Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)
economist.com
economist.com
Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.
Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
* Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often explicitly as part of the grade.
* Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks students to write and make a presentation about their math answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as long as the presentation is professional and impressive.
In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.)
At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_Ma...
Additionally, pointing out most professors are men does not counter the argument. Merely the transition of going from a highly cooperation- and rule-following-favored environment to an extremely competitive environment should give some indication as to how multifaceted this problem can truly be.
Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
Your claimed "women are wonderful" effect seems to stop conveniently at the career stage of life.
As other comments have pointed out, the reason can easily be explained by a paradigm shift. One which shifts from a cooperation-favored environment, to a competition-favored environment. Though there is an absence of evidence, the absence of evidence doesn't prove the opposite, it merely puts into question the hypothesis.
> Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
The GP stated this goes for women. Clearly, that doesn't claim the same goes for men. In fact, this is entirely in-line with the "women are wonderful" phenomenon, though I would personally believe other factors are at play beyond this.
How do you reconcile this with discrimination towards women?
Also the whole trope that women somehow cannot compete and can only collaborate, as if the two things are at odds, is also exhausting.
Frankly, this "discrimination towards women" may as well be turned around with one simple trick. Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their ambition and achievements? Last time I checked, women are a lot more judgmental of their partner's ambition, earning capabilities, career, and similar traits than men are, frequently to the point of wanting a guy who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to all those things, which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine men respond by being more competitive.
Now imagine your worth isn't as tied to this, you have all these men with a very clear incentive to compete keep trying to one-up another. It isn't a secret people give up easier when the challenge is too difficult compared to the reward, and assuming above, women clearly have less of a reward at the end of this.
Convenient excuses? Probably. Frankly, the entire "oppression" narrative is awfully convenient when put under the right angle. So instead of knee-jerking towards all this, let's stop this "trope" as well and address the problem for the multifaceted issue it truly is.
Edit: as replying to the below is no longer an option and apparently my "competition" claim is "unsubstantiated", it seems I have to point out the obvious. Women still largely go for men outearning them rather than equals, let alone lower.(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12372) Additionally, money helps men more than women when it comes to cushioning traits of lower value (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...) Though I guess one peer-reviewed study tracking diaries says more than entire countries filled with anecdotal data of women more willing to work part time even when not caring for kids.
Your entire comment basically is based off your own bias. Research can and already has been done on this issue, showing that you're probably wrong. I implore you to read this paper which already puts to rest your outdated notions that men are somehow more competitive than women. I'd like to emphasize the following with respect to competition and finances:
> The same line of reasoning might lead to the
expectation that men should compete more about financial
success than women do, since this would make them more
attractive to women. The data, however, do not support
this: there was no sex difference in the strength of
competitive feeling about attaining financial success,
nor were there consistent differences in the fraction of
diary entries concerned with things that might be
thought to lead to financial success, such as success at
school; in fact, in Study 1 women had a
larger fraction of diary entries about success at work
than men did.
No worries though, I'll just believe your baseless conjecture instead of a peer-reviewed paper.
Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their [looks, and maybe second emotional support]? Last time I checked, [men] are a lot more judgmental of their partner's [looks] than [women] are, frequently to the point of wanting a [gal] who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to [this one primary thing, and then the emotional support bit], which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine [women] respond by ... well, what am I supposed to fill in here? But if you think carefully about this, being agreeable (what's optimized for in this school stuff) is other than appearance probably the single most important currency a woman has.
As far as I know, whether the difference has biological or cultural reasons is not equally well established. But it seems somewhat stable across cultures, which seems to me to suggest that it’s indeed biological, see e.g. Costa et al (2001), Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11825676_Gender_Dif...
“In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude, consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across cultures. Substantively, most of the gender differences we found can be grouped in four categories: Women tend to be higher in negative affect, submissiveness, and nurturance, and more concerned with feelings than with ideas.“
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
> How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
In particular, the differences aren't "stable accross cultures" but more pronounced in more gender-equal societies, so the difference are either (likely) biological, or else caused by society but in a counter-intuitive way.
Sit in any classroom or ask any teacher who their problem children are, and they're almost always boys. They're louder, more violent, more likely to disobey, and have a harder time sitting still.
Are all boys a problem? No, of course not. I imagine a lot has to do with home balance, the involvement of two parents, etc. Are all girls good? No, of course not. But statistically there is a difference. This is true until they settle down in their mid to late twenties...just look at insurance rates.
Maybe it's not biological and is cultural, but it's true from a very young age through young adult that boys are less able to sit still, be quiet, and listen. And school is structured in a way that punishes those traits, and we as a culture medicate boys to make them calm down.
Honestly though...I think one of the biggest factors is that success in school does not predict success in a job. The traits rewarded in school do not correlate to the traits rewarded in high-competition jobs. Being quiet, listening, doing your work on time, not challenging the status quo, parroting things that teachers want you to, not challenging others...none of those things are traits you think of when you think of CEOs. Not that I think that aggressiveness necessarily SHOULD be what we're rewarding as a culture, but when the only goal is profits...it's hard to think that those things make a top company.
I'll probably get down-voted for mentioning him (and that's fine, I don't care), but Jordan Peterson has some really fascinating talks about personality traits between men and women and why personality traits in men lend toward more aggressiveness which is rewarded in competitive business.
Men get the "benefit" of bimodal outcomes, in that they're disproportionately represented in the highest-paying jobs and in prison. Women get the steady middle, doing what needs to be done but less big risk/big reward. I'm dissatisfied with it on both sides. A system in which 'overactive' boys (or kids more generally) are not served well is not good, and a system that optimizes for the wrong outcome for 'good' girls is not good. It's clearly not doing that well for America given our susceptibility to mis- and disinformation and our need to import skills rather than effectively developing talent here.
And it should be noted -- it's not the boys that are the problem it is the schools.
Raise young boys in a way that is completely stifling and unnatural compared to how boys were raised for tens of thousands years based on our evolution, and then diagnose these boys as having a mental problem. No, it is society that has the mental problem.
I want them to challenge, think, be introduced to the complexity and darkness of history, be able to creatively write and imagine, and to not fall in line with whatever the societal expectations and agendas are for the week.
Exactly this. Doing something simply because "it's a rule" and doing something where you see actual impact/results is world of a difference.
That might be true if you ignored development, but we're talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the same as a 23 year old man.
https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_Ma...
I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school was a really strict place compared to real life and work. There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher had intended you to.
As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.
Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to the sheer amount of time it took and the constant, overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines. College was a vacation. Work is easy.
High school did little to prepare me for "how the real world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and requirements and such in school) but did harm me psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get over—and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that), and crazy workload.
In my working life every time I brazenly break the rules and ignore instructions I end up getting a raise, or promotion. This is across 5 or 6 jobs stretched out over 23 years in small businesses, and fortune 100 companies. This is because I always back it up with results
In school, any deviation, regardless of intention or outcome, was perceived by my teachers as being disrepectful to their authority, and was quickly punished. To be fair, I went to catholic school in the 80s/early 90s, so following rules was probably a bigger emphasis than most people's experiences.
I mean, good for you I guess?
In a school setting, someone who listens, follows the rules, and does not challenge the structure of the institution is highly likely to receive excellent grades. In a business setting, this person may be an employee who contributes to the team by doing their job, and doing it accurately and consistently.
A disrupter may work in the same job, and challenge the way things are done - they may fail in doing so, and be repremanded or fired, or they may succeed in their disruption, and allow for a change in the process or job, resulting in greater efficiency.
This is the trade off in my humble opinion.
20 female teachers. 1 male.
No males on the senior staff.
LAUSD: ~4.5:1 in elementary school, ~1:1 in secondary, ~4:1 in special ed[1]
Across all CA public schools: ~2.5:1 [2]
Across the US: 3:1 [3]
So, more women? Yes. 20:1? Wild outlier.
So, what about the claim that it's more women, somehow building a system more friendly to girls? Turns out the data says "not so much" there, too. Principals are roughly 1:1[4]
[1] https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/doma... [2] https://www.ed-data.org/state/CA [3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp [4] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cls.asp#:~:text=I....
Plugging these numbers into R shows that it's not exactly a surprising result:
> prop.test(1,21,p=11/100)
1-sample proportions test with continuity correction
data: 1 out of 21, null probability 11/100
X-squared = 0.31913, df = 1, p-value = 0.5721
alternative hypothesis: true p is not equal to 0.11This makes the "principals are 1:1" data even more interesting. It also lends a good chunk more weight to the idea that at least elementary schools are an environment with outsizedly more female role models.
I still think the "build a system" argument doesn't hold - see the 1:1 data - but I'm certainly more convinced on "the effects of the system-as-is result in this", even without the conscious build step.
Mmm, that's interesting, I have the same observation. I'm not in the US, if that holds any value.
I grew in Europe and, until I was about 10 years old, I firmly believed that the girls must be much smarter than the boys, precisely because they always received much better grades at school.
Alas, eventually I was disappointed and I lost this belief, when I understood that the good grades received by the girls were determined only partially by their knowledge of the subjects on which they were graded and that a large part of the grades was caused exactly as throwaway53086 said, because the girls were "much more likely to obey rules and instructions".
Looking back to the previous years, it became obvious for me that every time when a girl and a boy proved to have identical knowledge about mathematics or biology or whatever else was tested, the disciplined girl received a high grade, while the naughty boy received a low grade.
The girls always did whatever the teacher asked, while the boys failed to do homework, did not pay attention to what the teacher taught and so on.
At that time I was reading a huge amount of books, so even when I was nine-year old there were some fields, e.g. biology, about which I knew far more than my teacher.
Obviously, pointing to errors in what the teacher taught was also a recipe for low grades, in comparison to those who did not question her wisdom.
In primary school, everybody that I knew had the same experience, with the grades that were influenced by the discipline and obedience demonstrated, which favored a lot the girls.
In high school and university, I have no longer seen such cases, the grades received by everybody were mostly correct, but the girls continued to be on average much more disciplined and obedient, which resulted in good grades across the curriculum.
On the other hand, many boys liked only some subjects at which they obtained good grades, while neglecting the others, at which they obtained low grades, resulting in a low average.
In high school and university there was also the same problem that I had first encountered in the primary school, that with the exception of the best teachers, the teachers who were not so good themselves gave good grades only to the mediocre students, while both the bad students and the very good students (who knew more than the teacher about what was taught) received low grades.
The girls were usually not affected by this, because even when they knew that the teacher was wrong, they would not confront him or her about the errors.
Lots of socialization going on.
If your school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers then your school was the exception.
That was definitely the case for me until university.
This does not seem like the right conclusion. More like "needs running around time and free play".
Cf. e.g. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/discipline-problem-solutio... https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/beyond-discipline-article/
My parents did it. Sent to us to Catholic schools instead for many years. And we grew up on welfare.
Unfortunately this is effectively impossible to achieve for 2-3 months every year, with school in session and short Winter days. They're in lower elementary school but I think their total recess time per day is only about 30-40 minutes, and much of the time they don't even get that because it's raining or too cold (pft, whatever, wear coats) or something else, and they have them watch a movie more often than not in those cases (nb. this is a "good" school district)
We have one other kid—a girl—who doesn't seem to need this to not "act wild".
The other trigger for "crazy" behavior seems to be when they're presented with unpleasant social situations and don't know how to deal with them. Like, say, being forced to be around kids who are mean to them. Gee, I wonder where that happens a whole bunch.
On the whole I've been fortunate in life, but it's not an exaggeration to say my life would be dramatically different if I'd learned what was going on as a kid. Instead it was interpreted as a character flaw: that I just wasn't applying myself. Even though I know that's wrong now intellectually, emotionally I still had that message beat into me for years as a kid, and that doesn't just go away sadly. I'd be particularly vigilant about teachers creating that dynamic, as sometimes they do it with good intentions but fail to understand doubling down on a "tough love" approach will utterly backfire here.
The same amount of PE, along with became optional through junior high school and high school.
In elementary school, recess/lunch were required to be spent outside (unless it's -30C or so)
You could spend up to 15min at a time inside to warm up, dry off your mittens, and maybe grab a hot chocolate but after that you were kicked back outside
They crave (and physically need) hours every day spent running and climbing and swinging and rolling around, chasing each-other, etc.
Furthermore, many of them are quite self-directed and stubborn. They get some idea in their head about something to try, and then want to carry the plan through and can get extremely frustrated if thwarted (whether by the plan's intrinsic problems, or by interference from other people). Sometimes the plans are problematic (e.g. «I wonder if I can get adult attention if I take every toy my younger sibling wants to play with, until they start sobbing»), but often the goals/plans are perfectly innocuous, but adults step in and block action for poor reasons or no reason at all, or because the adult wants the kid to be focusing on something different. After being thwarted at a few different projects in a row, kids can become very agitated and defiant, or even melt down completely.
Once the kid has accomplished their immediate goal or given up on it, they sometimes instantly switch to some completely different idea, and don't want to switch back.
It is incredibly difficult to convince a big group of young kids (and especially boys it seems, though many girls are also very active) to sit still and focus on some specific close work without conflicts, especially when they have pent up energy. Trying to force them ends up creating a confrontation, and plenty of kids are looking around for ways to push boundaries and get attention. This is entirely normal age-appropriate behavior, and should not be pathologized. Letting the kids choose their own activities and decide when to switch from one to another goes a long way toward avoiding unnecessary bad feelings.
However: if it were the other way around, would that ever be an acceptable answer nowadays?
Changes in public sensibility regarding sex and gender are not a good basis to reject GP' claim.
Of course, "girls develop earlier then boys" itself may have other, underlying, causes.
Being an adult is sometimes finding some occupancy that with minimum amount of time will give us the psychological comfort to do the maximum amount of paid work through the rest of the week (or day). Why don't we teach kids that being mature is caring for our needs too, instead of pushing them into the square hole of just duties that are demanded of them by everyone else.
Is this OK, or not? I thought it wasn't OK, so I tend to avoid it, even if I think some of it may be true, but isn't stereotyping anyone based on attributes something we are trying NOT to do?
what do you mean by this ?
In the context of the school it would mean the administration, the school board, and if its a private school the owners or trustees.
At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true. A disproportionate number of administrators (especially when adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown) are male.
There have also been many studies that show that teachers call on boys more, praised them more (they acknowledge girls, praise boys), and talk with them more.
So your assumptions are completely at odds with decades of data.
[1]: https://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/ — has good links to various research from across the world.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
Boys and girls experience different gendered teaching practices, but the net result is girls being given higher grades than boys on average.
Surprised to hear this. This is opposite of my experience working for Chicago public schools(CPS).
> At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true.
54% female, 46% male
Too many assumptions or allegations, plus the perception that guys can't be nurturing.
Most of the men still in education were older and were able to migrate away from day-to-day teaching into admin roles. In 20 years those guys will be gone and there won't be any male teachers to replace them.
Sounds like very hostile and sexist environment. I wonder what efforts the school systems take to ensure gender diversity among its employees.
There was a bank that bragged some years ago about being the most diverse bank, since they had 65% or whatever women on the board. 50% was explicitly less diverse than 65%.
It's only high school where the teachers were about balanced, and idk about the non-teachers
Close to 68 percent of elementary school principals are women, while men make up 67.3% of high school principals and 60% of middle school principals.
Teachers are more lenient in their marking of girls' schoolwork, according to an international study.
An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60 countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared with boys of the same ability.
When it comes to teachers' marking, the study says there is a consistent pattern of girls' work being "marked up".
I couldn't improve my handwriting for the life of me when i was in school and got really poor grades from teachers not being able to read what i was writing.
My own experience was that learning to type, thanks to getting interested in programming, was game changing. All I can say is that I could write lengthy essays and reports in a jiffy. Still can.
Not for math, at least not for my kids. I was helping my son with his high school physics homework a few days ago, and IMO his poor handwriting was a genuine impediment to his mathematical problem-solving.
Same goes for 4's. A lot of people don't make the top into a closed triangle shape. Instead they write it like an unfinished or upside-down h.
Even though I'm mostly typing now, it helped me in university and it helps me sometimes when solving problems on paper is easier than with computers.
That being said, handwritten long-form text seems like a rarity in the age of computers, though I still feel that I express things differently in handwriting.
Probably true for half a century now. And yet.
Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand.
It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
--
[0] - I say "most likely" because I didn't investigate the claims that MRI can pick up on the difference. But from my initial difference, the effect is still hereditary, in at least large part genetic.
The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD is to improve school performance.
The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD but who've been diagnosed with ADHD because they're not getting enough exercise is... to improve school performance.
The "young unruly boys without enough PE" is a well-known trope, and modern school is very much kid torture - but I'm not willing to say yet that we're medicating children too much, when the world is only slowly waking up to the fact that we've been underdiagnosing ADHD by at least factor of 2 - this stereotype of unruly boys means the Primarily Inattentive subtype of ADHD is being frequently ignored (vs. the Primarily Hyperactive that creates all the stereotypes), that girls suffering from ADHD are not being diagnosed, not to mention adults.
Either 1. we are medicate children too much and schooling is very screwed up or 2. 20% of boys defective to extent that they require amphetamines. I am not see third option. I am not believe 20% of boys defective to such extent. So I believe we are medicate children too much.
[0]: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...
How about 3: schooling is increasingly good at exacerbating symptoms of a problem that's considered to be strongly genetic[0] (a point curiously omitted in the article you linked) and widespread in the population. And the numbers seem less surprising if you consider that adult life is also good at making the symptoms apparent - except we brush them away with labels like "lazy", "unorganized", "chronic procrastinator", "rude", etc. and let people figure out coping mechanisms on their own, which often include substance abuse, or on the lighter end, self-medicating with coffee and cigarettes.
--
[0] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3245028/#__sec1... points to "strong genetic influence on ADHD with estimated heritability ranging from 75% to 91%".
Almost 40% of boys that age need vision correction.[2]
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15374416.2017.1...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6644a12.htm?s_cid=m...
> 84% of total world wide ADHD meds are eaten in the USA.
That's of course because US is ahead of the curve in medicine.
> Just like in Europe the medical consensus is that people have to learn to live with pain rather eating oxy's.
This isn't a medical consensus. We just don't push opioids for everything so early. We start with paracetamol and ibuprofen, upgrade to ketoprofen and other NSAIDs in more specialized or severe cases, and continue as needed. But living with pain is not an acceptable answer here either.
Stimulant meds work very well on ADHD and are very safe, both short and long-term; it's a much better story than say SSRIs and depression. The main problem here is the combination of stigma (oh no, amphetamines!) and fears of abuse by people not suffering from ADHD (oh yes, amphetamines!) - both of which are in large part fueled by the US War on Drugs, the unending source of pathologies and suffering worldwide.
It seems crazy that we've made it this far as a species without medication; so why should it be required now? Maybe the issue isn't the children, but the environment they are in?
- teachers had a lot more options when it came to disciplining kids
- many left school for work at age 15 - 16
Do you want the good old times back?
(Another thing is many countries have changed the curriculum to be even more heavy on theory than it used to be. That I would like to change, both for the kids and for future employers: broad practical experience probably increases someones chances in engineering and probably other disciplines as well.)
The United States most definitely has a unique illness. It’s convinced the masses freedom is being tethered to corporatism.
We need a less militaristic and autocratic 1984
“40 hours a week for deflated earnings is freedom. Quarterly gains for the aristocracy is how we beat ‘them’.”
I was under the impression that this "it works differently on people with ADHD" thing was essentially a pleasant myth. If you've got solid citations that stimulants do somehow work differently on people with ADHD I'd be interested in reading them. My understanding was that the effect is broadly similar, with the only meaningful distinction being that ADHD-diagnosed individuals have been judged as needing those effects, and others have not.
For those who need it it makes mind-numbingly boring stuff such as homework (as opposed to reading history books or creating elaborate formulas etc etc) less painful.
I don't know about you but I personally have seen some examples that have gotten significantly improved lives because of it.
If you don't know this stuff first hand, please refrain from making broad statements about it.
BTW, I'll give you this: one of the most interesting explanations I saw was that ADHD is very overdiagnosed - and at the same time underdiagnosed.
Some people get ADHD meds that shouldn't have, others struggle for years because some people have irrational fear against stimulats.
Can we try to avoid moving that needle and instead try to lower the errors on both sides?
Unless all the kids illegally buying ADHD meds to do better in school when they have not been diagnosed with ADHD (and adults doing the same, for that matter, to do better at work) are doing that for no reason, I'm pretty sure I'm correct that amphetamines improve performance for most everyone, and that distinguishing between ADHD-and-improved-on-meds and not-ADHD-and-improved-on-meds is not trivial.
I was replying to a post that read:
> If they're on stims in particular, and the meds actually improve their behavior, then the cause most likely isn't insufficient PE time.
I object to that being proof of much other than amphetamines making most people perform better in school, without commenting on whether ADHD is a "real" thing (I'm not even sure what it would even mean for it not to be "real", given the state of our understanding and diagnosis of mental disorders). "We gave the kid amphetamines and they improved, must have had ADHD" is dangerously misguided.
In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
> In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
It's kind of a given, until we transition to post-drug era, where we inject our bodies with nanobots that fix what wasn't already fixed by genetic engineering of the gametes.
Until then, I think it's worth re-evaluating this view while replacing "ADHD" with "diabetes" or "hypertension" or "rheumatism" or "asthma" or... insert any persistent and disruptive condition a person may suffer from regardless of the shape in which they keep their body. We should apply drugs where they help more than they harm, until we have better alternatives.
Yes, exercise definitely helps. But it doesn't make one's mind less noisy internally. Buddhists talk of monkey minds. ADHD is like having a zoo of minds.
This anti-medication bias is causing a lot of stigma in society for children who actually need them.
This is all distinct from people who actually really have ADHD and in which case medications can be appropriate.
You are completely right.
What I meant is that I have a feeling that often ADHD is diagnosed out of convenience rather than a real illness. I certainly didn't mean that all ADHD diagnosis are a scam.
We’ve had risings rates of mental illness for years. And these method of diagnose and prescribe is only making it worse.
There’s obviously benefits to medicine but we’ve gone insane with how we’re describing the mass amount of personal mental variance in the world as illness and trying to eliminate it.
These medications have lasting long term effects that are unknown. If kids that are the brightest are struggling to succeed change the rules not the kids. I learned more when I dropped out and studied what I love instead of following curriculum. We've got to have more varied paths towards success.
A lot of the complaints and stigma I've seen are from people who took medication growing up. They saw the need and value, but loathe the side effects.
Signed her up for gymnastics and ballet and she calmed down a whole lot and did better in the classroom as well.
There is a certain condescending sympathy that we afford to people just because they lived in the past. It comes from a misplaced desire to avoid anachronism, but ends up committing anachronism anyway.
We are such barbarians that I assume that tech will not exist to future generations.
It's a common trope, but AFAIK ADHD has a big hereditary component and currently is deemed to be extremely underdiagnosed in girls and adults in general, so I think this cliche isn't holding water. I will agree that modern schooling is extremely good at surfacing the symptoms (but then so is adult life in general, if you know what to look for).
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means, because it's the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal to intuition
> girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions
So is that difference a problem, then? Or not? Or neither? You can't force people to take a risk they aren't comfortable with, and if boys (for whatever reason) are a little less risk-averse, what is there to do? Punish boys for taking risks as we praise girls for doing the same?
I'd have to see hard data, not anecdotes. My daughter is a wild child, actively flouts damn near every rule I create, refuses to follow instructions, and has a lot of trouble in school because she thinks it's stupid.
My son is far more compliant. Like night & day different from his sister. And they've been like this since they were old enough to start showing real personality.
This hypothesis fails when applied to militaries. Throughout history men have near 100% representation in militaries and wars. Where discipline and following rules is more seriously enforced.
Public School Education in the US is not a hotbed of innovation – we are largely riding on the coattails of a system constructed by men, no? Women may have filled these positions, but the system was largely constructed circa the Industrial revolution (and the tertiary education system with its initial origins in monasteries).
"don't be so loud, that's not lady-like" "don't play in the dirt, you'll ruin your dress" "it's uncomfortable, I know, but you have to look pretty" "girls don't like sports, here, sit down and play with your dolls"
It's subtle things, but a million of them may make a difference. There's a lot more rules for girls than boys, they are used to spend their time in quieter activities, etc.
Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers. Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their behavior is better. The effect of biased grading is enormous and a huge disadvantage to our boys.
> Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. [1]
[1] https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
In blinded effects, boys overperform in math and underperform in literacy. In non-blinded effects, boys underperform everywhere.
Do people really say this? I've seen mens rights issues being raised carefully in the last few years, and I've never seen any backlash when done right. Like when you see articles written about women abusing men, or mens rights regarding children. Even women write about these issues. Feels like it's being accepted, just not being taken seriously enough yet. Maybe it's different in northern europe, but I haven't seen any backlash from international/US websites either.
I think part of the problem is that men are afraid of defending these issues. In part because of projection about how others will react. Either if it's from womens right activists going against it, or other macho men saying men shouldn't care about child custody or equality for male in women-dominated workspaces and such.
And there ARE also mens rights activist who are just using the issue to fight against womens rights, through whataboutisms and such. But don't let arguments against those people deter you from talking about reasonable mens rights issues.
Count how many people immediately jump in to try to ridicule you, typically with something like: there are already 364 mens days in the year, why aren't you happy already?
I didn't see any such replies here -- maybe at some other places some people do (Reddit / subreddits?)
(I didn't downvote)
> don't let arguments against those people deter you from talking about reasonable mens rights issues.
Good point
My wife and I talk about these sort of things sometimes: We believe there are differences between man and woman (and between different human descents, like people from the mayan descent [from where I am from] are shorter, while people from Germanic descent are taller, among others). That does not have to mean that one is better/worse than the other. But if society accepted and understood those differences, we could make better use of each feature for good.
This always reminds me of the equality vs equity cartoon ( http://www.vestidosdecordura.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/... )
Discourse about bias usually makes strong distinctions between groups that are known have relative positions of power in their society (because this discourse is mostly held in Western culture, that usually boils down to "white heterosexual christian-adjacent men") and minority/disenfranchised groups (women, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc).
Progressive groups are perceived to get extremely testy when it's suggested that minority groups might benefit from / majority groups might suffer from systemic effects in some ways.
This failure to think critically leads to some very silly arguments, for example abortion control being "male politicians controlling women's bodies", when in reality men's and women's opinions on abortions are extremely similar (in the US, at least).
Not only is this toxic, it's also counter-productive when we're supposed to pretend that women aren't half of society and thus perfectly capable of contributing to gender roles, e.g. [1]
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/boys-don-t-cry-study-suggest...
I never said or implied that.
The fact that members of oppressed groups can be bigoted (including against their own group) isn't a novel concept.
Yes, women can be sexist against women, and yes, women can be sexist against men. That doesn't mean patriarchy doesn't exist.
> And before someone points to male over-representation in government, maybe think for a moment: whose votes put those men there?
That's not really convincing.
Rich people and families with old money are over-represented in government. And yet we must presume that poor people voted to get them in place too. There are explanations for that (eg maybe rich people can afford expensive schools where they learn to be competent politicians), but overall any system that can select against poor people can select against women too, even if that system is mostly democratic.
If women are being sexist against men, then men are also an oppressed group. This isn't a novel concept.
You're classifying one side as oppressed and the other as oppressor on the basis of a single data point - looking at the very top of society. This would be valid if gender roles were handed down from the top of society, but that's simply not the world you and I live in.
Modern gender roles are a much more grass-roots affair and women are perfectly positioned to influence them. Every complaint about gendered toys, for example, implicates women more so than men.
When mothers push gender roles on their sons that fathers do not, it is absurd to suggest that there is some self-sustaining system called "patriarchy" (literally "the rule of fathers") at fault. You may deny it, but it is a transparent attempt at denying women's agency and placing the blame on men instead.
Frankly, it's boring and at this point I'm comfortable discarding the opinions of anyone who uses the word "patriarchy" outside discussions on religion (i.e. the only context in which gender roles are still top-down).
> Rich people and families with old money are over-represented in government. And yet we must presume that poor people voted to get them in place too
While wealthier people have advantages in terms of getting into politics, they still have to conform to popular opinion to get elected. Most European countries have strong labour movements that reflect this. I don't deny that men have an advantage getting into politics. I do deny that this single data point is sufficient to prove an oppressor/oppressed relationship between men/women. Gender roles are a trade, and women are active participants.
It would be an interesting data point if there was any particularly reason to believe the document you cited would hold up to further study.
Terrier, C., 2020. Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 77, p.101981.
"Economics of Education Review is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering education economics. It was established in 1981 and is published by Elsevier."
What are you talking about?
In my country(India) we have board exams, where people evaluating and candidates are both anonymous to each other. People don't write their names, but use a number.
Still Girls do better. Let's just agree girls are better at academic work.
Actually it's not; it's fine to bring it up. It is PC and OK
‘Men’ as a category may not be that group with respect to ‘Women’ as a category.
But there are a huge number of men who are in fact, just as disadvantaged as a huge number of women even if that number is marginally smaller.
There is no reason at all why those men’s problems should not be receiving the same attention that women’s problems are receiving, other than the framing as a response to oppression of groups.
So while you say "no, not ever", I say "are you even having the same conversation we are?"
Men are very, very oppressed. A few who have escaped into financial independence does not make a trend.
Men have been that group when it comes to their foreskin.
Every species on earth shows us this: "males are disposable, females matter". A 1M:100F ratio can revive an extinct species. A 1F:100M ratio is a blood bath. There are zero incentives for powerful men to help underperforming men, while women have neither natural nor sociological pressures stopping them from helping other women.
For better or for worse, we are barreling towards a point where male underachievement won't be ignorable. More than 50% of women will have to 'settle' for a man with worse career prospects. Scarily enough, if women choose to continue acting oblivious while wielding their primary evolutionary bargaining chip (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) to their fullest, then at least a couple of generations of men will waste away before a proper equilibrium is reached.
Ofc, this is a hypothesis that leans too heavily into our animalistic tendencies and their stranglehold over all societal developments. I also don't want this to come off as an MRA rant. Just a few ideas I wanted to put out there.
Doesn't pass reality check IME
New political currents hate ambiguity and nuance. If you're trying to motivate people to rise up against the Empire, the last thing you want to hear is people saying "Okay, but some imperial officers are actually good people, and this Saw Guerrera is a sadistic monster", even though both are true.
Eventually, once the Rebellion becomes widespread enough, people start saying "Okay, the Empire was awful and we're glad it's gone, but maybe we should cut back on the whole hunt-down-every-single-ex-stormtrooper-and-murder-them-and-their-family thing".
I hope, anyway.
I agree, which is why I'm not bitching about it. But it's also kind of sad. I have a young son, and even at 5yo he has seen enough "yay girls!" messages in books and cartoons to deduce that there's something wrong with being a boy.
It's also a good example of the societal construction of concepts like "oppression". The idea that women earning less for the same work is a huge problem, and that men doing more dangerous jobs and dying younger isn't, is a subjective choice we've made. And the problem isn't so much that it's wrong, but that we don't have to choose. We could decide that they're both problems, but we don't. And I think the reason has a lot to do with the heavily-downvoted sibling comment saying, "Well, we worry about the oppressed people, and men aren't oppressed."
Saying "the Rebellion becomes an Empire" implies that the side that fought against the bad things starts to do equally bad things once it gets into power.
Homosexuality was punishable by death in England up until 1861. Women didn't have the right to vote in France until 1945. Progressive extremists get people fired, and can even commit violent crimes sometimes, but they're nowhere near as bad as the state-approved violence that the minorities they defend were historically subject to (and still are in some countries).
Writing a transphobic tweet can get you fired, and I agree that's bad. Being transgender can get you killed. Saying "the rebellion becomes an empire, we need a new rebellion against them" is incredibly dismissive of the abuse marginalized groups go through.
the wage gap has clear reasons (mens' jobs are better paid, women get promoted less) and thus clear solutions (stop discriminating against women at hiring/promotion time, or improve women's retention thus allowing them to stick in a job for longer, improving their chances at a promotion), even if these solutions are easier said than done.
the life expectancy gap instead... what are the reasons? I suspect that in some cultures it can be because of gender-specific abuse of alcohol... but if that's the reason ( or even if otherwise if the reason is biological) I'm not sure that we have an obvious solution to the problem.
Also, I presume that language test score could be as concerning as math test scores... but the latter will help students pursue a STEM career, which is better remunerated than a career that makes use of knowledge of languages. From that point of view, to improve opportunities later in life, fixing math scores can have priority.
"Good oral and written communication skills" are a requirement of virtually all high-paying careers, including STEM.
http://psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publica...
"Thus, high levels of testosterone are associated with willingness to incur greater risk in both sexes."
In my experience, this view has loose ties to ADHD, specifically regarding the hunter-farmer hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis
Doesn't say it in the article, but Hartmann's main book on ADHD discusses how he tested an African tribe for ADHD. 100% of those tested were "positive" for ADHD.
I believe we're looking at evolutionary aftereffects of generations of family-based societies where men hunt and women run the family.
I have also come to this conclusion though personal experience.
A well-intentioned person for whom I hold the utmost respect said I exhibited hallmark symptoms of ADHD. I realized the shoe really did fit, so I decided to get tested.
In the end, I was "diagnosed" with ADHD, allowing me access to a variety of drugs to "treat" it. They don't help. I have a stash of Adderall XR I don't use because it makes me feel...wrong. I've realized I need to change my approach to how I work. Systematic breaks to clear the mind helps tremendously. Coffee has a calming, stabilizing effect. Meditation of various types (Koru is an excellent system) has also helped understand my mind better to know when I'm getting off track.
I am fully convinced people "with" ADHD are supposed to be living as bold risk-takers because their bodies are literally wired for it. More men than women are wired like this, but both can "have" ADHD. Pencil-pushing desk jobs are not for these people, unless they're doing off-the-wall research and analysis.
If this is indeed true, why are we not seriously reconsidering this whole thing of dosing kids on very shaky grounds?
There are a couple of points in very early life, then not until puberty.
You could still point to the indirect effects of elevated T during infancy.
Then it becomes a competition of who has done the dumbest thing. I know it's just being playful, but you rarely see the opposite.
Turn the tables, I was in a meeting with a male and female coworker. The guy was saying how stupid he was, and the female stopped him and said: You shouldn't say that about yourself, in a serious tone.
I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.
If I were in one group, I reckon I'd form one opinion and if I were in the other I'd form the other opinion.
I'd be wary of making population generalizations when one uses sample populations highly susceptible to selection bias: one's friends and one's coworkers - both of whom are usually selected for agreeableness with the group, either directly for friends or indirectly through culture fit for coworkers.
The only downside, is that I have a slight speech impediment, but it's mild enough that most people don't notice.
And for some reason I still (25 years later) tend to pronounce hill as "heel".
After doing something stupid at work, I once said, out loud, "AnimalMuppet, if brains were leather, you couldn't saddle a flea." And 30 seconds later I was over it and back to work. I didn't say that because I think I'm stupid. No, I was able to say it because I'm sure that I'm smart. The security of being sure made me able to say that.
I wonder if the females don't feel secure enough to say such things, or if they're just wired differently. (So that saying derogatory things about themselves, which they don't actually believe, is an alien concept. It sounds rather weird when I put it that way...)
Who can self-deprecate, feign uncertainty and fake modesty in the most sophisticated way. Everyone is competing for the "nice guy" designation - or perhaps they're frightened of the "asshole" designation - and they're using deception as the means.
It's reminiscent of stale scientific writing where every statement is hedged with endless caveats just so they can't get singled out for overstepping slightly.
People would rather be liked than respected I guess but I also think that many today can't tell the difference.
Even if you're some weirdo who thinks there is no gender discrimination in the workplace, you can't deny that many women at least perceive there to be gender discrimination, and one of the tips passed around is to stop self-deprecating yourself in front of your colleagues.
With that part unmentioned, the GP seems to assign dubious priorities to human motivations.
Really? The only motivating factor assumed in the GP looks to be that women want to be successful in their careers. Is that a dubious claim?
I'm saying that I think the downvotes comes from something GP didn't say rather than something they did say.
Sample size of one, but if my company has the option to hire a male or a female engineer which are known to have the exact same skillset and experience I expect them to choose the female one 10/10 times:
- hiring the man gets the job done
- hiring the woman gets the job done equally well and gets you a pat on the back (both immediately and also whenever the statistics are brought up)
I probably replied to the wrong comment. Or didn't really read your comment.
Sorry.
> which are known to have the exact same skillset and experience
Sure if there was an objective way to evaluate this, then you're right.
But there isn't. We THINK that there is, but there is a ton of subjective bias along the way from who recruiters contact, the resume screen, all the way through the interview.
And the whole point of gender discrimination is that "on average" women's technical skills and experience are undervalued.
That's the premise people are making when they discuss discriminations. Now, you might disagree, and then we can get into the details of why this happens, which parts are conscious and which parts are unconscious. But what's happening is not how you're describing it.
As have been pointed out before: most of us live in somewhat capitalist societies. Capitalists are AFAIK primarily greedy not primarily evil.
I don't believe for a second that Facebook wouldn't take the opportunity straight away if they could get the same work done for less money by hiring women instead.
IBM too. That should cause a feedback loop that increases salaries for female engineers until balance is reached.
Anything other would imply a lack of information somewhere or that capitalists were more evil than greedy.
Now that I think of it: Lack of information one or more places is actually an interesting hypothesis in its own right.
On the other hand, I also think that they have a harder time taken serious on highly techical topics, and earn less on average for the same job.
It comes with benefits and drawbacks. I honestly don't know which outweighs which, but putting it all in a negative perspective is unfair and not accurate.
Thats because girls blame it on their *astrological sign*
In all seriousness, I truly believe girls mature way earlier than guys. Just look at insurance rates.
If grades tend to have a lot of negative skewness, that means that it pays to be in a group that has the least number of extreme underperformers, since your group's outperformers are handicapped due to the upper bound existing near the mean.
That means we expect men to underperform in domains that have lots of negative skewness in the outcome distribution, assuming [1] holds.
In domains where there's a lot of positive skewness in the outcomes distribution, we would expect the opposite result.
As a first step, we would want to check how grades are actually distributed in the raw data, and whether there is an inter-country correlation between its grades' skewness and its male-to-female differences.
And you are right that we should check for inter-country data. It will provide a more accurate view.
"better visual sense"
If your point is that the empirical findings underpinning the variability hypothesis may have some cultural causes instead of being only genetic, then we don't disagree. But I wouldn't agree that the culture-over-genes perspective is undersubscribed, that's the most fashionable and socially acceptable perspective to take.
Damore was sacked for his memo. Well, arguably he was sacked for people (at his workplace, using company resources and time) making disingenuous and vicious attacks on him (often misrepresented what he actually said), far less accurate or polite or measured than anything Damore said, creating enough of an internal activist movement that the boss had to cancel his trip to the Maldives IIRC.
At university level, the grades are more accurate (but still flawed) because the grade is typically 70-80% test and quiz based.
My experience in the US with grades for middle school and high school is that it's 85-90% non-examination based-- Meaning it's essentially a measure for how well you can complete and turn in the busy work on time.
That's a great measure for conscientiousness, but the standardized tests will show who actually learned the material.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Your point is still valid though, I find university test scores more "accurate" too, whatever that means for learning.
My wife grew up with a lot of testing in asia. Now working as a teacher in northern europe she finds the approach here way better for actually learning, where there's less focus on memorizing things, and more on problem solving. The thing is, it's harder to make tests for problem solving, so tests tend to favor memorizing, especially when there's a lot of it. It's not just about making the questions, it's about grading them and making a judgement about whether the student took the right approach despite getting the wrong answer. How do you standardize that?
I'm not sure what's standard, but at my university we often had exams with either formula books and/or a cheat sheet we could prepare ourselves. Yet the math tests were way more challenging for me than the simpler tests without access to material we had in high school.
[1]: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article1952...
In reality, boys may well be learning more than girls in school, maybe even substantially more.
Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812 - March 2015 (70 comments)
underrated comment from the old thread
Also anecdotal - but I've seen a lot of the boys who were academically behind seem to get their shit together ~3-5 years after graduating and ended up going to college, grad school, getting white collar jobs, etc.
It appears that if you have the resources and privilege its not too hard to overcome having dicked around in your primary education - but I'm willing to bet most people who aren't in that position never catch up.
There's a lot of speculation in this forum about whether this is because of different distributions of IQ, effects of testosterone, etc., but how can we possibly determine if these are true differences or the result of parents, teachers, and other people in society treating young children differently based on their gender?
I'll demonstrate:
Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka "the patriarchy".
On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance that benefits women, such as sentencing/incarceration rates, suicide rates, or academic performance, it seems that often people are satisfied with an explanation that says the disparity is due to some innate behavioral difference in men. Occasionally, in the case of poor academics or crime rates among men you'll hear justifications along the lines of "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them", which in my opinion is a statement that subtly implies that these men's misfortune is their own fault.
Also in some cases you see outright deflection; bring up how women generally make better grades than men, and how they outnumber men by nontrivial amounts at universities? The response it "well, better education doesn't necessarily translate into better employment for women". Bring up the substantially higher male suicide rate? You'll often hear "well actually women attempt suicide more often, but use less effective methods" - and that's supposed to be the end of the conversation, as though attempting suicide with a bottle of pills (where you could still wake up in the hospital surrounded by family and friends) has the same sort of finality as shooting yourself in the head or jumping in front of a train.
The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune; this seems to misunderstand how society affects its members. In the context of violent crime, an example hypothesis would be that boys are taught by their families, movies, etc. that violence is a valuable part of being male, and because of this social norm, more men end up committing violent crimes. It seems crazy to suggest that a man affected by these cultural norms could have chosen to be brought up in a different environment; I don't know that people are suggesting this when they claim that patriarchal social norms are a problem.
My point is that there is a pretty clear tendency for people to attribute sex/gender discrepancies to societal factors when it benefits men, but less so when it benefits women. The reasons for this are likely varied, but you can draw your own conclusions on that.
> The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune
I think it does in some cases, but I suppose it depends on the speaker's definition and characterization of this nebulous term, "the patriarchy". I think some people do indeed feel that all men are complicit in "the patriarchy" and so if the system ends up hurting them, they are at least partially responsible.
Perhaps that's all the more reason that characterizing all gender issues as "our society is a patriarchy unconditionally, in which women are always oppressed and men are always the oppressors" is not all that great.
Something is clearly wrong with our system which is resulting in one gender receiving more support. The distribution curve should mostly be equal, yes we are different gender wise. But for large majority of people our brains function mostly the same (it’s not like girls are a different species than boys).
E.g. at any point do we think about optimizing some learning environments for boys? When college graduation rates in the US are 70/30 girl/boy, is that okay? I know it feels weird asking the question since those ratios were flipped a few years ago, and we fixed it...
It is well documented that men drop out at higher rates and are in general more prone to failing. Having a few extra "zeros" in the GPA rankings would skew the mean down for males.
It's tempting to say that "Girls are better than boys in academic things", but if you look at the performance of a cohort of graduates, I'd expect you'd see we're all about equal.
After graduation, there's a couple other well documented attrition filters for women, unfortunately.
There was this old essay about it, which is now quite old and probably cancelled, called "Is there anything good about men" that discussed various life tradeoffs that affected the genders differently.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_302.60.a...
I find it fun to share that my boss is a woman, her boss is a woman, and _her_ boss is too. And they're all at or past mid career and highly successful managers at a world-class technology company. JPL is a wonderful place though.
There's a budding problem for gender equality growing, and it's not the usual story.
We're not quite ready to talk about it openly though, without the stated cause being toxic masculinity or something - as if that's a problem that has been getting worse, not better, and is somehow only now taking its biggest toll on boys under 15 (and even under 5).
Alas, the answer must be doubling-down on that narrative and pumping the boys who can't function like girls full of ADHD meds - I was on Ritalin before age 12, and it does "solve the problem" to a workable enough degree for everyone to keep on keeping on.
Schooling as a whole needs to be overhauled to better accommodate young boys. Until then, we're going to see wider and wider gaps at highschool and university levels.
Regardless of gender, schooling as a whole needs to move away from this factory-like system with underpaid teachers and an emphasis on test scores. It would be nice if there were an easy solution...
It's definitely influenced how we raise our kids - boys in general really seem to need to be active, exploring, and heavily engaged in physical activity otherwise they turn that energy towards destructive activities.
in this case X=sex but it could be race, age, etc.
Meanwhile, I could have easily dropped out, parents even suggested I could given the strain of me getting me to school freshman year similar male peers did at 13/14, so just I lived with friends and couch surfed through all of HS. As a youngster though I did not show much academic connection and was suspended each week in a charter school, failing 2nd grade, but never going to 4th grade after switching schools. After a parent teacher conference where my mom embarrassingly tried to fight my teacher I realized things might go easier if I took time after school or during lunch to just wrap up my homework. Through middle school the boys and girls club created an atmosphere where I could continue that behavior and get access to computers and printers for written assignments. It was still a hassle though. Without a few key teachers in middle school I probably also wouldn’t have kicked a bad habit of ditching school.
Out of my friends, none of us enjoyed this. All my teachers were always women and I have to wonder if the curriculum was designed by someone more like us would we have gotten more from it? I honestly don't know.
That's just my two cents anyways.
Feelings are more important than facts to many people nowadays.
is it good or bad in your opinion?
The scale of the damage it is doing in western society at the moment will need books, not chapters, dedicated to it in the future.
or fabricated papers heh
This should be either a perfectly put sarcastic statement or a result of living in a sort of cultural isolation in the past decade.
Why? Is it just self-serving prioritization?
Reflecting more, I don't think it is. I'm naively assuming that the girl-boy difference is likely biological (either female brains are different than male brains, or the differences in sex & reproduction result in equivalent human brains pursuing different life strategies in different bodies), while black-white-Asian difference is likely social, probably related to culture and poverty level (i.e. no brain differences).
It follows that in order to optimize for social good & progress, we should adapt the education system so that both female-ish and male-ish types of brains flourish (note that there is likely significant overlap) yet we should help people out of poverty (which might involve changing education, but also probably other, much more significant efforts) and change culture (make schooling & achievement more important and popular) to reduce white-black-Asian gap.
We have known what the problem is and what the solution is for a long time. - Standard curriculum for non-standard children, and finding out what makes a child special and encouraging that at the expense of other things.
Frankly, all the quotas and other artificial constructions to help women should already tip people off that disadvantaging young men further will only cause more and more resentment.
Men are physically stronger and more athletic on average, and it's so extreme that hilarious stories like this [1] come out when top-tier female athletes try to compete against men in some sports. Woman simply do not want to be working the same kind of manual labor jobs at the rate that that men have for this reason, and it would be extremely bad for society if we attempted to fix this "inequality".
But it's even more pronounced in dating/sexual patterns. Most women do not want to be "dominant" and this lack of "dominant" women is a huge problem for men who consider themselves to be "submissive". It's a very talked about issue for men in BDSM communities. And it's even more well known how a majority of women find it very hot to be "dominated" e.g. lightly choked [2]. Women simply will not prefer a society where men on average are not the "dominant" gender, at least in key aspects of society such as the bedroom or in labor intensive work.
[1] https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/0...
A society where women cannot find husbands with higher earning potentials would create a marriage crisis.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12372
>That's right, the women are smarter.
I think that's right, especially at young ages like before 20? 25? then this difference seems to be closing
I always felt like girls were like 0-3 years ahead
but I tend to believe that the gap tends to be closing over time
Maybe there are so few female inventors because women are not as good at inventing/creating things?
Also, this is assuming grades are good at measuring how smart someone is.
- when I was in school I only cared about results for the subjects that interested me; otherwise i did just enough to pass - when she was in school she cared about high grades for all subjects
But this type of assumption seems to have unforeseen consequences. We should question it.
But yes, to make it explicit, i'm the father.
All this suffering did not seem to reduce their academic and technological aptitude.
If this is true, then it would follow that there would be more genius men than women, which would explain what you mention.
just look at this thread. 400 comments in 3 hours. it's because of the title. the idea that girls are doing better than boys triggered a whole mob. pretty worrying.
I kinda suspect not a lot of people are reading TFA since no one has noticed it's paywalled.
How many deep sea welders are women? Less than 0.1%. How many oil rig workers are women? Less than 1%.
Good deep sea welders earn over $300k.
I think this would be the case for the hypothetical “party if you're a man, standing outside in the rain if you're a woman” job, too. How do you know you're describing something about the people you're measuring, as opposed to the people around them?
Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women gravitate towards are paid less.
I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and high ranking corporate officers.
i.e there are more men who are total geniuses at one end and total dumbasses at the other but the average would be the same.
https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-dumber-and-smarter-than-w...
No idea if it's true though - not my field and not an expert.
1. Your cited article is correct.
2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top tier" level intelligence. This second point would require some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy persists.
doctors: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-women-n....
lawyers: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers...
(just to use two popular examples. if you extend this out to a lot more professions the pattern persists)
You could be right, but I personally doubt it.
So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.
That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity, there are likely many factors at play at the same time.
They are solidly in the majority of students in medicine, law, accounting, etc.
> What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been shown to favour male underlings. In a few places sexism is enshrined in law: Singapore still canes boys, while sparing girls the rod.
That's one example but there are plenty of others.
One group of individual doing better at something does not mean the thing is favorable towards the group.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
Perhaps you could provide us with some details about how education is not biased based on sex?
We know that before the tech industry became popular and a way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better academically outside of the US.
When did this change? I either missed it or this was always an exaggeration in media.
The Internet suddenly became a big thing, PCs massively growing in popularity, and the image of gaming was changing, becoming a less nerdy pastime with the arrival of the Playstation.
Not really sure if it encouraged a more diverse set of youngsters to develop a serious interest in computing though, as by then we'd already got to the point where 'learning to use a computer' now meant Word+Excel rather than BASIC or LOGO
Does anyone here think their academic experience was a direct analog for their workforce experience?
Correct. I've yet to impress with my math skills, just saying.
I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy stories all the time, because that was her interest.
20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.
There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.
Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.
It was pretty obvious from the context that the person you're replying to meant "working" as in "working a job for money".
If I was woman and I decided to have baby, I'd probably be either very stressed with my current job, or looking for something part time.
Now imagine if I live in Sweden or the like where the state hands out money for raising children.
The personal and societal reasoning about parenthood changes, but they still do have babies, despite being on their own. For many people, children is their retirement plan.
Anyway, it's not the same to have a nice monthly stipend than a small cheque far in between. Spain, for example, is considerably worse financially-wise for raising a kid than countries more up north. Not only because the country job market is shit (which is important even if you don't work, because your partner has to bring money home), but because the state really doesn't do much about it.
Now imagine living in a place where there isn't really a functional state to look for.
Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.
And sure, people do that all the time. People do all sorts of things. It doesn't mean they are communicating effectively, getting any kind of point across or coming to any conclusion at all.
I could start into semantics too, for example saying that people don't bring up tangential points because tangents aren't points they are lines. It wouldn't be a good idea, because it wouldn't further the discussion at all. That's basically what I see happened here.
The top comment is asking why girl's perform better, and yet and under-represented in top tier jobs. The comment you replied to responds that they think it's because of having child and choosing not to go back to work.
At no point are they taking a stance on whether or not raising a child is as important as working a job...
That means most men won't do it, because they'll lose status. Meanwhile women will always place lower importance on status than on childcare, and so they will do childcare because no one is available to do it for them.
The disparity won't ever disappear until it's just as valid and socially supported for a man to stay home and raise children, as for a woman.
I don't know that is true of most men. Have children? Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men wanting to have more children is inversely proportional to the amount of work the mother expects them to contribute.
Women tend to be more nurturing so their role is disproportionately more important during a child's earlier formative years. They also tend to have a stronger orientation toward domestic affairs. Men, on the other hand, tend to be more strongly oriented toward the public sphere. The home is the focal point. Thus women are at the center of the action, as it were, when it comes to the amount of time they spend with children, while men tend to be more strongly motivated to take care of affairs for the sake of their families outside of the home. The home is also associated with greater safety and comfort, which is something women tend to prefer (we also see this reflected in occupational preferences), while the public sphere contains more risk and discomfort, something men prefer to face esp. when the reward is sufficiently high (this is also reflected in occupational preferences; men tend to prefer taking on more dangerous and higher stress jobs and longer hours in exchange for more pay).
I have used the word "tend" for a reason. These are not two sealed off magisteria. Proportion is probably good way to frame things, though to a point. So men also participate in child rearing, esp. where discipline is concerned (the complement of maternal nurturing is the need for paternal authority which serves the child later in other ways like the ability to relate to authority elsewhere in a healthy way). Women also operate in the public sphere and often also work. Conditions and circumstances can also constrain how male and female roles are expressed.
You produce a small version of yourself and you are emotionally satisfied that something you did will mean something in the end. If you get to raise the child yourself then you get to perpetuate your mental life as well.
Still selfish reasons, but at least much better than producing... laborers.
Which is exactly why many women drop out of the work force to do this important work, and many men would, too, if it was more socially acceptable for them?
Most everyone loves their mom more than anything else.
Anyway, whatever is the reason, they do take the tradeoff.
People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.
I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What if it really is better to have less money, and not have to deal with any of this work stuff?
Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?
You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?
I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.
How about increasing the tax credit that goes to all parent, regardless of they choose to do childcare? Maybe for some parents that would be enough that one parent could quit their job and finally have the joy of spending more of their time with their own kid. I don't see why we should subsidize institutional childcare over other forms of caring for the very young.
If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, then you would expect females to do better in school. Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces.
Again I don’t have a study handy so I’m not sure how empirical that is, it may just be conjecture.
Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.
If every field is 50% or better in women, you need a heck of a lot more women.
Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".
I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed like the expected amount.
I don't really think job preferences are that strongly encoded in gender, I think far more men could be kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of extra work because people don't trust men with kids as much.
I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let people decide.
It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".
I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.
That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as societies become more equal, gender disparities in field choice increase.
See: "Countries with greater gender equality have a lower percentage of female STEM graduates" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...)
I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.
Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..
Why?
Engineering is a field that selects for a certain personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class, and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men, especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic, maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for cheap laughs among their male friends.
In majors with more representation among women, you are less likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as you, and are more likely to see through the major without switching to another one.
However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never bothered to check the figures.
The top performers in my college class, struggled to get internships within my internship-mandatory program.
or maybe because your _official method_ was "under some assumptions" or "by guessing that"
I've heard that complain countless times from friends and I think always the reason was that it wasn't formally correct.
Especially with something broad like algebra, there are often many ways to solve a problem.
his job is mainly to teach you stuff.
Of course there are also tests where you can use anything you want as long as it is formally correct e.g leaving school exams, end of semester exams and many more...
It's not the greatest approach but I guess it scales?
I see the role of a teacher as someone who helps you learn, rather than someone who only teaches you things.
If a student finds a particular method or approach easier to comprehend, shouldn't the teacher adapt to that rather than forcing you to use the "correct" method?
If a teacher is dogmatic in their approach, I would call that poor teaching.
your school leaving exams or next school will probably not care
and they will test whatever they want, so why take a risk?
you can be challenged by a task which is doable in both methods, but "recommened" approach needs 3min in order to get this done,
meanwhile your's solution needs 15min. I mean here that standarized tests aren't some kind of trickery, they just tend to test how many various approaches do you know.
___________
also how many times can it be done? (deciding that it's ok to use other/easier method instead of "state of art" solution) once? twice? thrice? very often?
There are many situations where there are multiple approaches to a problem and none of them are more "correct" than the other ones.
> but "recommened" approach needs 3min in order to get this done, meanwhile your's solution needs 15min
The point is that what if the recommended approach takes someone 15min, and a different approach that they understand better takes 3min.
Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an option. They have to leave the office before day care closes. Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically more likely to impact moms.)
Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high paying, high power careers.
>women have no interest in money
Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and less interest, and also a difference between interest in money and interest in the status associated with a certain level of salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.
So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so. Just as with universal education, it starts to be available from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start making it into the skilled workforce.
Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on eternity.
1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men.
2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce correlates with academic success, one would expect it to correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on homework but only very slightly on exams.
We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff.
I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father.
There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of it can be read as systemic imbalance.
Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.
This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills" means specifically in the US:
- you perform well on standardized tests - you perform well on rubric-graded essays - you do all of your homework, and you get As on every assignment
this leads to:
- you get into a good university - you (presumably) perform adequately or well at said university
Every student who performs well academically has a similar path to this point, but then there's divergency.
Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career. It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and medicine.
Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not see a link between academic performance and engineering competency.
I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo) for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation between academic performance and representation in the top tier of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the other big industries.
So the average may be higher for girls, but that’s across all girls.
This is what the bell curves are and a result of men’s being very wide and girls’ being very narrow.
This is known as the variability hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=s...
Interestingly enough, that has a graph of the AMC math contest breakdown by sex. Check out page 7 (page number 115). When you start getting in the upper percentiles there I think that culture might magnify the male/female ratio a bit (this is based on personal experience), but at least in my high school the center mass of the scores up to 100+ or so was filled out by teachers just signing up a bunch of good students with no particular involvement in mathematical extracurriculars.
I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay" for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to do is be devastating for my social status.
It's actually interesting to talk about because technically these things are true for women too, but we have a whole industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say in anything.
We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood) that are harmful to their career, because their career is all they have.
This is close, but too strong. You only need women to have less interest in money than men to cause a difference.
A likely cause of such a difference is that men with high income and prestigious careers are very popular as romantic partners for women.
To spell it out, women in high paying jobs get a lot of money. Men in high paying jobs get a lot of money and improved romantic success.
The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.
- Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in school)
- Are better at following instructions
These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no instructions to follow when you are building the next Google: nobody did it before you.
Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction association) it was asked for the people in the room to send proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a few things we could do but we have a problem because there is not a single lady in the list'.
We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic, no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining). My only idea so far is that women and men have different instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.
I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2).
Here is my model:
1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1.
2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do some bit of work only because they see some advantage to themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude, who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic.
When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl does more homework than the median boy.
The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork. But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that get the top positions.
On top of that, in my experience, women do make different choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-actualization", while more men still have the expectation that they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed, obviously, many exceptions exist).
And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track" job than take a high-powered career path.
FTA:
> Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved ahead.
This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing.
> academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
I highly doubt that there is no correlation, but I doubt that education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the other direction.
Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.
Which is it? Their brains/bodies/chemicals? Or the social pressure?
Testosterone doesn't really kick in until high school, and the article (at least the part outside of the paywall) seems to suggest the problem exists in adolescents, not young children, so that would suggest that it's the former not the latter.
The next question is... what has changed in the last 30 years? The answer to that is most likely going to be social, and not chemical, unless you mean less lead in the air. Maybe the answer is more complicated.
Finally, what has changed in the last 30 years that might be linked to both? Well, easier access to pornography could be a factor. It's a social change that lines up with male adolescence that could be related.
In any case, the 'answer' is to try to combat the change, and wait for statisticians and scientists to study the problem to understand the root causes.