Why are boys academically underperforming? [audio]
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-gi...
Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more. In general somehow reading has seemed to grow more gendered over time; if you go into the average chain bookstore its apparent that its heavily targeted towards women, and something like Amazon's free Prime reads are often almost entirely women-targeted genre selections.
Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts.
Jon Scieszka, a kids author, noticed this over fifteen years ago and started guys read, a website trying to encourage boys to do so and raise awareness about it. But it seems to have stalled, and I don't hear a lot of talk about the feminization of reading.
I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away. There's always been cultural resistance against "book-larning" but its weird how gendered reading itself has become lately.
How often do school libraries have things boys want to read? In high school, even among those who did read, very few of us ever used the library because it mostly had fantasy novels, fiction, etc. My friend group wanted to read about history and economics, topics not really covered.
Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all? We'd think it absurd right? But for some reason the idea men shun fiction is seemed as a truism. And if people would say "oh boys are too energetic, they can't sit still for a movie" we'd think they are nuts.
I'm not sure how it happened. I wish someone would research how this idea came into dominance
I couldn't find any research on this, but it would not surprise me if viewership skewed towards men for documentary.
From personal experience, Rick Riordan's series had similar interest levels between girls and boys but later series (Hunger Games, House of Night, Fault in Our Stars) did skew towards girls. My reading also fell off as I got older so I'm sure I wasn't as in touch with what my peers were reading.
However, the massive bulk of the market ends up being targeted towards women. It's something where you'd need to actually look on shelves for, as there's a weird dynamic where in female-dominated markets or places, you have male "figurehead" things while the rest of the market is dominated by and caters to women.
I noticed this in Christian fiction ironically. You will see a big author like Ted Dekker doing his spiritual action adventure/fantasy/mild horror for a wide audience, but the huge bulk of the books are historical/amish/mystery romance aimed at women, to the point where no male alternatives exist. Even the small religious science fiction market is female dominated soft romantic sf.
In this case it's milking established demographics, as the religion itself has a mild demographics issue (not enough men.) But go look at a young adult shelf sometime; even superhero books feature women protagonists and are targeted to them now.
Remember that "intelligence" is tied to success on standardized tests, at least in the view of educational administration, because that is the alpha and omega of getting funding and keeping your job.
Have to disagree; the sort of reading discussed in that study isn't conducive to positive educational outcomes, but rather is more of a social activity. (Yeah, I know reading is often thought of as a solitary activity, but reading fictional narratives may be better understood as desynchronized socialization.)
Don't get me wrong, children can enjoy an educational advantage from pleasure-reading early on, as an introduction to how to read. But after that, pleasure-reading is a largely wasteful activity, at least in terms of educational advancement.
Further advancement in reading may come from learning to read expanded English -- including [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), $\mathrm{\TeX}$, `(string)"source code"`, M+A+T+H, technical texts, diagrams, schematics, etc. -- but it's unlikely that reading young-adult narratives provides the reader with any significant advantages. In fact, I suspect that it's likely to correlate with negative educational outcomes.
A shot in the dark guess could be that the attention industry (and the ad industry in general) is better at targeting boys grabbing them away from both homework and at home reading at a greater scale then the other genders.
He states that there are Kind Learning Environments. These are places like golf, chess, or classical piano. Here, the feedback is quick, the goals are clear, and relative ranking is knowable. To excel in these environments, it is all about drill-and-kill. Repetition and stick-hours are the name of the game.
This is in contrast to Unkind Learning Environments. These are places like tennis, business, or jazz. In the unkind world feedback is harder to come by, goals are unclear, and relative ranking is often not knowable. To excel in an unkind environment, Epstein states that you have to be an information grazer. Getting as many viewpoints and mental schemas as possible is the best way forward in an uncertain world.
Epstein's book goes much more into depth on this and has many very memorable examples. It's on Bill Gate's best books of 2020 list, despite being published in 2019.
So, I think that having more reading of any sort is then better for unkind environments, as it is a method of information grazing. Even terse dime-novels will often expose you to new ways of thinking, a new word, or a new idea. Though not the best method of information grazing (whatever that may be), it matters what boys replace it with, if anything. If they replace it with the kind learning environments of CoD or WorldofTanks, then that is not as good. If they replace it with foreign films and TV, that may be just as good.
I would think that any person that reads broadly should be better at business or other unkind learning environments, all other things being equal. Unfortunately, at least in most of the world's business environments I know of, when it comes to gender all other things are very much not equal.
Unfortunately it will be another 30 years before the 'girls are disadvantaged in education' trope dies, but bad ideas like phlogestion and trickle down economics take a long time to die.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
"I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school"
It also shows up in more anecdotal stories like this one, in which a teacher banned boys from playing with Lego whilst letting girls do it:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/31/kindergarten-teache...
The problem is one of feminism. It's not that boys have somehow inexplicably got dumber over the past decades, it's that women have become radicalised and collectively concluded that it's OK to express explicit biases towards other women on the basis of gender, because progress.
Disagree. If you love to read fictions, doesn't help you at all to read tech books unless you're in it.
My hunch is, it is related with puberty. Biologically boys hit puberty late while that time girls are already on the way being matured. So it could be more about distractions during puberty. (But I am not expert in this field, need proper data to validate), May be it will be good to increasge age criteria for boys to attend school like marriage.
Another related point is, incentives in puberty. Simple thing like being good in sports make you popular in crowd. So it is more important to have proper incentives for boys for studies.
> Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more
Disagree. Many boys are in comics, manga, sci-fi reading than classic and fictions. In my experience, where academic curriculum is more focused on memorization boys trail behind. But they do good in competative exams where analytical questions play big role.
> Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts
This is somewhat true, specifically in states. One of the reason behind it is, marketing agencies started to target teen-age girl group heavily for whatever reasons recently.
I work in tech where the gender disparity between men and women is discussed very often -- but I don't see these conversations taking place amongst teachers, most especially for earlier primary education which is more female than male.
Maybe there is a bias here or maybe women teachers have teaching styles that resonate with female students more. It definitely needs more attention.
Before him I didn't care about math at all. I only learn when it's a guy teaching me for some reason. I can't focus on a woman if she's teaching, I get bored and started thinking about what to app to make.
But not every guy teacher was the one I could focus on. He was the guy with the deepest voice, for some reason it didn't let my attention drift away.
Before that, I sucked in Chemistry, until some guy taught me. I don't know how that worked but did.
Then some guy taught me physics but his voice wasn't manly, and I started sucking at physics after that.
So I'd say as a guy, I was almost always better taught by men. Women (young or middle aged) bored me away from the subject. And that used to reflect in the batch performance for almost every guy.
Girls weren't impacted by it at all. They got good grades either ways man or woman.
I realize now how horrible it all sounds, but trust me I tried.
source: https://www.tes.com/news/could-handwriting-bias-write-exam-c...
Women in general tend to be more compliant, which becomes an issue later in life when standing up for oneself in the workplace (e.g. getting promotions and pay raises), but it's an advantage in the classroom. Men need to be shown the value of something before they will learn it. This can be a problem as a lot of school lessons have no immediate practical value.
Because it doesn't fit the SJW narrative.
UNESCO [1], World Bank [2], Unicef [3] have specific goal programs here.
[1] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/priority-areas...
- Why only black lives matters, what about white people, asians and many others? Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter' ?
- Why only 'lets girls to get code', what about boys and trans ? Why do we scare to say 'lets get everyone to code' ?
- Why do countries identify themselves with a single religion ? Why can't we respect the all religions ?
In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge. People are so scared to say right things and get shunned publicly. We should not create our policies based on phobias, stigmas and to allur particular votebank, but for universal integration.
Let's have first right vision. It needs a real courage to say the right things and more to do the same.
I honestly don’t see this as a problem. So what if a person gets a little privilege just because they belong in a minority? What bothers me is the more common case of privileged person taking advantage of their privilege.
> Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter'?
Because I always hear “all lives matter” said in response to “black lives matter”. To me that sounds like you are discounting my previous statement, as if it’s not entirely sufficient, that black lives matter.
“All lives matter” is something that people also say. e.g. I hear animal rights activists say that all the time. Even the very same people that say “black lives matter” in an anti-racist rally are likely to say “all lives matter” in an pro-immigration rally, pointing to the fact that many immigrants suffer preventable deaths on the migratory routes.
> In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge
Good. If I say something that insults a lot of people I would like to know about it, so that I can know better in the future. I hate to be the one that speaks like an idiot and never gets corrected.
The elephant in the room is that Boys’ academic underperformance is tied to class, and thus resolving the issue has gone nowhere, because there’s no such thing as class and because the responsibility for all under-achievement therefore lies with the individual.
Can you explain this?
This one suggests (socioeconomic) class is a factor in lower performing boys' performance. This is true: at least in the US, boys' academic performance is more affected by socioeconomic class than girls' (though both are very much so).
balls187 says that the way boys' and girls' academic performance evolves vs. age is different. This is also true.
Edited to add: please also see the work from David Figlio et al. mentioned in Krona’s comment below. That’s an interesting study design that tries to demonstrate that boys in aggregate need higher quality schooling to achieve the same level of performance as girls in aggregate.
It ends on a note saying that the way to fix is by acknowledging the fact that boys are falling behind, and adjusting our teaching methods and schools' social environments.
Anyone with experience in teaching environments knows girls are way worse at ostracizing successful students.
It’s very interesting to me the claim that boys are quitting because there’s too much competition, because my experience is the complete opposite. The only thing that makes boys quit competing in my experience is either seeing the competition as pointless (“bad boy” attitude) or realizing that the competition is not fair.
A lot of teachers are unaware as to how smart some kids can be. I’ve seen kids swap their names in tests just to validate the hypothesis that their language teacher was assigning grades based on who wrote what (which, having seen their numbers, looks like it was indeed happening).
Prior to puberty, nearly all the top performing students were girls. After puberty, boys were more represented.
The theory I heard was societal pressure in the US was higher on girls to be "liked" and accepted, and that girls felt that doing well in school was counter to that. Girls would stop focusing on performance and ultimately move towards the center of the curve.
Pressure to be liked, and antithetical attitudes towards academic performance also applied to boys as well, but to a lesser degree.
This article from 18 years ago suggests that girls received extra encouragement to overcome the lowered expectations due to their gender.
This isn't "bad parenting" or "overdiagnosis of ADHD" by the way, the brain of a young male develops differently, specifically their pre-frontal cortex (executive function, how to behave/regulate oneself) develops much slower, whereas the motor-neural cortex is overly developed, relative to girls.
Beyond any developmental difference in the sexes, there's culture. Where I taught, the South and West sides of Chicago, any troubled boy was more likely to join a gang, sell drugs, commit violence, etc. These poor boys could be jumped and beaten for living on the wrong street. One student was having anger issues, his cousin got killed, he had latent anger issues which prevented prioritization of school work. Another common issue: his father is gone, he's switching homes constantly, there's no stability to facilitate the slow, incremental progress that is school and learning.
Beyond sheer dangerous problems like the above, I'd say boys channel their effort into sports and gaming more, whereas the girls I taught were more concerned with social circles, popularity, social media, etc. Question, do we think gaming is "better" for mental health than social media? If so, boys may be advantaged, I recall my boy students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic.
There is a change that happens around puberty, when I was in seventh grade I noticed it acutely. Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus to follow the teacher's lesson. It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
Edit: There's a bit of discussion of "overdiagnosis" or "misdiagnosis" of ADHD. This is a complex issue, but I will say I don't think anecdata is constructive here. By blaming bad parenting or video games or candy, we ignore the reams of data which show that many children can not focus and struggle MIGHTILY due to this.
Children with ADHD have less friends, less academic success, more likelihood to abuse drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, cocaine/nicotine (their dopaminergic system is uniquely vulnerable to stimulants). This is a sad trajectory for these kids, and I think we should consider carefully before we blanket accuse the medical system of overdiagnosis or misdiagnosis.
My experience as well. I taught 7th and 6th grade and the 6th graders were especially fascinating as you could see the transition happening throughout the year and for different students.
Right. And instead of changing school to adapt to kids (e.g., less sitting in chairs, more free play), we change kids to adapt to school (e.g., medicate, discipline, hold back).
Our approach is completely backwards.
I think it has to do with scalability; our current education system scales much better within the ridiculous budget constraints education faces (in the US).
Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
The spending efficiency of public schools in US is horrible, and they tend to focus on quantity over quality with teachers, due to a misguided idea of reducing student teacher ratios that Malcolm Gladwell has written about.
This constant excuse repeated everywhere about not enough funding isn't backed up by data.
I spent my entire childhood in public schools. 3/4 of my teachers were lazy shitbags who treated it like a govt job. The other 1/4 were punished every time they broke the mold in any way to fix things.
The day public schools realize that their primary role is educating kids OVER providing jobs to as many teachers union members as possible, we can start fixing them.
My wife teaches English at a pubic school on the other end. Their student body is mostly minorities. The library contains only books written by dead white men which the students are inherently mistrustful of. They can't afford new novels, so the teachers print excerpts at home and bring them to class. In 2017 they blew their printing budget. In 2018 and 2019 we printed more than 35k pages at home because the school couldn't afford more toner. In 2021 they'll be in the black re: toner again, so my home printer will get a break until they blow the budget again. Public schools are funded based on property taxes of the surrounding neighborhoods. Some of them have money to burn, others can't afford books.
My wife's school has the best teachers in town. Nobody goes into teaching for the money, and nobody teaches as a school like hers because they think it's gonna be an easy job--those sorts gravitate to the schools with money to burn and students that aren't also homeless.
More important than fixing the absolute amount of funding that public schools have is fixing the way it's distributed. It should a flat rate per-student, adjusted only for cost of living at a city-by-city granularity, not a neighborhood-by-neighborhood granularity.
Once the public school experience is more equal across the board it will be easier to distinguish the good teachers that lack supplies from the bad teachers with resources to waste.
>Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
NYC public schools are #1; DC isn't in the top ten (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...). Baltimore is #3, though, and four DC suburbs are also in the top ten, all no doubt offering much better education than the Baltimore (or DC) schools.
>My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
Private schools pay teachers less money than public schools, too.
- Cost more money for the state - Cost more time to the teacher (its an issue since early grade teachers are already swamped) - is in "testing" since the late 90's at least and is not quite there yet.
So we took another approach, more like germans. Reduced schools hour and add 2x2 hours of learning something else. Woodworking, board game, wird sports, anything the teacher can put in place (often boring stuff tbh, but i heard really good initiatives from friends that stayed in the social "business").
Well, in the end, it costed more money, took more time from the teachers anyway, was poorly implemented all around and was rolled back in some areas. But weirdly, while rural areas often get the short end of the stick when this kind of change rolls out, in this case, this created a lot of social link and learning opportunities (as they got no money, they had to ask parent/grandparents and people living around for help and this often was a success)
If a stranger breaks into your home and kills your kid, the natural response for a lot of people is to kill the person that did it. There are a lot of reasons why we _don't_ allow that in civilized countries. People have to be socialized to reject that natural behavior.
More to school children, they as adults will not be successful if they frequently act impulsively. Adulthood in society is finding a fulfilling career, maintaining healthy relationships, paying your bills on time, and setting fulfilling long term goals for yourself. None of those things are helped by impulsive behavior.
* Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
* I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
I mean... no shit? The point wasn't to compare revenge killing to fidgeting. The point was to illustrate that impulse control is necessary for a civilized society to function.
> Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
It's frankly insulting that you would take the stupidest possible interpretation of my argument, make a counterargument, and claim slam dunk.
How do you think it is that kids become adults? Do you just let kids run wild, controlling none of their impulses, and then they turn 18 and suddenly they're in full control of themselves? That's absolutely laughable.
It's development for a reason: you're _developing_ the kids. They are going to be at a lower level of ability than an adult with regards to impulse control. That's why you start to teach them. Babies can't chew hard food. It's impossible. So you don't give them hard food. It's _NOT_ impossible to teach a kid to control some of their undesirable impulses.
> I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
Uh... wat? No, you can't train _all_ impulsiveness out of anybody. But you can absolutely train people to recognize and mitigate negative impulses.
Almost the very first skill any kid learns is to control the impulse of blurting out when they want to speak in a classroom. They are taught that they should raise their hand and wait to be called on. And lots of parents have to teach their kids that they can't hit other kids.
With respect to how both environments force humans to adapt to the institution, and thereby manifest a perverse socialization, yes. The differences are in magnitude, not direction.
I'm reminded of the flawed "alpha" theory of wolf behavior. Turns out the observed dominance struggles were directly related to being in captivity; this form of "socialization" doesn't emerge in the wild.
I, for one, appreciate not having to worry about going hungry, dying of thirst, freezing to death, or being chased down by a pack of wolves. You need a society to facilitate that. Society doesn't work without social norms. And you wouldn't be on Hacker News speculating about this if not for society.
Also, where are you getting this idea that kids in school are abused?
Boys may have a harder time staying still and paying attention, but that isn't just a school thing. Doing any sort of research for any sort of theoretical learning in life requires those same things. You'll never get to fulfill your every desire in life. Learning the discipline to control yourself now and have fun later is just as important a life skill to learn as any. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Citation, desperately, needed.
The anecdotal evidence available to me from my experiences and my social circle strongly contradicts that.
You may want to reconsider that assumption.
"This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
"At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion.
"The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)"
Agar.io?
I don't agree with this sentiment, there simply wasn't great evidence that ADHD is misdiagnosed, at least when I studied it a few years back.
I also think there is a socialization problem from a fairly young age. Many elementary schools have zero-tolerance on fighting these days, but I've observed many preschool environments where the teachers are fatalistic about boys roughhousing, but will take girls to task about the same behaviors. It's certainly likely that there are biological differences as well, but the current environment seems designed to magnify them.
1: Bipolar, processing disorder, dyslexia
1a. Also, the disorder was MUCH less well known by teachers, parents, and doctors 20-30 years ago, which is resulting in more undiagnosed adults today at ages 50+
2. Multiple comorbidities: This is very true, good point. A person may be anxious, depressed, bipolar, or OCD, and these can share symptoms with ADHD, thus part of the DSM-V diagnosis of ADHD includes ruling out other disorders.
3. Spectra: All mental health disorders exist on a spectrum from "No symptoms" to "Many/All symptoms". There are mild, moderate, and severe diagnoses of ADHD, for instance, and that may warrant different treatment approaches.
Right, this is kind of what I'm talking about. A kid jumping on his chair and screaming might have ADHD, ODD, RAD, PTSD, ASD, &c., or some combination of them (one of the more bizarre stories I have is a kid with dyslexia who would stand up on her desk to get sent to the principle's office to avoid her school work when she couldn't crib off of the kid next to her) . What happens in too many schools is the school psychologist diagnoses them with ADHD and sends them to a psychiatrist.
What happens next depends on the quality of the psychiatrist and the means of the parents. In, what qualitatively seems to be a large minority of the cases (I have no hard data to back this up, just a collection of anecdotes), the psychiatrist does little or no additional screening and prescribes a sequence of medications (Ritalin, then Adderall, ...) until something works or the parents stop bringing their kid in.
Meanwhile the majority of the "primarily inattentive" ADHD kids either fly under the radar, or do so badly academically that they get more generalized interventions involving tutors or assistants who either bug them to stay on task, or do 90% of the work for them.
I (also the "spacey" type, told by every therapist I've been to that my symptoms are quite severe) was only diagnosed when I got sent in for a generalized intervention due to terrible performance, and maxed out the WISC. If my symptoms were slightly less severe, (or I were born 5-10 years earlier) I probably would have just been the "lazy kid."
Again this is because the majority of the kids who enter the mental health "system" are due to behaviors observed by teachers in the classroom.
As an aside, I should note that at least in my lifetime, and possibly longer, we've asked teachers to take on a lot more jobs, while simultaneously eroding their autonomy to do any of their jobs, so I'm not blaming teachers for this, just noting what I've observed.
I remember this shift clearly. And I felt a lot more unity and focus afterwards than before, it's just that as a teacher, I would've been focused on unifying against you.
Beforehand there was a subtle sense of pride that I usually got straight A's and made my parents proud. Afterward I felt like I had had it wrong the whole time:
It's not me vs you according to whatever metrics the authorities choose, comrade. It's you and me against the status quo. We must specialize in wherever the authorities are weak and exploit that to the hilt. As it turned out, the authorities were confused by their technology, so the clear path forward was for us all to become hackers--or so it seemed at the time.
And so, twenty years later, all my male friends have mediocre academic records and decent salaries, while the girls (regrettably) have it the other way.
I don't know if my path is as open to thirteen year old boys today. We launched our games from a dos prompt, opportunity for exploration beckoned at every keystroke. Nowadays everything is part of a platform, you have to go out of your way to find opportunities to tinker. It's all so constrained.
As I see it, I lucked into a growth mindset that was compatible with my pubescent priority realignment (towards my friends and against authority). Do you think that the modern world offers similar opportunities that I'm just not seeing? If not, should we design for them?
For those wondering, I believe this game is agar.io
In our current school there are 3 STEM programs for girls, one that is for both boys and girls. One of the programs for girls is very well funded by local startup money and gets designers, marketers, etc to make them fun. The one for both boys and girls is volunteer run and while I respect and appreciate the effort, frankly it not fun and exciting at all. It's little better than someone just handing you a textbook to read.
I'm all for making STEM (coding especially) inclusive and welcoming for all. Nobody should face discrimination or harassment based on gender (or any other attribute). Unfortunately it's the boys getting the shaft right now. I can't imagine the outrage that would happen if someone started a "boys only" program, yet it almost seems like that's what needs to happen. We're back to the days of striving for "separate but equal."
And I'm afraid this increases the perception that men are naturally fine at STEM and women need special support because of inherent gender attributes (and not because of social problems that we could just address at the root)... which at the end of the day makes life harder for women in their careers.
Even the "boy scouts" are just the scouts now: https://www.scouting.org/
I'll add that one of the best things about Boy Scouts was that we could do stuff that was dangerous, but not too dangerous. We didn't have any moms come along either, and I think that helped. Dads would stop us from doing something truly stupid (like permanent injury type stupid), but not something dumb that would bruise us and teach us a lesson. It also allowed us to do lots more fun stuff.
These days, tree forts are a no-no, apparently. Some guys from my old troop were building one at a mixed event recently. Some girls from another troop came over and said it wasn't safe, then got some karen from their troop to come yell at the boys. Oh, and and apparently it's no longer okay to climb above chest height these days, because it's "not safe". I'm way too young to be saying, "Back when I was young, we did $UNSAFE_THING all the time! We liked it, and never got hurt." Or at least, I thought I was.
There is very much a need for boys to have a space to be boys: where they can let their boisterousness out, where they can act a little crazy, or just act closer to their true selves etc. without having to worry about how they're perceived by the girls. As soon as puberty kicks in, all co-ed events are affected by sexual dynamics; it's been a standard in every human society to provide plenty of contexts for boys where that is removed from the mix as much as possible in order to get better / different behaviour from the young cadre.
As the father of several boys, I agree. For anyone interested more in this concept, I recommend "Boys Adrift" by Leonard Sax (a psychologist) and "Boys Should Be Boys" by Dr. Meg Meeker (a pediatrician). Both books are very enlightening about some of the problems our boys face in America.
Basically, different safe spaces exist for different demographics, but are only marked for certain groups.
Downvoters: why is this not interesting? Traditional textbook way of learning might be better than making things too much fun. (it still has to be fun, but intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic). We will never know if we don't measure the outcome.
On the other hand how do you get more girls into STEM without programs like this? Maybe it's the best of bad options.
I think addressing group 2 is a desirable and valid goal.
Societal gender roles say nurses and teachers are women's work and STEM is man's work. That's the thing one would need to address, and at a young age. It's not entirely clear how one can do that. One "only" has to challenge the societal norms that define gender roles themselves. Not an easy problem.
That is in my opinion an unjustified assumption. Huge numbers of men and women are uninterested in programming. In fact, virtually everyone I know of either gender is uninterested in programming. The number of people who don't program because they're not interested anecdotally dwarfs the number of people who don't program for any other reason.
However, if we are going to solve a problem (eg non biodegradeable plastic) we must do it upstream (eg taxing non biodegradeable plastic and nudging corporations into switching to biodegradeable materials), rather than expend tons of effort downstream (eg banning plastic bags, straws and blaming individuals).
Same here... if we are going to be doing something about girls in STEM as a society, I’d rather do it upstream — earlier in life — because otherwise trying to fiddle around the edges later is just a bandaid.
PS: as an aside, I found the expression “it’s the boys getting the shaft right now” a bit ironic, given the origins of the phrase https://www.etymonline.com/word/shaft
[Race] may not own houses. -- Illegal. [Race] is given extra help to own houses. -- Legal
You do see anger when individuals perceive they can't afford homes, school, or other big ticket items and perceive that they aren't given help - but that isn't quite the same as denying people something.
Which is fine if you're part of that the well-off, but if you're just a person and not benefitted by the categroy association with rich people who happen to be the same race -- a simplistic association that discriminatory, racist people make -- then you're shit out of luck.
Discriminating against people is denying them something, it's denying them a fair shot, fair treatment by the government. Regardless of their sex or skin colour they deserve fair opportunity.
How is that not denying them help?
> On average [Not-Race] has more wealth to afford houses, or home ownership is more common than [Race] in these programs.
So why not just have your aid program be based on wealth, rather than race?
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html#:~:te....
However the organization’s programming can be very feminist, turning off boys.
Edit: btw the thing that annoys me about this is that I already won some tough and prestigious merit scholarships so I actually would have a good shot at these and probably get one if I applied to several. So it's more direct here for me.
Evey beyond names people tend to assign class, gender, and race to surprisingly mundane things that are found on resumes.
Here's an article that discusses one recent study:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-bias-hiring-0504-...
The problem with the original study was that it used names that denoted socio-economic status as much as race (ie, "Dahntay Smith" or "Shaniqua Thomas"). That's a problem, too, but I suspect a similar effect for professional job applicants can be shown using "lower" socio-economic status white names (ie, "Bobby Lee Jones" or "Tommy Ray Brown").
Regardless, I would be strongly in favor of anonymized job applications, since that would eliminate any suggestion of such bias in whichever direction.
I assumed this was fairly typical.
Either way I was responding to "if we took sex and race off... job apps... it would really help."
And I don't think this can be achieved by accident. There must be intentionality to achieve this.
Just look at this NYT hit piece on Coinbase yesterday and all the data available from big tech like Google and Facebook: https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/13440449092006952...
I'm not endorsing it. I'm just noting that it's happening.
Some of them play this game very aggressively. Once they are there, immediately organize into diversity projects and groups to push for quotas in promotions, project leads, etc. Despite these fast-track opportunities, they fully believe they are continuously being held back, at every level, and everything will be interpreted that way.
I think it will eventually break the org but I don't plan on staying.
That said, FAANG companies have provided countless textbook examples of what HR departments should not do in almost every imaginable situation.
I’d love to see the aclu sue FANG over their Diversity programs. I highly suspect they are illegal in one way shape or form.
A uniform decision regarding all interns across an entire company targeting specific racial charactaristics is very different from a policy that bases decisions on objective measurements done in good faith with intent to correct for some form of bias.
You’re obviously able to organise in the workplace for basically whatever goals you want if you like (though in the US this organisation is only protected if more than one person is involved.)
That's not what's happening. They just demand explicit quotas for themselves.
The whole 'diversity and inclusion/feminism makes things better for everyone' is largely a myth, it's just identity groups out for themselves in corporate America.
A more likely explanation which is backed up by evidence is that generalized perception of a group by the teacher will yield grades accordingly, so the more research that shows girls being better at school will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers have to work hard to counter this bias (and many do).
There is also a possibility that there is some biological difference that makes certain teaching methods that just so happen to be favored by teachers at the moment are a tiny bit easier for one gender over others. However I would like to see some research before I subscribe to that, but remain open for the possibility meanwhile.
That all said, if there is a difference, but the effect size is small, then honestly: Does it matter?
That's not what the parent comment is saying - it's saying that earned praise is not given at the same rate for males as for females.
They seem completely unrelated to overall academic performance however, and your complaint sounds a little whiny. I'm as tired of woke nonsense as anyone, but these programs are a great idea.
Being cool is a chump thing
Definitely not, because this gender difference far predates our belief as a society that women are as capable as men in STEM subjects and careers.
Probably not, no. Setting aside the deliberately inflammatory description you chose to use here, this is a complex phenomenon observed over quite a long period in a variety of different locations and social backgrounds globally, and the suggestion that it could be simplified to "uneven praise" doesn't seem to correlate with any research I've seen.
Unfortunately it's the boys getting the shaft right now.
It's pretty difficult to make any real progress on issues of equal access if any targeted efforts to improve access for particular groups are going to be characterised as "giving others the shaft".
It depends on whether the efforts go from "equal access" to positive discrimination, and I'm not sure where that line is drawn or if people are interested in drawing it
If "equal access" is the goal (which I agree it should be), why are we excluding a group based on immutable characteristics? You really see that as equal?
And on a tangent, as for "girls in STEM" programs, I'm not really sure why they need to exist. I think a "girls in STEM" program is as necessary as a "boys in teaching" program, and that is, not at all. Different genders will naturally gravitate towards different fields, and we don't need to fight that.
There's a pop theory / crackpot idea that men tend to be on average "dumber" than women, but with a higher standard distribution, so they will have more "geniuses".
Women will be on average "smarter", but lower standard deviation.
If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that, since while women will have a high chance of reproduction, male biology will need to have more variance and "risk" to achieve some sort of distinction to get to the comparatively lower reproductive success rate of males.
In reality, our schooling is now so screwed up between grade inflation, teaching for the test, over-prescribing ADD drugs (which is opioid dependence grooming by the drug companies), reduced funding, destruction of the middle class, and a host of other changes to society and policy.
The current understanding is that the average is generally similar, and males have greater variability. So yes, vastly more male geniuses. But men have larger brains for a reason, so it might be we're biased against measuring anything men are better at.
> If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that
It doesn't. The main reason is because female mammals have duplicate sex chromosomes, and the effects get combined together. In some other kinds of animals (such as birds) females tend to have greater variability. So it's a haphazard consequence of some evolutionary split way back when. (Who knows, maybe the causation of disposable males is there, but in the other direction.)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/dr-paul-...
Is this a public school? What does "for girls" mean? Like, can you enroll a boy?
The description of the program specifically says, "for girls" and it has a cartoon graphic with a few different female characters of different skin colors, each dressed as some profession. It doesn't say, "no boys" or anything like that, but as I said above I'm hesitant to try with my son. If it were me I would do it.
1. this gender gap begins very early (kindergarden), before the majority of "women in STEM" programs begin
2. are international (i'm fairly certain they don't have women in STEM programs in China, for example)
3. it doesn't explain why the differences are inversely related to income level (do you think there are more "women in STEM" programs at lower income levels?)
4. this difference is very old (>50 years of this effect)
About 100 years ago, women were explicitly forbidden from most colleges and universities. The attitude that women aren't cut out for, and should be excluded from STEM dates back to Socrates (~400 bce), at least. I'm not a historian but that wasn't terribly long after Greeks started writing things down.
The issue is that a lot of people don't really define stem as stem, they define it as RCE-research, computers, and engineering.
Linking the pew article for more detail: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-...
Besides the point. Have you ever had a favorite teacher who told you that you were destined for failure? Probably not, that teacher is never gonna be your favorite -- and spending a semester, or even years, with that teacher might well sour you on the subject even if it was your favorite.
I'm optimistic that we will eventually reach a fully egalitarian future, but pessimistic at how much work is left to do.
this wasn't true 50 years ago
could it be that simple? yeah I think it is actually
I mean, I suppose it's also possible that these programs just don't do anything and we should scrap them due to lack of results, but I'm inclined to believe they're helping somewhat.
(Semi-disclaimer: Prior to COVID I used to volunteer at Girls Who Code.)
Because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that's what happens. As measured by the Global Gender Gap Index , the countries with the highest levels of gender equality, such as Scandanavia, have the lowest levels of female programmers and engineers, whereas countries with much lower scores and more traditional views on genders (such as Iran UAE) have some of the highest levels of female programmers and engineers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...
There were half a dozen of them and none of them even considered what they were about to do was wrong. I wonder how often this happens in other areas.
It should also be mentioned that young men are now doing worse than young women in the workplace. That's because this is a generational thing. When millenials are 50, then 50 year old men will do worse than 50 year old women.
How specifically was this accomplished? Well many small actions were taken. So it's hard to pinpoint which one exactly it is. Women are favored both with explicit policies to favor them, as well as by being given more consideration when policies are designed ("How will this affect women"). Hence I don't think there is one big thing that needs fixing, rather it's many small things. And doing so will take a long time, decades possibly.
It gives them almost a timescale to plan against and boys have nothing similar in the biological sense.
I genuinely have no clue if it actually holds any weight, just something I've always been curious about.
* Sex differences in general intelligence are small, so the F>M achievement gap in higher education likely is not explained by women being smarter.
* The gap emerges already in elementary school and the gap in elementary school is predictive of performance in higher education.
* The gap in elementary school is not new, and can likely be attributed to females maturing earlier in their attention skills and being less unruly.
* So girls/women may have always been more fit for school, but they lacked incentives to make something of themselves and were held back by their biology in earlier times.
* What is new is a strong incentive for girls to succeed in school due to the economic opportunities and reduced investment in the children and birth (e.g. birth control).
* The gap mainly exists in lower-to-middle income families, not so much higher income, so a good environment can presumably aid boys to be more focused, or boys may be more sensitive to a poor environment.
* It concludes with anecdotes by a teacher about how a return to more manly competition may not actually be helpful for boys as it discourages slow learners. Rather, boys should be more supported, and they need to get over the stereotype that nerdiness and conscientiousness is for the girls. Plus the topic of boys falling behind should not be a taboo.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
One possible explanation is that the social expectation of becoming a wife and mother is decoupled from the choice of what they study in school.
It's repeated a few times, that girls attend college more often than boys, and achieve higher grades. But college is a broad term; you can study electrical engineering or gender studies and get a master's degree either way, yet these are very different fields and require very different skills. Relatively more girls pick gender studies over electrical engineering.
It's possible that boys outperform girls in every single field, but averaged over all fields, it appears the other way around (Simpson's Paradox). I wonder if there is any data that shows girls' superior performance broken down by field.
Old news. Been happening for decades, by design.
The proposed solution is usually to do a blind audition. If you don't know anything about the candidate there is no discrimination. However this seems to have a major flaw. How do you account for all of the disadvantages that occurred before or might occur after the blind audition?
It seems that corporations and governments are trying to solve the global problem (lack of diversity due to discrimination) which then in turn causes local problems (reverse discrimination).
Edit:
One paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Another: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.180...
If you have a boy who's on the verge of failing because he can't pay attention, make a serious effort to get him several hours of moderate or intense physical activity every day.
You'll see a world of difference.
I like the older approach of emphasizing reading writing 'rithmetic, and then teaching practical skills and classics. All obviously relevant skills and knowledge for everyone.
Attitudes and norms around how school have changed a lot, and the modern school severely penalizes boys.
For instance it was typical for schools to encourage competition between students, but this is very frown upon in most places nowadays. For a lot of boys, the drive to compete is pretty much the only positive thing keeping them focused on schoolwork.
Another typical trend has been to reduce and to almost eliminate the amount of multiple choice testing and to change it to written questions. There’s evidence enough to claim that this significantly penalizes boys (specially in the 10 to 14 age range) due to developmental reasons.
The difference in ADHD diagnosis is easy to explain. As we’ve moved our expectations of kid behavior from what “the typical boy does” to “what the typical girl does”, a lot of perfectly normal boy behavior is reinterpreted as ADHD.