A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something else, I don't know; but gender definitely makes a difference in teaching.
1) A friend of mine once astutely commented that the diagnosis for ADHD was basically "middle class with behaviors which annoy female schoolteachers."
2) Boys tend to challenge authority from teens to early 20's to try and work out their place in the world. Most male teachers just roll with it until they have to make a sarcastic, embarrassing remark which short circuits it (never heckle a teacher or a stand-up comic--they've seen it all before). Female teachers tend to react more strongly. I suspect its a physical thing--boys start getting problematically large for most women about 7th or 8th grade and if, as a female, you don't nip it in the bud hard and fast, you can lose control over the situation.
3) Boys need male role models just as women need female role models.
4) Male teachers don't tend to view approval by their students as something useful or desirable (in the case of approval by the female students--it's downright dangerous). The better female teachers are in the same boat, but there are a LOT of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's approval.
If we stew all that together with an absence of male teachers, I suspect that you have more than enough unconscious bias to account for everything.
The usual explanation tends to be that the outs in progression to university-level education are much more available to young men than women overall, as well as the worst excesses of lost potential (i.e. gang membership and fatalities are disproportionately male).
(2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will, what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real improvement in teaching outcomes.
(4) also demands actual evidence.
> (2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will, what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real improvement in teaching outcomes.
There are two pieces to this. One is physical and one is social.
As for physical: if I'm managing a classroom, I have a lot of authority by virtue of being 6"+, 100bs+ bigger than most of the students. My voice alone is far more powerful than that of a woman. In addition, I can embarrass or insult a troublemaker without much fear of physical repercussion. This is really huge as it gives me a lot of graded options that a woman would have to think twice about. And, at bottom, the students have to wonder exactly how much damage I could do to them if they really push me into a corner.
As for social: my personal experience is that a lot of female teachers want compliance (personal control dynamic) while male teachers can function as long as there is no interference (group outcome dynamic). A good example of this was an exchange between my parents:
<female> "I want them to quit chewing tobacco in my class" (Note: personal control dynamic).
<male> "Well, you're not going to get that without throwing somebody out of class every day. Are you willing to disrupt your class for that?"
<female> "Not really."
<male> "Okay, so presumably you could ignore it if they don't spit in the back of the class (group outcome dynamic)?"
<female> "I guess, but ..."
<male> "Fine. That's achievable by telling them: "If you're man enough to chew, you're man enough to swallow it (Note: peer embarrassment). If I see any on the floor, all the people I see chewing are cleaning it." Now they'll police each other, and you'll only occasionally have to send one to the office."
> there are a LOT of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's approval.
Go teach at a school. There are always quite a few women who want to be "buds" with the students. I don't really see this among the men except in the genuinely dangerous cases.
This was middle school, so maybe the effect was exaggerated, but he could stop fights like no other.
To your point about trying to gain the approval of students, the dynamic definitely makes a big difference. Teachers that tried to be the 'fun' teacher were taken advantage of time and time again. I wish this wasn't the case, but an authoritarian role was the best way to provide consistency, stability, and true opportunity for learning in these types of classrooms.
Your parent post never argued that it was voluntary, but contemplated if it would be perceived to be voluntary sexism if the genders were reveresed.
We need more female teachers -> "Why? Is teaching a female job? Fucking sexist!"
We need more male teachers -> "Why? Are female teachers not good enough? Fucking sexist!"
Lose-lose scenario. Therefore you can't "win".
Women in tech is important. Minority representation is important. And yes positive white male role models for little suburban straight white American boys is important.
Which is hardly surprising.
For example in 2010 in the Netherlands (from http://barrolee.com/) 45% of women aged 30-34 have some tertiary education and 31% have completed tertiary education (31 / 45 = 69%) whereas the male statistics are 39% and 25% (25 / 39 = 64%). This is then offset by women working fewer hours per week (from Eurostat): in the Netherlands men average only 35 hours per week, and women only 25. Dutch working hours are a little extreme, but the general trend is worldwide.
You are right. I saw this show on CNN a few days ago and it was sad how these people have to re-learn basic things. http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/21/us/prison-reform-overview/
To give a practical example – as an Asian male who is not that good at coding, if I ask someone to explain some code to me, I am met with way less enthusiasm than if a female coder asks the same question. On the other hand, the guy giving the talk at the event has already written 10 libraries used by thousands of users, and codes kernel exploits in his spare time. He is already at a high position in life (in geek terms anyway), and tells me, "Hey, you have male privilege and weren't told to not code at elementary school. So we're going to focus on helping women more at this event."
I wonder how we can solve this conundrum and give disadvantaged women at the top, and disadvantaged men at the bottom access to opportunities. One thing that would definitely lead to progress (in my opinion) is a recognition and broader understanding that "male privilege" is often (but not always) confined to the top 1-2% of males in a given broad category. The rest of us often suffer the same impostor syndrome, rejection, and nervousness, regardless of our gender.
Kindergarten activities and society's ideas of self discipline aren't really the conditions human life evolved under. Maybe fighting and looking for action/excitement are the same qualities that make boys successful later (if it doesn't kill or otherwise ruin them first).
Here is my theory (after hours of watching the discovery channel). You don't need many males biologically speaking. So for males, it's do or die from day one. Mostly it's die, but there are a few winners that pass their genes on. Women, as long as they are fertile, don't necessarily enter the same competition... they are the prizes.
Of course civilization doesn't work very well with all the males running around trying to kill each other and breed all the women, so we have laws and religions and kindergartens and diversity training classes. Which kind of puts males (and females maybe to an extent) in a biologically uncomfortable position. Those that succeed in this unnatural environment are those that channel their natural impulses into the pathways society has set up. The poor disadvantaged souls that aren't ready for kindergarten and wind up in prison for violent crimes? Well... they might have been leading the pack 20,000 years ago.
EDIT: To expand - it is useless to speculate on psychology in an evolutionary context, because we have precisely 0 observation supported models of what anything was like many thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of evidence that a lot of modern narrative was constructed to suit the current gender roles.
For example, "hunter-gatherer" is a complete misnomer. It should "gatherer-hunter". Because evidence shows that 80-90% of early nutrition was likely gathered by the tribe, and that hunting was exceptionally infrequent and probably a huge waste of resources the majority of time it was engaged in.
Is there any evidence that this diet is nutritionally optimal?
If we don't have any long-term-supported models of what nutrition was like during the bulk of our evolution, then there can be no proof that humans can optimally function on whatever diets historically existed. There's pretty solid evidence that nutritional deprivation stunts both physical and mental development. There's also an overall trend towards higher IQ which has likely coincided with caloric and micronutrient satiation.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that "archaic" can be substituted by "better than". in the past, people spent an awful lot of their lives deprived of developmental needs, and humanity is clearly trending upwards as these needs (nutritional and otherwise) are addressed. Other factors include the elimination of contaminants like environmental lead.
No, it is just wildly abused. Take all the arm chair physicists running around talking about spooky interaction. Same problem, except misunderstand and misusing the principle of spooky interaction doesn't lend itself well to issues that have nearly as much emotional involvement.
Psychology as a whole has a problem of being used by armchair psychologists and applied to all sorts of issues in society and things like chemistry and physics does not. Evolutionary psychology has an even greater problem with it, but this is an issue with how society consume science, not with the science that is consumed.
Really? I thought that anthropologists studied remote tribe in e.g. the Amazon basin in order to gather exactly this type of data?
They also tend to defy most evopsyche gender stereotyping anyway because they're totally different cultures with wildly different understandings of things.
All of psychology is pseudo-science. I mean, two sigma. I can't even...
But don't worry. In the recent years we've seen that apparently 90% of medical research from last few decades is likely bullshit too.
Our nation is also infamous for lacking ambition and fostering perverce incentives. I think all of these things are connected. Wittgenstein would probably agree.
I do understand some of the legitimate reasons for this: women are at higher risk to be raped and experience more medical issues related to homelessness. But this only accounts for some of the disparity.
Part of the issue here is that there's a belief that adult males should be able to support themselves. This is evident in the programs that do serve men: while homeless programs that target women provide food, shelter, medical care, and childcare, the few homeless programs which target men almost universally focus on helping homeless men get jobs. Men do experience privilege in employment when they're actually employed, but this idea is inapplicable to the homeless. Most homeless people are mentally ill, and a mentally ill man is no more employable than a mentally ill woman.
in sf finding a shelter for children is disgustingly difficult and, as i finally concluded, impossible on weekends
i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs' about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing ire
programs to help the homeless are flawed, i know it first hand, but complaining about someone else's idea of a solution does the least possible to help
if you want a shelter organised under your own incentives i'd suggest starting your own
it's an asshole thing to say but look at the landscape of shelters
currently we have overcrowded, underfunded understaffed solutions:
some universal, few women only, few men only
how do we remove the gender bias?
bulk the universal with the necessary staff that administer the specific needs of the gender exclusive shelters
but the universal shelters are already overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed so to ask more of them would only aggravate the issues further
so we need more shelters, and to have more people willing to open and operate a shelter, and some people get the will to do so by focusing their attention on a specific group, in this case gender based
why is there gender bias in shelters? i'd argue because the people who are willing to put in the work choose to create an environment for the gender bias
should we regulate out the bias with legislation forbidding discrimination based on gender? in the current landscape i only see that harming the issues because then those that have the personal will to run a gender biased shelter will lose their incentive and simply do something else, limiting the number of shelters available to share in the solution
instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out proactively
It's not a conflation, it's acknowledging what I believe to be a causal relation. If I'm correct, changing the beliefs will help fix the issue.
> instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out proactively
Yes. The solution to disparity is enough abundance that it doesn't matter.
..acknowledging what I believe to be a causal
relation. If I'm correct..
I was there, I just pretended like more education doesn't worth it that much (not on US btw).
But in terms of genetics the female upside is limited by the very high costs of child bearing & the limited number of children they can physically have. The male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can have sex with.
1 / 200 men are apparently descended from Genghis Khan! This feat would simply be impossible for any woman of that era.
Having many low investments into offspring can be effective, but it is also risky. The more champion based a race is (one male per many females), the more energy is going to be spent on competition. The offspring will also have to depend solely on the mother, since each child is just one of many from a single male and has thus less individual investment value.
The alternative strategy is to focus on a smaller number of children, making sure that that the reproductive investment has a higher chance to be successful. Children gets the value of having two parents that are invested in the offspring, but there are issues of "cheating" (an observed behavior in many animals).
Of course, I am only describing male strategy here and naturally it can not exist in a vacuum. Female strategy often has higher initial cost, but it does not dictate the outcome. In the case of humans also, the observed strategy in both sexes is normally said to be a mix strategy, so it is far more complex than just saying that the male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can have sex with.
Non-humans do not I think enter into the discussion, and a strategy doesn't have to be universal to have a big enough effect on our psychology to be worth worrying about at the level of education policy.
Risk behavior is complex concept, goes well beyond reproductive strategies. Behavior is significant more effected by culture than genes, and culture is effected by gender identification rather than sex.
Would you be surprised if transgenders has a identical risk taking behavior in relation to the gender which they identify themselves as? Would you be surprised if sexual presence has no impact at all? In both cases it would strongly imply that reproductive strategy has no impact on risk taking behavior.
Some explanation for the claimed propensity of men taking higher risk would be that being successful is more rewarded socially for men then women, while averageness and failure is generally socially more for men than women. Finding root causes for that social pressure is harder, but my guess is that it has both biological reasons and historical ones.
Even if so, I'm not sure if he would actually be an example of the low-investment male mating strategy. He was the ruler of a large empire, so he would be able to invest in his children. Even those who weren't recognized would have advantages from being rumored to be his offspring.
Groups which allow the low-investment strategy are outcompeted because they don't incentivize any males to invest in the group, while the Mongol empire had plenty of conquered people available to the Mongol men who were excluded by elites' polygamy.
Civilization is very recent in human history, and without civilization you can't have Genghis Kahn so I don't see how he is relevant.
I feel like people used to say God made people a certain way. Now that I basically only interact with nerds, they just replace God with evolution. I'd prefer some citations, since all I hear are the same assumptions.
Part of this issue I feel is, as mentioned in the article, is that boys are taught from the young age to take care of their problems, which leads to more isolation. Another important reason I feel is the rising amount of "girls-only" opportunities that systematically make boys feel inadequate and since they are not able to participate for whatever reason (e.g. "its only for girls") they continue to lag behind. I even have a perfect example of this, my city has a "Girls Learning Code" meetup / lecture series that while advertises being gender neutral is clearly not so, the question is how many meetups are there that are for boys, e.g. "Boys Learning Code" (creating these would be classified under men 's rights activism and therefore dismissed). My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds. There has also been a decline in male bonding occurring at the young age, which I (and some academics) believe is very important to male development over all. This is caused by the fact that traditionally boys-only facilities (in this specific example Scouts Canada) have been pressured into accepting girls, which prohibits boys from...essentially being boys. Girl Guides of Canada received no such pressure. Coming back to the issue of masculinity, even though many young adults might have good enough grades to get into university they might not be high enough to go into fields that wouldn't cause strange questions and don't have stigma around them if you're male (I'm talking about fields such as Medicine, Law, Engineering, Computer Science), they might have the grades to get into Arts, specifically psychology, nursing and things such as women studies, all of which have a very high female to male ratio (and are generally considered a "girls" field) making boys pursue other interests (such as not going to university) instead for the fears of unsexing themselves.
(Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America? I've immigrated from an Eastern-Block country as a teenager to NA and I've never seen these problems because communism required that all members of the society do essentially the same jobs, that is why would you sacrifice half of the working populace, so you have women in high power positions, police, factories, the military, a lot of girls even take mathematics and computational sciences, sure there were problems but not at this scale (my grandmother was a Chemist and my mother was a corporal in the Defense Ministry and also studied thermal physics in University); I've never even imagined it was an issue elsewhere in the world until after I moved to Canada)
The majority of women drop out of the running for STEM jobs before they even go to college - something is persuading them at the primary school level to avoid tech related fields. It's the biggest reason that the idea of sexism in the workplace pushing women out of IT is absurd - because they never got there in the first place. They never even got to the college classes in the first place. Even high school vocational programs focusing on tech have girls wildly unrepresented.
And it's the exact same reason that organizations like Girls Who Code is extremely important. It's the same reason that an organization like Boys Who Teach/Nurse/Other female dominated profession would be a godsend for evening out the gender balance in those fields.
Should there be code/stem programs for boys? Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with programs that exists primarily for outreach to a gender that is underrepresented in that field? Absolutely not.
The problem in this country is that we have identity politics, which helped to address real discrimination, but all too often is misused as a tool to obtain power and support from vocal special interest groups.
Perhaps most disturbingly is the rise of the professional identity politician/professor/activist complex, where students are brought in to universities majoring in "Women's Studies", with zero job prospects when they graduate except for teaching more classes or becoming an activist. Suddenly, you have entire groups of people who, although they won't admit it, NEED the problem they are claiming to fight to exist forever if they want an income.
The end result is a constant search for new manifestations of oppression of their chosen group, real or perceived. All too often, its perceived, and even when it's real, these folks have solutions which do nothing more than create new inequalities.
It appears that there are only ~2.5k genders studies majors matriculating at any given year [1]. I doubt that's pushing the needle appreciably in terms identity politics. IMO I'd look more too the cognitive dissonance between the gap in achievement of the wealthy vs poor and the taboo in talking about any sort of income inequality in this country as a more potent driver to the under-directed efforts to impose a slanted "equality" in the name of social good.
Then I read Judith Butlers Gender Trouble to about halfway. It's a book that's canonical in womens studies these days. Holy shit it reads like political manifesto, with sciency stuff only to mask it little bit.
This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really skewed edge cases.
>Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America...
I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do.
I disagree there is a binary choice. Educational system in Finland was intended to address the inequality, but in the effect it actually helped the performance.
On the other hand, the U.S. with No Child Left Behind policy failed, mostly because it didn't address the inequality.
I think there are two things conflated here: power and choice. We should strive for equality in power, but still give people the choice. If you have the choice, then no one puts you below. I think the fallacy here is that people actually don't need huge resources to become successful, only modest ones. So you can distribute resources equally and yet the best people won't be topped out.
Contrary to popular opinion, lack of possibility to be rich wasn't the biggest obstacle in Eastern European countries. The biggest obstacle was existing bureaucracy (which actually had more power than normal people, it just wasn't expressed in money). Good innovators don't need financial incentives; they need (at least modest) access to resources and freedom. For example, this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle
Do you know this because somebody tried to do it, or are you assuming this? The use of 'would be' sounds like the latter. If so, why don't you try?
In 1910 your choised were playing capture the flag with boys in scout meeting. Or stay at home with mom and help her. What are you going to do?
This used to be movement that helped poor boys more than any other single thing. Boys have not changed, scouting has.
I grew up in an impoverished, white rural community, and the boys without fathers go nuts. It's a common pattern that doesn't even call for data. Everyone just knows it.
My wife's father died when she was young, and her mother simply collected social security checks and lapsed into depression. Her sister and her did alright. Both of her brothers dropped out of high school, one of them committed suicide, and the other died at 21 of a medical condition while attempting to earn a GED and working for $8/hour at a gas station. Both were in and out of jail from their teen years and up.
I wouldn't want them handling any male issues. In the 2010 study of intimate partner violence, they specifically used a definition of rape that turned most male rape into contact sexual assault and not rape.
Then in their summary, they focused on rape and non-contact sexual assault. Anyone doing a light reading would have assumed from the study that males did not experience much sexual violence.
Personal anecdote: my experience has been this misunderstanding is the more common than not among those who have done a light reading of the study.
Is the discussion so infected that we can't simply share a goal that every person should be equal in worth, be able to pursue their passion in life, and to have liberty. If we can't agree to such simple goals, then how can we ever have progress beyond political lines than just shout at each other, forever arguing and never fixing anything for the better.
I think the point was just that if we don't help these boys - then they are more likely to fall into patterns of crime and violence - which is a cost everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?
Likewise there's a very big difference in helping children because we want to maximise their potential and it being the right thing to do, versus helping them because they're effectively holding society hostage by otherwise becoming criminals later in life. You're probably not going to put your best into helping a group you feel holds you hostage and certain solutions, like guaranteed employment in a physically draining but low paying job, might eliminate the threat for society while wasting the potential of the kids involved.
There is a legitimate increase in danger in some areas, but people often view it as victim blaming. The line between 'do this and you'll have a better chance of being safe' and 'if you had done this, you would have had a better chance of having been safe' can be fine.
There are also those who see such advice as misplaced (the whole don't teach people how to avoid X, teach other people to not do X).
Not saying I agree or disagree with either view point, only hypothesizing there could be a common trend of thought underlying the issues some are taking with the original post.
You don't see a problem with phrasing equality in that way?
To avoid gender, consider an example which uses race instead.
>It would help humanity to also give enough focus on black child development so that we could save their future, avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails.
I've only switched one word, and while some may say it is not offensive, I could clearly foresee some people finding the underlying tone as offensive.
For an example of a difference which is sexist, imagine someone saying women are less fit for critical roles because they are more emotional, when in fact it is that our society works to repress male expression of emotions and both men and women are, at the core, emotional entities.