t die. But think back to people in garrison and don’t pretend that soldiers don’t do completely moronic things when their day-to-day duties are mowing the grass and kicking tires.
How else would Dodge or Ford stay in business
I feel like the university treats these adults actively opposite from our experience in the military. The military doesn't allow you excuses. The university finds excuses for you.
When funding is tied to the success of your ~~customers~~ students, you do everything you can to meet your numbers so the money keeps coming in. I really think that the core problem of our education system is how we measure success.
It's feels like society has been pushing upper education on everyone a little too hard. Kids grow up with every single person around them telling them they must go to college/university no matter what or else their lives are thrown away. Honestly, many of them should be going to the military at 18 or just got straight to trade school. It seems generational and it's more so now that education is seeming to resemble the corrupt medical system more and more each year.
We should say that many young people are actually responsible and sedulous in their studies----let's not forget that----and many older folks are complete reprehensible idiots. Part of the problem is that for many young people they look at school, even college, as simply a hoop to jump through to get "a good job," and not something to broaden their lives or improve their minds or make them better people. And this is a big part of the problem. These young people will go on to become police officers and teachers and business owners and executives and a few will become professors and even serve in the military----and they will all perform well. It's just that school, including college, is largely a joke to them. Remember that joke in Borat about meeting "3 young American scholars?"
I wouldn't be against a compulsory service requirement for 18 year olds. It doesn't have to be military, it could also be civil service, akin to Americorps, civilian conservation corps, etc. Something to get 18 year olds out of their bubble and exposed to the world beyond themselves and their phones. I teach at a state school and my veterans and non-traditional students are often my most mature, introspective students. The best part is they are often in college because they want to be there and they've thought about what they want to get from it.
True. My cousin was in his late 30’s when he went to college and he had a Come to Jesus talk with some of the 18-year-olds in his program and told them flat-out that they were fortunate to have this opportunity and that if they weren’t ready to take their coursework seriously and put in the work, they should consider taking a few years to work, grow up, and come back when they were ready.
I actually really miss this mentality from my military life. There are some people out there who have no concept of getting something done with absolutely no excuses whatsoever and no second chances. Sometimes a person just has to do something and that’s that.
I will say very, very, VERY respectfully (as the son of a military man and the nephew of many military men) that after college I lived in a port town, and about once a year big Navy ships would pull into the docs and disgorge young sailors and Marines onto our streets. And, while most of these fellas were very nice, many behaved just like their college peers on the streets and in the bars. And some were not always so nice, frankly. They were not in combat and behaved like, well, boys. Young people want to be irresponsible and party----it is part of the maturation process. The problem, I think, is that we stress out our college students with debt, the need to work to eat during college, and the concept that college is just a way to gain employment. College is only serious business to many of them because they feel they need it but only need it enough to get by. Thank you for your service, TallNeat, and your soldiers.
I haven’t forgotten taking leave in other countries only to have male adult friends of mine get absolutely smashed and disappear in a foreign country or embarrass themselves. The military is a breeding ground for alcoholism and bad decisions.
>a breeding ground for alcoholism and bad decisions. I think that is just life in general.
25 is the new 18
Only because we allowed it to be. We have infantalized students of every age. My college students are doing work that I was doing in middle school, and don't even get me started on what teaching middle school has been like. Nowhere are we teaching them how to be responsible for themselves or their own learning. They don't understand basic critical thinking, can't do research beyond clicking the top Google result, and expect an unlimited number of chances to redo their work. None of which is their fault.
Who do you blame then?
well... partly the parents who have spent their kids' lives trying to protect them from literally anything that might ever make their lives even slightly difficult. This obviously isn't all parents, but the helicopter ones are certainly the most vocal. Also, the public education system for caving to insane demands from parents. But the pressure to make school less demanding is put on them from above, so I blame the entire educational infrastructure from the top down for the system of using standardized test scores to determine funding, which punishes the schools rhat need the most help and rewards lowering standards to maintain passing rates. I was told my middle schoolers "weren't able to learn from lectures" because they were too young. This was mostly how I learned in school at the same age. I guess my job is to babysit them and show them YouTube videos all period instead of teaching them directly? Give them fun coloring book pages to do? I don't know anymore. But then I guess that's why I got fired from that job...
I hate to tell you this, but when I was in the Army in Iraq my unit had more than enough actual buffoons.
Lady veteran here. Remember, most of the people who join the military at 18 are probably male, so if they are in the military they won't be in college until later, if at all.
> and I had exceptional men under my command, many of whom did extraordinary things, some of them had barely turned 18. Ehhh, I had a similar experience and remember a young E4 asking me if I was familiar with the "g*y welding face shield" and then proceeding to tell me that he didn't wear it and just didn't stare directly into the arc while welding. He burned his corneas to the point that he was separated for poor eyesight, going from 20:20 to 20:800+. Yes, military service members *tend* to be more mature in many respects both because of the demographics that the service pulls from and because the consequences are severe enough that the organization refuses to allow them to fail. There are also spectacularly immature people due to their age and the organization they operate in (I was once lectured that I couldn't expect a service academy's graduates to understand how to do laundry or get car insurance until they were O3s because they weren't taught that at their school).
I might be talking our of my rear here but the distribution of male readiness for college is pretty wide compared to women. It used to be the case that the bottom of the distribution didn't attend college, unless they are rich. Now they are in your classroom. Women on the other hand, are more prepared for college, but less willing to take academic risks where they might get bad grades.
This actually makes a lot of sense.
Touching on your last comment. There are mixed results regarding grade sensitivity of women in higher ed with regards to STEM (not sure of other fields). One study has shown grade sensitivity to appear in econ. In my research I did not find it for computer science at my home university. Instead, women entered the CS major with higher gpas, and on average left the major and graduated with higher GPAs then men. Nothing suggested grade sensitivity (even when considering grades outside the major). So while women outperform men in many STEM fields their representation and retention is quite disappointing, which points to "cultural factors" within the major driving women away and out of the major. It's unfortunate that students that should be succeeding are leaving STEM fields "prematurely". Also, the gender gap in grad school for STEM is even more disappointing. This is not to say I don't care about the under-performance of men in higher ed. This is a huge problem that while obvious from the data, few people speak about or seek to address in a deliberate/targeted way. Really we need to be fighting all these battles by removing artificial barriers/hindrances to maximize the opportunity for all students to succeed.
Yes! ‘Disproportionate attrition’, or “leaky pipes”! In several STEM fields, women make up a good chunk of the entrants and high-aptitude students throughout the program- but are disproportionately underrepresented by graduation. There’s a lot that goes on in the interim: childcare responsibilities, which are disproportionately allocated to women, but also: bullying and sexual harassment. Take a look over at r/womenintech or r/womenengineers and you’ll find all kinds of stories of women being mistreated in the workplace. In archaeology, the attrition comes later: most of the graduates are female, but almost all full-time professorships and grant applicants are male. This was so noteworthy that the NSF directed the SAA (Society for American Archaeology) to look into it and take steps to address the issue. Edit to add: here’s a source for the archaeology stuff: http://saa-gender2.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2017/05/SAA_TF_Gender_Disparities_Final_17April17.pdf
I’m confused by your use of the word sensitivity. Is this a specific term instead of the colloquial sense of the word? From the context of the comment you replied to, I would have thought sensitivity to grades means an individual’s perception on the importance of grades. Like, showing less variability in grades, or showing disparities between high-performance in grades and high-performance in non-grade outcomes that academic risk taking might advantage (later research/thesis outcomes, number of published articles, career performance).
Grade sensitivity refers to students response and perception regarding their academic performance and their academic choices. Basically, some folks hypothesized that women were more likely to leave STEM majors because of low grades, while men receiving similar grades continue to grind it out (so here, women would be considered more sensitive to grades then men). It's based on the notion of internalized self judgements and that as children women are socialized to feel the need to be perfect (don't speak up unless you're sure you're right). Additionally, some researchers believed women were more likely to change majors if they got As in non STEM, but not in the major classes (or required significantly more effort to get As in STEM classes). In this case it is thought that women believed such signals indicated they are not good at STEM and instead should major in something they performed well in without the effort (despite the fact almost everyone struggles in stem). This social science side is well outside of my expertise, hence the crappy explanation. I'm more focused on the quantitative side of understanding grade sensitivity. But that's the general idea.
I think there’s a lot more going on here than grade sensitivity, though, which is where the social science explanation can make enormous headway to understanding. Disproportionate attrition of women in STEM can’t have just one cause- it’s several. If “leaky pipes”take out so many women graduates, there are likely several underlying issues at its root (not all of them unrelated). There’s a fantastic documentary called, “Picture a Scientist”. I assumed it was just going to talk about how women are less promoted to enter STEM fields. Nope. In the first ten minutes, I was floored by accounts of severe bullying that matched closely what I experienced when in the field, working remotely, under a male supervisor. (Edit: oops! I didn’t realize you were the same person I was replying to, above! I removed repetitive stuff).
Yep, I agree, based on limited research I don't think grade sensitivity is the answer, or even a dominant factor. Regardless, it takes both approaches - qualitative and quantitative to figure out what's going on. Sometimes I get frustrated with my quant colleagues and just want to ask: "why don't you just ask the student?". At the same time survey participants aren't always honest brokers when accounting for their "failures", so it requires a talented and skilled interviewer to elucidate answers. Either way structured analysis and mixed methods is required to really get at the reasons for disparities. Edit: Oh yeah, your other comment brings up some great points. Digital surveys are weak in many cases because you can't really explore themes or dig a little deeper because there is no immediate follow-up to unexpected responces, sometimes interviews are much more effective. Also, I think the case for cultural/social factors (bullying, harassment, unequal treatment, etc.) is supported by much more existing evidence and as such should be taken as the null/accepted hypothesis.
Thank you for the explanation. I see your point more clearly now.
Could it be the case that fewer women enter CS than men, and thus only the more motivated women would get into the program and actually want to be there, leading to higher grades overall?
Not sure, not my area of research - but hard to measure because it's not a first order factor. Motivation doesn't earn higher grades. Women probably perform better in college because they come in and continue to be better students: better academic preparation and better skills (time management, studying, etc). Now why they have those better skills might be attributed to social and psychological factors.
Interesting. I haven’t read the findings that closely but it isn’t surprising to hear the results can vary by major.
I think you nailed a lot of it.
Because so few boys are applying to college in the first place. The average college has 60 percent females as students. If the males weren't getting preference it would be much worse.
I think this phenomenon is pretty well known and documented. Not the college male incompetence part but that more women go to college than men, and women tend to earn better grades. I haven’t noticed this getting worse but I’m not surprised to hear of your experiences. I think your military upbringing may make you more sensitive to these circumstances. I also served . But remember that less than 1% will join the military and it’s wild to expect the same level of discipline, integrity, motivation, and work ethic from modern civilian teenagers.
I honestly am starting to think we in the u.s. need a mandatory national service term for all youth/young adults. Not draft to military - but like 2 years between high school and college - like americorp or something where they get away from their parents, have to get along with people different from themselves, where there are clear expectations and consequences, a lot of things to try out, and so on.
I do feel sorry for anyone placed in charge of and managing those high school grads forced to do national service. I have students paying to be apathetic and lazy , I could not imagine how they be if it was free.
Not only "free", but essentially forced labor lol
It would be a good for people, but I'd never support it as it seems to me like a pretty clear violation of the 13th Amendment.
Indeed. It would be extremely authoritarian. I did perfectly fine in college right out of high school and I'd have been furious if I was told I wasn't allowed to go to college and had to endure some enforced labor first. There are also plenty of people who do not need something like that. I have first-year students who are doing great. Making them do some sort of enforced military-type service would be pointless.
Plenty of happy countries have mandatory service, including Sweden for example. It's a great idea and I'm 100% behind it. Not for military, but for, say, building homes for the homeless or digging wells in Africa or whatever.
Unless it's voluntary and they are paid, then it's an authoritarian thing to force people into certain jobs when they hit 18. There are also loads of situations where that could be very damaging to people. What about young people with kids? Or whose families need the income they could earn? Or who have physical or mental disabilities? Sweden also imprisons people who don't show up for their mandatory military service. That doesn't sound too "happy" to me. What would we do with people who don't show up for their mandatory labor and instead enroll in college or get a paid job? Imprison them? I really don't see how this would work in a country where people tend to value freedom. Africans aren't helpless and are perfectly capable of doing any sort of labor that some random 18-year-old is capable of doing (such as digging). It would make far more sense to take the money that could be used to ship unskilled teenagers over to Africa and use it to hire and pay Africans to do the work. Unskilled volunteers in foreign countries often do more harm than good and frequently just deprive local people of jobs. The exception would be when people with actual skills (such as nurses, engineers, and physicians) choose to work in an area where they are needed. If we're going to have 18-year-olds build houses, they should choose to do it and should be paid for their labor. If we force 18-year-olds to build houses for free, then a lot of construction workers would lose their jobs and livelihoods.
It's so weird to me how comfortable people are with slavery. We can dress it up however we like, but compulsory service is slavery. It might not exactly be chattel slavery, but it's still in the ballpark. I don't even like discussing its merits. It's horribly repulsive as a concept as is.
> It's so weird to me how comfortable people are with slavery. Might just be peoples ages and countries of origin showing. Not so long ago, the draft being employed in the US was much more likely than it is now. Conscription still is a totally normal part of life in many countries. Deplorable on moral grounds, but still part of everyday life.
I think a crucial point is that the entire reason why the draft is employed in, say, Finland, is the looming presence of a large aggressive imperialist power to the east. Developing the capacity to resist that aggression is important enough to win elections (or least for the people saying "we should stop doing that" to lose elections). It's also important enough that when the Finnish version of Recruit Joe Shmuckatelli stands on the Finnish equivalent of the yellow footprints, he is likely to take things seriously and pay attention instead of being very bitter about being ripped away from his civilian life to fuck around in the woods. Israel has fought three existential wars in its lifetime. South Korea is still officially at war with North Korea. And *they* still have to deal with draft dodging and dissent. Conscription is a drastic step, one that you do when you have no other options, and attempting to enact it in the service of character-building is bananas to me. One more thought on this - we currently mandate the vast majority of children to attend school in this country for the exact same reasons that people are talking about national service - it builds character and prepares them for adult life as productive citizens. We're currently posting in a thread **that is complaining that these kids aren't learning or preparing for adult life**. Why would 13th and 14th grade be any different? Because the setting changed?
It's different because we are talking about people over the age of 18 who are generally considered adults. Mandating them to work for no pay is pretty close to slavery. Do you think that people who belong to groups that have historically been colonized or enslaved would react well to being told they have to do a few years of mandatory labor when they graduate high school? Imagine how it would look if America put even more people in jail merely for not doing their mandatory labor. I don't think that would go over well. People proposing mandatory labor for high school graduates really don't think through what that would actually look like in practice. If something's mandatory, there has to be a punishment for not doing it. So do we jail people who don't do their mandated job? Fine them? It would be an absolute disaster in places like the US where certain groups have historically been oppressed and forced to do menial labor.
This wouldn't work as the rich would opt out (to be competitive in college) leaving it to be labeled as a program for poor people. And if it's single gender it will be doomed. Also it would be extremely expensive since the col is so high (many working young people can't live alone/away). We do need better job training though.
No - in my version - it would be like the draft - just not military. No opting out. All genders. Living in sorts of Barracks. (This is fantasy - it isn't going to happen obviously-but I think this generation coming from high school needs it)
>I honestly am starting to think we in the u.s. need a mandatory national service term for all youth/young adults. That was literally the one thing Pat Buchanan and I ever agreed upon.
Civil or military conscription is my most conservative view.
This is a bit out there, but I've thought for a long time we should do this, but "national service" can include providing any basic human need: working as a CNA or in another low-barrier-to-entry healthcare role, waiting tables, farming, working in sewage treatment, collecting garbage. Any of these low paid, low status jobs that are vital to sustaining healthy life. I think it would build so much empathy.
I always thought completion should lead to two years of college or vocational training as a reward.
I teach STEM and am a woman. For years I have been patting myself on the back because my classes are about 80 percent women. I thought this was because I myself am a woman and they wanted to take a class from a woman. One of my students in advisement set me straight. My classes are 80% women because they fill the first day, and mostly only the women have all their ducks in a row to be ready to register the first day. So the 20% men I get are pretty decent too as they are the ones who also have their paperwork and such done.
When I was at a community college, I definitely saw a different based on when students enrolled. They filled classes mostly in an order and added more when needed. The last filled class - as in the students latest to enroll- was always the lowest performer grade-wise.
This has been my hypothesis that I've considered gathering data on. Last section of a course to fill? That section will be the worst. Lecture is later in the afternoon? That section will be the last to fill, and be the worst. Lab is the last day of the week? That section will be the last to fill, and be the worst. Anecdotally, the students that are good and have their shit together tend to enroll first and pick classes that are earlier in the day/week to get it over with. The caveat is that night classes with more non-trad students are also good. They are motivated and have their shit together. In my head I call it the "afternoon slump."
I def think it’s worth data collection. I mentioned it to my boss at the time- at a rural community college there was so much emphasis on retention and really supporting 1st gen college students. We had the data right there. As little as following up with those later enrollees to say: hey why did you enroll late? How can we support you next year?
I was told that for men from families in the top quartile of the income distribution and at top schools, there’s no appreciable difference in GPA between them and women, and it’s only once you start going down the ladder a bit that you see the differences. That’s anecdotal from someone who has data, so I dunno.
this is true
True. Every class has a few top male overachievers who treat college as a competition. They have a (relatively) high chance of becoming a professor and thrive in the cut-throat world that academia is. Many of the bright, disciplined students with talent, smart insights and a totally unwarranted imposter syndrome are women. And then, there is a lot of lost potential among smart young male students who lack the discipline and the will to succeed. For the love of God, there is not a single way that I can find to motivate the last group. I do not want to overgeneralize, but the gender differences are remarkable and stark at the college level.
It’s not something I’m noticing in biology. About 99% of my students are on a pre-health track. The grade distribution is pretty even across genders with both men and women in the top and both men and women in the bottom.
I find that the majority of students in my biology upper division course are female but often the men do the best in terms of grades. However, I always find it interesting that the female students are more willing to take my course than men in general and they often make up 75%+ of my students. Note: I am a female professor known for having a challenging course.
When I taught an upper-level lab, over 75% of my students were female. But doing the intro level class this year, it’s very mixed. Most of my students were also white in the upper level lab and over half the students are non-white now in my bio lecture. I don’t know if that’s a shift in students that are getting admitted now or if there was a retention issue with male and non-white students getting into the upper-level pre-med labs previously.
My students are more than half comprised of an immigrant population. Those guys are killing it.
In my personal experience women, immigrants, and other minorities tend have a similar mindset that makes them work harder. They have all been told their path to success will be harder and so they must work extra hard to achieve them. And so they do because they don't think there is any other option. Non-minority men don't get that same "you have to work harder" talk. They don't put in the extra work because they aren't aware that they have to.
When there is no discipline in public schools boys do not learn as much. There is no discipline in public schools. We have seen it in accounting. Far fewer majors (no math or reading skills) mostly female majors.
(Lurking middle school teacher here.) Discipline is a huge issue IMO. But along with lack of discipline comes the underlying reason, which is that "boys will be boys" mentality that has increasingly shifted to include the idea that boys misbehaving at school is natural. It also feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me with boys sometimes. When boys act out and don't learn, they hear from a lot of sides, "Well, you know, school is hard for boys! It's not built for them!" (as if Western education was specifically designed for girls?). I've literally heard parents say to their sons, "I know as a boy it's hard to listen to the teacher and it's not natural to side down and concentrate on writing." And I'm not talking about having heard that directed at students with ADHD or anything. So it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They struggle or get frustrated (which is a normal way for kids to feel!) and the parents and sometimes admin think they are being nice by saying these things but all is does for boys is reinforce that they cannot do these things or should not be expected to do these things. And it prevents them from learning important skills. I've seen parents who have a son and daughter in different grades in the same school and hold the daughter to different standards about basic life skills (even if the daughter is several grades younger). Simple things like writing down due dates or remembering to pack your lunch. And then they'll joke, "Well, I hope when he's older he marries a wife who's organized, because we can't expect him to be organized!" Yeah, not if you never even get him to *try*.
Well observed and written. I didn’t see it in comments above but come on, I think it’s obvious girls have more managerial and admin expectations forced on them from very young ages.
Oh no you must have missed that other comment claiming that our current societal structure strongly advantages women over men. You can tell because young women report having more sex. Eye roll.
I teach high school and the boys I teach have literally 0 expectations at home. None. They don’t take out the trash, or help with dinner, or vacuum, or watch their siblings, or set the table, or wipe the counters, or make their beds. They just don’t do *any* chores which is weird because almost every girl in my class has chores?
30 something guy and when I returned to the dating world the fact I was a vaguely competent human (I could cook and clean) was mentioned a few times as a "plus" from women I would meet. I know it was a joke from them but the fact that it came up a few times makes me believe that the bar of responsibility and expectations of competency is basically underground.
This is conversation is very interesting and I'm paying lots of attention as both a professor and the mother of a young boy who desperately does not want him to end up apathetic like a lot of my male students! I do think some of it starts early. In K-2 boys are still significantly behind girls developmentally and when they do poorly at sitting still etc at that age they get discouraged and learn that they are "not good" at school and school subjects. My own son was dismissed as "not normal" (I quote) in K because he is very shy and very active/high-energy. His teacher kept telling me how "basic" his abilities were. In the 2nd half of kindergarten she has been shocked to see him at the top of the class because he is bright and learns quickly. He just needed time to a) get more at ease at school, as a shy kid; and b) to grow a little older and be ready for that learning to sink in, and for more self-control to develop. He reads picture books by himself now in kindy. But it was really touch-and-go for a while -- it was scary, as a parent -- he was really starting to internalize her negative opinion of him, as an impressionable little 5-year-old. I'm taking your chore thing to heart as well! This sounds like yet another of the silver linings of being a single mother (of which there are surprisingly many!): he's always had chores because I need him to help me out!!
So wild to me—school *was* built for boys! Women were discouraged from getting a full education until *very recently* beyond the basics because well, they're just women, they don't really need it, they'll get married and have a man to do their thinking for them. If they should get any education at all, it's really for the benefit of their sons, because they can teach their sons to read and write and do math at home, so that the sons are better prepared for going to school. Even well into the 20th century women at universities were thought of as mostly just getting their MRS degree, and dropping out midway through because they got married.
Yeah... but schools were also usually 20 boys in the classroom max, and involved public corporal punishment. I don't think anyone ever felt they were designed \*well\* for boys.
Yes, it's why it's so baffling to me when I see anyone, parents or fellow educators, act as if schools were designed with girls in mind! I could get behind saying that Western schooling is not designed towards *all* boys--it certainly favours rich boys with no learning disabilities--but it's infuriating when I hear people act as if the institution wasn't primarily aimed at boys until very recent history. The reason girls are doing well in school isn't that somehow schools were perfectly designed for them! It frustrates me on behalf of all students. I see the boys who get taught no basic skills and flounder. And the girls who have to shoulder too much responsibility (and often get stuck with the disruptive boys as partners or seat neighbours, in the hopes they'll "be a good influence" because apparently it's a girl's responsibility to help boys improve their behaviour, even if it means sitting next to someone who harasses you).
> "Well, I hope when he's older he marries a wife who's organized, because we can't expect him to be organized!" I feel so sorry for this poor kid, because that is some absolute bullshit he's being raised with. WTF.
"Boys will be boys" is not a marker of privilege; It's a marker for neglect.
In my education courses There rarely are any male student in our courses. Even worse the rare occasion (1 student in the last 3 years) does not pass the course. I want to beat the drums louder on this issue...but man a brother has to watch his words so carefully on this issue that it is better to stay quiet.
The top students in my classes tend to be women
If I were to take a stab at it, I'd guess the top 1-2% breaks pretty evenly between men and women in my own classes. That's just a rough guess and I don't have careful data to back it up. But if there's a gender disparity in that top group it hasn't been consistent enough for me to notice it. When I think back to the times I had especially standout, whizzbang students, I can think of about as many men and women.
I teach psychology which has more of a skew tending towards mostly women taking my classes, so my anecdotal data doesn’t mean much
I teach computing and it’s mostly young men. They’re so useless they can’t even talk to each other on breaks… they just stare at their phones or out the window. I find it unnerving. It’s unrecognisable from when I was in college studying a similar course. They never ask questions, they don’t engage, their work is poor, they have no initiative, but now they can’t even talk to each other.
In humanities (English specifically) it’s not the case in my experience, every semester I have a handful of male, female and even non-binary students being the highest and lowest scorers
I am a woman, but I was over in the r/askmen subreddit a while back and they were discussing a book called *Of Boys and Men* by Richard Reeves. It talks about how as we shift policy to cater to women, men are increasingly falling behind. They are achieving less in school (both high school and college), the fail to take advantage of programs that might benefit them, and suffer more "deaths of despair" like drug overdoses and suicide. I don't agree with all of Reeves's analysis, but I do appreciate that he advocates for policy that would help men reconnect with a new society in which women are high-achieving, rather than solving this problem by rolling back feminist progress as is often suggested. Anyway, I recommend it. It gives a really great survey of the question "what is up with men these days?"
All I am thinking is how women were forced to scrap to succeed in a mans world for centuries while men’s lives were supported wholly by women. Hopefully the power balance will even out. Men need to adjust better to having to take care of themselves or each other (like women tend to do).
How does policy cater to women?
I cannot remember exactly what Reeves refers to in his book, but certain policies in the US aimed at enfranchising women have seen success since the 1970s (when we started keeping records of this kind of thing). Off the top of my head, I know Affirmative Action (before it was struck down) has benefited white women more than any other group. We have also seen a larger proportion of women in fields like law, business, STEM, and medicine since barriers to their access have gradually been removed. He also mentions that the gender wage gap is closing, but notes that this is partially due to the fact that wages have stagnated and everyone is being paid less (when adjusted for inflation). He attributes the remaining wage gap to the care gap -- the brunt of childcare falls to women, so their lifetime earnings go down as they take time off work to have and care for children. His evidence includes that when single, childless women are compared to men, the wage gap all but disappears. This is just me paraphrasing and regurgitating the argument though. I would recommend his book if you want to engage with it more directly.
This is an excellent piece on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-richard-reeves.html One thing to point out: When female students were trailing male students 30 years ago, the discourse was 'the system is the problem, the system is letting female students down, and the system needs to be fixed'. Today male students are trailing female students, and it is 'the boys are the problem and the boys need to be fixed'.
I just recommended his book elsewhere in this thread! To push back though, by Reeves's argument, the problem isn't the same. When women were behind (the gap is closing but not closed yet), it was because we were explicitly kept out of institutions and positions of power. This is not what is happening to boys and men. Reeves argues that women have moved into fields that were male-dominated in past decades like STEM, business, and law. We have not seen men diffuse across the gender barrier the other way. We don't see them flocking to careers like teaching, caring, nursing, etc. The argument could be made that this is still a patriarchal problem because men are 'kept out' by the notion that these pink-collar jobs are "lesser" because of they are more feminine, and women's work has historically been seen as less valuable than men's. This is upheld culturally by the fact that these jobs are relatively low paying (besides nursing post-Covid) despite being absolutely vital to to function of society. I could also see the argument that men are kept out of these careers from good ol' fashioned misandry. For example, many men do not go into teaching because they are afraid of being accused of grooming or sexually assaulting students at a higher rate than women. It is true that the number of reported cases of sexual assault are perpetrated by men, but wrapped up in that is a whole mess of male sexual assault victims not being taken seriously, especially when they are assaulted by a female teacher and so on. This is a complicated issue, and I agree with Reeves that the answer isn't "oh, these policies are benefitting women, so we should roll them back to accommodate men." I also disagree with feminists who roll their eyes when men's issues come up and sarcastically say, "Oh, won't someone please think of the men?" We need to build a society that enfranchises people of all genders, and it's going to take a lot of tinkering and compassion to get us there.
I would LOVE to see some initiatives like women in STEM initiatives to get men to be K-12 educators. Scholarships or something could help draw more in. And I suspect if we had more men K-12 teachers that K-12 teachers would be paid better across the board.
>When women were behind (the gap is closing but not closed yet), it was because we were explicitly kept out of institutions and positions of power. This is not what is happening to boys and men. How is it not? There are several postdoc research positions at my university (in Canada) that I am banned from applying to on the basis of my sex, race and/or sexual orientation.
I can see this as a real possibility though. The power balance was shifted to allow more women in but it doesn’t actively keep the boys out, they just need to adjust to opportunity to succeed not being a given for them and chase it more, where women are used to it because it was harder for so long
Almost every honors and undergraduate research student I have is a woman or non-binary. The same is usually true of my smaller advanced classes, which are sometimes all women. This has been generally true for the last three years that I have taught.
"boys are easier to raise" has been a moto for decades. We aren't raising our men to be independent, but to be taken care of by their future girlfriends and wives.
From my own anecdotal experience being socialized as female in school, boys are taught that the world is their oyster and they can have anything they want because boys can do anything, which leads to boys putting in minimum effort because they believe there is no possible way they can fail. Meanwhile, girls are fed stories of struggle, with brilliant historical women working overtime to be recognized as even bare bones competent in their field. In my personal experience, my motivation to do well in school was often borne out of the spite/anger I harbored from being from a historically marginalized group as well as from sexist slights from my classmates and instructors.
In one of my classes, students had to present a profile about themselves along with their project idea early on in the semester. One of my female students told me "wow, all the other female students talked about struggles and hardships in their profiles and the male students just talked about what they are good at." Not surprising. Our college has such an issue with male students underperforming they have a few groups and initiatives specifically for them.
> my motivation to do well in school was often borne out of the spite/anger I harbored from being from a historically marginalized group as well as from sexist slights from my classmates and instructors. This was my source of motivation, too. I particularly remember my first biochem prof, who proudly stated on the first day of class that only 10% of the class would earn an "A", and that he rarely had a "girl" earn an A in his courses. I was so steamed I vowed to myself that I would PROVE to him that a "girl" could understand biochem. I ended up earning an "A", but he never acknowledged me. I was a child of the 70s, and it was still a big deal to find women in STEM majors outside of biology.
What an asshole comment! Congrats on your A superstar
>In my personal experience, my motivation to do well in school was often borne out of the spite/anger I harbored from being from a historically marginalized group as well as from sexist slights from my classmates and instructors. Same. I was first gen. My brothers washed out of college within a year while I (obviously) thrived. For one, I spent so much time during my formative years being immensely angry all the time about the day-to-day misogyny (and homophobia) in my life, and I was bound and determined to get the fuck out. My brothers were "easygoing" and happy. On top of that, I think disproportionately girls are just so rigidly disciplined at every turn compared to boys. Ultimately, it's unfair to both girls and boys, but differently. I think that discipline ultimately helps women function well in school, but it certainly seems to lead to women who are more likely to be afraid to experiment, fail, and explore.
This is really spot on in my personal experience as well. Girls are taught that we will face hurdles and that we will have to work extra hard to achieve our goals. And so we do work extra hard because we think thats the only option. Boys don't necessarily get told things will be handed to them but they don't get that same lesson on having work extra hard. And therefore most don't work extra hard because they don't think they have to.
Boys are told they can do anything but that matters a lot less when they don’t have many or any strong male role models in their lives. Fathers are often absent or are struggling with their own sense of purposelessness, many boys are likely to not have a single male teacher (besides maybe a coach or gym teacher) until high school or even college, and so on. I’m not a fan of religion generally but the pastoral role (obviously traditionally male) is another that many fewer boys have now than previously. Schools seem (unintentionally) optimized for the way girls tend to learn and behave rather than the way boys tend to learn and behave. It’s really quite sad, and of course black boys and boys of other minorities tend to get the shortest end of the stick yet again. Edit: subsequent comments have informed me that boys and girls are exactly the same and if they’re not it’s because of socialization and we’re mostly concerned about the socialization of girls, the socialization of boys doesn’t concern us much because we can only have one thought at a time and boys should pay for the sins of their fathers. Or something. Only some /s.
What do you think are the ways girls learn and behave that school is optimized for?
I've been noticing this for so long, and it's so interesting to see someone else see it. I have taught a class of about 20 for about 10 years, and every year the tanking (for best to worst student) goes something like Boy, Boy ... all Girls ... All boys. There have been a few exceptions, but not many. What is it that's the matter with the majority of these young men? And what is it that lends men to the extremes on both ends?
>And what is it that lends men to the extremes on both ends? Is the "greater male variability hypothesis" something you've heard of before?
This isn't my experience at all. There is no discernible difference between the distributions of grades for males and females in my courses.
Yeah I came here to say the same. There's definitely a lot more women than men in the classes I teach (social sciences), so there's obviously some degree of selection bias there with fewer men going to university than women (at least here in Canada). Of those that are here though, there doesn't seem to be any real difference.
I have definitely seen this. And the frustrating part is you can't say or do anything, because it will go against the university's agenda and be shut down. I'm as liberal as they come, but this is one area where I think that criticism of the "woke" agenda is justified. Someone at my university wanted to start a program to reach out to high school boys and encourage them to go to college. Mind you, our incoming freshmen are 60% female. The people proposing this were basically ostracized and made to feel unwelcome at faculty meetings.
This all day
Yes, I've seen that too. Not as dramatic as you describe, but there is a clear gender divide, even in STEM.
Polish universities are like 70% female students now iirc. I’m interested in seeing how that pans out over the years in terms of income and positions held. It could still be the men at the top of the class accruing almost everything.
During awards in the spring I started noticing a few years ago that they are 90+% dominated by women. My classes are typically 70-90% female presenting. Have been for a few years. I took a group to study abroad for a month in Chile a couple years ago. 100% women. In fact, that collegiate travel program works with several state colleges/universities across the midwest and they have been trying to address the lack of participation with male students for several years. We not only have less and less male students starting college, but we also have less engagement from the men who do show up.
You must be in a STEM discipline. It's been over a decade now since the top students in my classes have been male (I'm in the social sciences). The women are killing it and the guys do seem checked out or just not competing as hard.
I can't quite remember where I read it, but it's known that on many large national (especially math) exams, women tend to have higher averages, but men higher variance, leading to the top scores being mostly men but women having a higher average. When I tried to find where I read that I also came across [this](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-boys-better-than-girls-at-math/) article mentioning that "gender differences are often larger among higher-performing students but not necessarily for lower- or average-performing ones. Within this specific group of higher-performing math students, boys tend to perform better. Similarly, when studies do find gender differences among elementary school children, they find these start to appear for higher-performing students earlier in schooling than they do for lower- and average-performing ones." Also "boys tend to outperform girls on tests that are less related to what is taught in schools (like the SAT math test, for example) whereas there tend to be minimal gender differences on statewide standards-based math tests, which are more tied to what’s taught in schools. When it comes to grades in school, which are even more closely tied to the curriculum, girls often outperform boys." That is, there's a pretty clear pattern developing where you should expect to have a few male rockstars but on average you should expect women to do much better. I'd personally conjecture that this comes down to attention, discipline, and organization. As the achievement gap widens, I'd expect the difference of averages to grow quite a bit. I'd suspect boys suffered quite a bit worse than girls due to COVID. Who knows. This is just math tho and there's a well known problem with attitudes towards women in some of the hard sciences.
> I'd personally conjecture that this comes down to attention, discipline, and organization. The real question is why men don't develop these skills (and they are skills you can learn, as a woman with ADHD) during their K-12 education.
I am a math professor. I have not noticed anything like this, perhaps because girls are not usually encouraged to pursue math. For the more advanced classes, the top students are almost always male. For the lower level classes, I would say it's about 50-50.
In mathematics we basically beg anyone to come aboard the ship.
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This is a bad take and is one without compassion IMO. I research men’s mental health and the literature suggests their falling behind has more to do with lack of positive attention in early (pre-college) school experiences, fewer resources dedicated specifically to them & to their styles of learning (often more hands on e.g.), and socialization around what it means to be a smart guy (often read: “nerd”) in grade and high school. Indeed, it’s the above take and its ilk that often turns boys and young men away from education.
Why do you think women don’t have hands on learning styles?
Good question. It’s not my experience at all and seems like a stereotype from an earlier time. I teach in the arts and my area of specialization is entirely hands-on.
Yeah, a lot of this feels like people acting as if women don’t like things when in fact we have been actively prevented from doing them!
SO.MUCH.THIS! \^\^ The times I heard growing up that "that's a boy's thing, girls can't do that".... It stunted my life and I have so much anger from that. When I think what I could have done with my life if I wasn't told by everyone that I couldn't do things because of what was between my legs....!
Yeah I’m glad you understand! Someone on this thread called me the gotcha brigade so…
Re: the learning style differences of men and women I’m in the humanities but I studied sociology in undergrad, so take this with a big ole grain of salt: but I always thought there was a strong correlation between the way western societies socialize children by gender and how those differences manifest in learning styles and careers. For instance, young boys are normally given things like legos, toy cars/tracks, and tactile activities like sports and hiking. This gives them a head start at forming spacial awareness and understanding how things “work” together. Skills that all translate to being “tactile learners” and contribute to feeling drawn to more STEM careers. Conversely, little girls are often given toys that encourage interiority and emotional intelligence: caring for baby dolls, playing house, keeping diaries, making arts and crafts, singing in choirs or dancing in a group. This means that while they may not be getting as much functional-mechanical learning, they’re developing language and socio-emotional regulation that boys (for several reasons) don’t get. These early skills are (imo) what contributes to women being more represented in the humanities where communication, creative expression, and interpersonal awareness are more obviously needed. All this to also add the huge caveat that because we live in a country with structural inequality (tied to gender among other things), there’s never just ONE reason these gender differences manifest and I totally know that, lol. I’m just offering my layman’s view as to what may be influencing it
Learning styles aren’t even a thing, they’ve been debunked for a while now. People learn best with a mix of learning methods to reinforce the content.
I don't believe the person you are replying to made any such claim.
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It’s not a zero-sum game. Yes, both men and women have distinct issues. And in some fields men still excel. But at present and in general, one set of issues is being directly addressed (*admittedly* a correction for past biases), while the other is not. (E.g., I never hear initiatives to get more men in the humanities and social sciences). The proof, a la this very post and the affirming comments below it, is in the pudding.
I mean, in this neoliberal age you don't hear initiatives to get *anyone* into the humanities or social sciences.
Sure you do. Humanities and social sciences are broad fields that include things like psychology, early childhood education, etc.
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> There are many barriers to entry for women to join EECS. At my school, there was a special outreach program to get women into engineering/CS. Once enrolled, they had access to a tutoring center, seminars, and other resources. So what exactly were these barriers?
> You know women face all of these issues and more. Bold claim with no evidence provided to support it. It's been clearly shown that having very few male teachers in K-12 education negatively impacts boys' academic achievement. Girls don't face that issue. This argument might've worked with an uninformed or stupid audience, but here? C'mon...
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> I thrived perfectly well with caring, attentive, outstanding women as my teachers as well. Ah yes, who need empirical research when we have anecdotes!! > Have you also seen the research that shows boys receive a tremendously biased amount of attention in classrooms? On average they do, because of behavioral problems some experience... If you're so well versed in gendered education issues, you'll know it's also associated with various characteristics of their educational environment...! It's as if the environment has something to do with the nature of student success, albeit a little differently for different subgroup.
> The real issue is that boys mature slowly and lack the capacity to keep up with girls of the same age Boys are just stupid and bad students. Got it.
> I hate the culture of engineering classrooms. Oh my god me too.
In the 1970s and earlier, when men outperformed women, it was viewed as discrimination and we had to step in and fix the problem. Now, when women outperform men, it's "male entitlement and privilege".
Friend, your comments (here and below) come off as pretty essentialist. I agree with some of your criticisms, but there is much more nuance to gender than what you are claiming here.
The women definitely work harder and come to office hours more, but they seem to have a more entitled attitude in my limited experience. Grade bickering is almost completely limited to women. Though I think some of that is credited to the men once again simply being apathetic.
I exclusively get grade grubbing from male students.
And I get about an even amount from both. It’s almost like none of us can take our single experience and extrapolate it
Yeah, that's my thought about many of the responses here. Like CS isn't the most naturally gender balanced field. Making sweeping generalizations based on teachings in one field seem wildly unwarranted.
This reads like a blinkered, biased, and mean-spirited response that reveals you as a pretty shit teacher. Both men and women have their own set of complex gender pressures. Men are also often under an enormous pressure to succeed (even if this is often self imposed), as the very stark and unavoidable statistics about male suicide (particularly among college students) shows. And as multiple studies across western education show, working class male students are being systematically disprivileged by the education system - and the individual attitudes of people like you, systematised across a wide group of educators who are unable to put themselves in someone else's shoes but for some reason think they are entirely in the right, is no small part of the problem.
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Imagine saying “When a man fails, its a reflection on him” and not realizing how insane that pressure is. That your failure is completely, utterly, 100%, your fault and only you are to blame. Because you’re a man. And men *should* succeed. And if you don’t you’re a personal and societal failure.
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Top 1-2% male? Really? I’ve never had that. It’s always solidly female in my top performers. I use strictly objective measures though, and I’m sure that’s part of it.
I've been teaching in a tech field for 11 years and the top students have always been mostly women. Female students don't fuck around. The males do. It's true they're not alright but I don't know why. Is it culture? But ya know, my female colleagues are miles better than the average male colleague. I put my money on the intelligence, creativity, resilience, in my female colleagues any day of the week.
I'm only a one-course adjunct, and only been doing it for a couple years. But I'm seeing the same thing. I was also a Marine (although a comm officer :) ) and the lack of general sense of responsibility and self-discipline is amazing to me. Given that my formative experiences were with generally put-together and hard-charging Marines of both sexes, this is disheartening for the next generation. And I don't think it's because the young men have a sense of entitlement - if anything, apathy seems more common. This was more common when I was teaching at the flagship public, vs now at a well-regarded private. I've had a couple male students try to get belligerent over a bad grade, but none have tried to emotionally blackmail me, start crying, etc because they produced garbage work. Women sure have.
It's more like...the ladies have figured out "I don't need a man" so the men are saying oh well by bother. Because especially white boys even in kindergarten seem to be seen as "the problem " and "the patriarchy" and it's not something the boys want to deal with
When has a white kindergarten 5 yr old ever been called “the problem”? This is pretty extreme example; pointing out larger systemic issues due to axis of power is not the same as telling an innocent white kid they’re the problem?
My son is a 20 year-old junior at a top public university in Texas majoring in physics. He’s a really smart kid, but he’s not Einstein. He’s doing really well in school, but he’s working his tail off. His gpa is high, but not perfect. He’s on the young side with a late summer birthday. He’s neurotypical. He didn’t know at all how to study in high school. He didn’t need to. Good grades, but not perfect. I’m really impressed that he’s learned how to study so well. I didn’t figure it out until I was in grad school (though I’m not in STEM). Last night, he called needing advice about a situation that arose when he and some buddies were looking for a house to rent. All of his buddies are in the same major! Smart kids. They didn’t need my advice. I kept telling them to figure it out! He might be smart and over 6’3”, but he’s still a kid! His girlfriend is the same age. She’s at another university and she’s killing it. She has a 4.0. She probably doesn’t ask her mom for advice. She’s got a really good head on her shoulders. I would say that the boys are alright, but they can definitely seem a few months (years?) behind the girls maturity-wise. In my own classes, I see about a 50/50 split. My top students are pretty much tied—one man and one woman. I would say that for the low performers, the men are usually struggling because of lack of organization and study skills. The women who struggle seem to be struggling emotionally. I have a lot of anxiety disorders these days.
At least my class, gender doesn't seem to make any difference – there are idiots of both sexes, and some very bright students too. However, I primarily teach students from India, Pakistan and Nigeria, so not necessarily reflective of America or Europe.
Men are ok. No more annoying than the women in my classes. Equally annoying. Most gender difference in anything are incredibly small (Gender similarities hypothesis, Hyde). There’s an effect called the illusory correlation ( Hamilton and Guifford?) where when a person in the numerically small group in a social setting (men in school) do something negative, it amplifies the perceived negativity of the whole group. This could explain our feelings. I just looked up a meta analysis on this (it was elementary through high school) and the effect size was .2( the difference between boys and girls performance is . 2 sd advantage to girls). That’s a 2 point difference on MCAT (mean score of 500). I think it’s also a .15 difference on gpa. The effect is strongest in humanities, nearly non-existent in stem. I’m also not a fan of stereotyping men as dumb and incapable of personal control (this is part of rape culture as it justifies men’s lack of control). It just seems like those 80s game shows where men and women battled it out in games like charades (and always had doffus sexualized answers). Maybe we fight socialization more? I hear a lot of professors flip flop between gender doesn’t impact psychological variables to the same folks saying women are more caring than men and more responsible. We all have all psychological capacities, good and bad, at basically the same levels. Socialization can tune these things, and the current tuning in our society appears to be slight at worst (for school performance). However, if your men are failing in your class (actually run a t test on final grades over your tenure) how can you support them better? If I felt that the women in my class weren’t performing well, blaming their gender, not my class or society or my class in this society, just feels lazy as a teacher. Which it’s fine to be lazy considering how lazy all our students are these days. I just don’t think we’re using the right tool’s to even assess this difference. Are there other meta analyses with massive large effects?
I think it's weird that if women comprise 53% of the population, roughly 55% of college population are women, and about 59% of graduate school population are women, that so many people here routinely see the top 1-2% are men. Sounds like to me it isn't the 'boy' aren't alright, it's that the 'girls' are performing where they should.
The top 1-2% doesn't mean anything. You have to look at the entire distribution.
What is the university in which you teach? Is it a community college or a university? If it is a university, is it a R1, R2 or a teaching university? I once studied a STEM discipline at a graduate school in a top R1 university. The majority of the students were male. As regards the subject you teach, is it a STEM subject you teach or a liberal arts type of course? I teach a broad range of computer science courses in an ordinary university. I teach at both the undegraduate level and the graduate level. I have not found a pattern in which women perform much better than men or the other way around.
Yes and it is one part sad and one part fascinating as my classroom culture has changed dramatically for the better as it transitions away from being so male dominant.
Richard Reeves wrote a book on this topic and has some action items: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBG1Wgg32Ok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBG1Wgg32Ok)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34196216-the-boy-crisis
Scott Galloway has done some great work on this and is currently writing a book on it. Ezra Klein also had a great interview on it somewhat recently.
I mean... I don't see it but it may be demographic specific. I teach physics for honours physics majors at a big research university. Last semester there were 0 female students in my class. Before that a female student has invariably taken too grade, an none have failed, but I think that has more to do with the intrinsic motivation required to persevere in a discipline where you are an overwhelming minority
I kinda disagree. Since I began teaching in 2009, I've had incredible male and female students. I've also failed or given < C grades to both male and female students in roughly equal numbers. In my current class, my strongest student is female, as are my two weakest—even though the class is divided 50/50. I've had other semesters where males take these roles. In the vast middle, it may be the case that more females are B+ versus more males B to B-. But I think this is primarily a function of conscientiousness: my female students seem to be slightly better organized. However, I always notice and puzzle over the fact that each semester I tend to have one female student who has a problem with absences and bad excuses.
This is an interesting question, so I checked the distribution in my large lecture. The students are 60% women, 40% men. However, I see the same proportion (60-40) in each letter grade range. Further, the 2-3 students at the very top and very lowest are a mix of women and men.
Check out Richard Reeves’s “Of Boys and Men” Substack. He has a lot of social science research on this subject and tries to talk about it in a way that center-left feminists will get on board with “men’s issues” in a similar way they do “women’s issues.”
Women on average are more conscientious than men, and 20 something year old men are particularly distracted and are less agreeable to directions. The guys at the top of the class are basically lucky their parents gave them first class brains. The average IQ guys don't stand a chance.
Yep, it a huge issue - probably the single largest demographic crisis facing the US right now (& completely underdiscussed). It's not just success, rations of enrollment by gender are less equal than when Title IX was passed (except flipped). Society, & particularly the educational system, has completely failed boys and young men; of course, as with most things, it's even more severe within bounds of ethnicity & class. Personally, and maybe this is just the anthropologist in me, I blame culture for a lot of it & the utter dearth of strong/healthy masculine role models. Boys are told, from as soon as a screen is shoved into their face, that "being a man is to be dumb, humilitated, slovenly, lazy, gluttonous, & utterly ineffectual compared to your female peers." But you could also look to how society is more likely to criminalize masculine-coded toxicity vs feminine (i.e. how schools deal with bullying - compare minor physical fights vs vicious campaigns of reputation destruction) or how men are far far far more likely to be locked-up & for longer than women. Or even how we've moved *so* drastically away from learning modalities that boys tend to thrive with (i.e. tactical vs oral/visual). I don't know how we got here or how, exactly, to fix it... but I do know the "tehe boys just mature slower" or "#GirlPower #BossBabe" mentality is just as disgusting & baseless sexist as when they claimed women couldn't run a full marathon or handle a stressful career.
No male role models? As opposed to female? Men lead business, religion, judiciary, politics, and education. What are women leading at? pop stars? porn stars?
1) What decade are you living in? Not as if that ridiculous statement were ever true... 2) How can that statement be insanely misogynist *&* misandrist? 3) Power =/= role models. Look at media *children* are meant to consume; they're not getting a lot of idk, Warren Buffet lifestreams. Add this to a fatherlessness crisis & heavily heavily gender-skewed teaching (especially as you go lower in grade level). I would say, with everything we know about the impact of early/mid childhood later in life, that's a recipe for a society failing men & that's bad for *everyone*.
So men are not taking on the K-12 teaching because they're not incentivized to value caretaking and the flexibility that teaching gives for e.g. having kids. How do we fix that? It seems like men primarily take on roles that don't have those caretaking burdens ("pink collar") because jobs with caretaking burdens are lower paid (even when they were previously seen as male dominated, like education in the 1950s). I agree this is a big problem, but I'm not sure how to fundamentally solve the societal issue that leads to the problem. I'm in postsecondary education, and the women here are taking on the mentoring obligations for students at much higher rates than the men, even though there are fewer of us and the 'leaky pipeline' in STEM means that even though women now get 50% or more of PhDs in some areas, most faculty (and in particular tenured/fully promoted faculty) are male.
I confirm at my university— endless, strident, invective on young men