Examining the Educational Gender Gap in US [pdf]

watson.brown.edu

1 point·jcbeard··2 comments

After the very old "war on boys in education" post. Read up on the issue. It's quite scary for me since the latest research suggests (and correlates roughly with my observations from my son's schooling) that the problem insinuated by the earlier atlantic posting (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-...) is quite real....seems most of the latest research centers around stereotypes. Hoping the more recent article (and data focus) will spark a bit more debate around the issues. I'm especially interested in the connections between education, SES status, and social mobility.

An alternative, but not necessarily correct, explanation for the divergence of graduation rates is that males have better access to valuable alternatives to education [or less strongly, that males have access to such alternatives to education earlier].

Outliers in the realm of athletics are obvious, e.g. the professional baseball draft including high school aged players. More mundane alternatives may exist in trades where a preponderance of the workforce has traditionally been male such as those in the construction industry.

On the converse side of this speculation is that entry level positions such as customer service representatives have increasingly required a college degree and hand in hand with the multi-generational trend of females entering the formal workforce, the positions that are more likely to be available are more likely to require a college degree.

The data is neutral. Maybe it's about educational impediments. Maybe it's about employment impediments. Maybe it's both. Maybe it's neither.

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