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Comment by jeb | Hacker News Reader

The article seems neutral till the last lines:

The developing gender gap in the gifted programs of New York City does not signal that girls are smarter than boys. Rather, it exemplifies how well-intentioned government officials and educators can disregard boys’ needs and abilities and unwittingly adopt policies detrimental to boys’ well-being. It is a small part of the long story of how American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation’s schools.

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Unlike Switzerland, the American Enterprise Institute isn't exactly known for being a bastion of neutrality. The author's other cause celebre is that people should stop whining about women being underrepresented in math and the hard sciences. Her AEI profile (http://www.aei.org/scholar/56) informs us that she is "preparing to write a book on the lost history of conservative feminism." As a non-white, non-male physics PhD, I can't wait to read that one.

Zing. I remember reading/watching studies of classroom settings a few years ago where teachers were unconsciously giving boys a better learning experience. It was eye opening. I thought there was a fairly established result in gender bias studies of education -- boys get more opportunities, more teacher interaction, and the system encourages them more. Maybe this is more fair?

When was that, exactly? Things have changed, from top to bottom. Everything seems to be totally restructured for girls. The much-better-examined question is why females are getting more bachelor's degrees then males in college, by a percentage that if it were any other group would be prima facie proof of widespread discrimination. http://iserp.columbia.edu/news/articles/female-advantage-col... says 2004 saw 58% female graduation, and the disparity's trend is up, not down.

We need to wipe out the idea that education is somehow biased towards males now, and fast. The playing field has gone from balanced to stacked in favor of females and it's still being tipped yet further in that direction.

("Why does it matter?" It is, as the article says, fairly well established that variance in male intelligence is larger than female intelligence. It is also fairly well established that progress is made in society in a very unbalanced manner, where most progress is made by the outliers in skill. Throwing away the males because the education system labels the usual male child learning styles pathological because they can't be properly corralled is not the path to a society able to compete on the global stage.)

As a male, and father of males, I can honestly say that if any male feels like they are being systematically being discriminated against in school, they need to "man up".

Even if there is some gender bias in schools, everything else in society is so male-centric that the scale still way tips toward male.

Everything else?

How about child-rearing / anything to do with children? Males are pretty often feared as being pedophiles if they work with kids.

Fair. There are some places where men have a tougher time. Daycare provider is one. Figure skating and porn star are probably some others. But all up, it's still not even close.

http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/employment/jobpat-eeo1/2...

With a couple significant outliers (most in men's favor, but not all), it's actually pretty close. Though I'm not sure what "professionals" relates to.

It's really not very close. The "outliers" are things like "execute" where men dominate more than 2:1. The only places where women have more of are clerical and sales positions.

And really the real question, if you're interested in workforce data is money. There's a huge gap between men and women: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/paygapgr...

Now of course the standard reply is "they work different jobs". And that's true. Jobs men work tend to pay more. Why is that? Who knows. And if you look at the historic pay of fields like psychology, once dominated by men, it used to pay very well. As women began to play a large role in the field, pay dropped. Did men leave because pay drop or did pay drop because men left? No one knows.

But I still believe my fundamental point. If you're a man and you're not doing as well as you like and it's because you think women have done you in, I just personally have a low opinion of you. Not that you'd care about my opinion, but that's just my take. And I'll raise my kids, to the best of my ability, to not believe that they can't get a fair shot in life because women run the show.

And a lot of those top-level ones are rather entrenched by owners of the businesses & their family connections, which are often dominated by male-only thinking. The top tiers are often a very insular world all its own, it's no surprise they're changing so very slowly. Sad, but not surprising.

Pay-gaps measuring across the board are rather meaningless, aside from showing a cultural bias for hiring. There's definitely a significant pay gap, but a lot of articles like that one take male-income / num-males and compare it to female-income / num-females. More point-by-point comparisons show a smaller gap per-job (I usually see 5%, sometimes 10%. Significant, but not 25% significant like the article lists). For psychiatry in particular, it's also become an over-crowded field; to compete, and to get the average-joe on their bill, the average-joe psychiatrist must lower their cost.

edit: as linked by tokenadult, I point this out for consideration of the results, but not as an explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Berkeley_se...

I'm not discounting the entire thing by any means, most of the purpose in the comment is because the issues around child-care are utterly ridiculous. I've run across a fair number of men who have run flat against (spiked) brick walls in their attempts, followed by rather massive repercussions for simply trying to be single fathers (lost jobs, criminal investigations (finding nothing), near-eviction from their community, etc). I've not heard of parallel situations for females as bad as many of them have encountered, in relatively recent years. Going more years back, certainly, things were blatantly downright misogynistic in many areas.

As to the last paragraph, that's a better way of putting it than your original post. I overall agree :)

Regaring child-care. A similiar, if not far worse, example that comes to mind for me is domestic abuse. When I was in college I rode with the domestic abuse team for our local police department (many police stations have programs for this, if you're interested).

I was shocked by (a) how much domestic abuse happens, (b) how violent it is, and (c) how much leeway the men get. Officers routinely push the women to not press charges, because it will "likely escalate the situation" or frankly, "we probably can't do anything until he kills you or worse, and that doesn't benefit you does it?".

And the crazy thing is that in the US domestic abuse is about as good as it gets worldwide. In other countries men can kill their wives if they have affairs or even get raped. And if you count the number of victims of sexual violence in this country, women far outnumber men.

There are two sides to the abuse issue as well, though. There's definitely that mindset among a lot of people, more than enough in policing positions to make it true, and it's disgusting.

There is, however, a massive selection bias in the stats for abuse in particular. Where men are abused, they're either congratulated (if sexually) or told to "man up" (not selected specifically because you used it, but because it's the phrase). There's a lot of evidence (and growing) that it's far more common than is admitted, though I'm not at all implying it's as much as women get abused.

It's another of those situations where, instead of support, men live with it or are ridiculed where women are protected (lies by should-be-protectors aside). If you look at it with a bit of history in mind, it's pretty obvious why this exists: men were the only ones with any real power and wouldn't allow abuse, and they were more unchecked in their own abusing.

I don't disagree about the underrepresentation. I know in prison populations it is relatively common. And while its underrepresented in day to day life, I don't think it budges the needle much. While I saw some domestic abuse by men, it wasn't common (I saw about twice as many calls from a male partner in a gay relationship than men in straight relationships... both were really rare).

But I think this argument is symbolic of the debate. You think men don't get the support they need by society for sexual abuse and that women are protected. Whereas I think women are abused more frequently, and the protection mechanisms are controlled by men.

My sympathies rest with all victims, but I just have trouble sympathizing with men as a group.

I'm arguing for support for victims, and that people should quit separating them by sex / race / etc once they're identified as such. The greater the separation, the more likely we'll get "separate but equal", which never is, instead of progress. Someone who needs support is someone who needs support, what else really matters? If the mindset were closer to this, people who needed help would get it, real statistical data could be extracted, and systemic problems exposed instead of everyone (rightfully) doubting any study that goes against what they currently think because there's so much wiggle room.

edit: but as I've said elsewhere, I'm an idealist, and I recognize that such a thing isn't ever going to actually happen to total equality. I just think it's something which should be aimed for, explicitly, instead of using the "but there aren't as many <group X>es with <problem Y>" ethical crutch. Especially for something like this, where the only wall is purely a cultural one, not one where there isn't enough funding to do more.

Exactly at which age will you tell your children that they are getting an imbalanced education and that if they want it, they need to "man up"? 13? 14? 18? What happens to them before then?

I really do not understand why you appear to be putting the onus for getting good, even-handed education on the children and not the system.

I think you misunderstood my point. I don't think they're getting an imbalanced education. And if they do think that, it's not because they are. But it's because they're whiners or losers.

A lot of people get imbalanced education. Blacks do. Overweight kids probably. Ugly kids probably even do. Men don't, at least not that I've ever seen. I think it's literally 10x more likely that you get discriminated against because you listen to Lady Gaga than because you're male.

I'm still hung up on exactly how this gender bias (in either direction) actually manifests itself in the classroom.

The derivative with respect to x of x^2 is 2x regardless of what gender you are. The Americans won the Revolutionary war regardless of what gender you are.

The example in the article is that one gives tests which measure a combination of intelligence and the ability to sit still for long periods.

Since young girls have a greater ability to sit still than young boys, they score higher.

None of the things you say that are well established are actually so. Even things like intelligence are still widely debated (the actual definition, much less distribution of it). And societal progress has everything to do with moving the center mass -- not with outliers. But I don't claim that this to be well established.

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