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Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

> Men are not doing as well as women in school.

Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.

I'm not just playing with words; it is really important to frame the share of responsibility correctly.

It is the school's job to educate the kid, not kid's job to compensate for the dysfunctions of an education system. I'll generalize because I don't have any detailed data; anyone from the front-line educator to the curriculum designer to the budget maker is potentially responsible for this failure. On this particular issue, they are the ones not doing well, not the kids.

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> > Men are not doing as well as women in school.

> Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.

Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success, which is being made more clear now that systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain.

Equality of opportunity doesn't mean equality of outcomes, after all.

> Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success

Maybe. A strong essentialist proposition requires an equally strong evidence, though. Have you got any?

> systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain

What positive systemic discrimination do boys receive in education? Since we are not observing a sudden drop after K-12 but a longitudinal effect, please explain starting from K, if any.

If that were true then why wouldn’t you want to change academia so that it works well for both men and women? Wouldn’t that be the obvious ethical path to take?

I agree with you that changing academia so it works well for both men and women is the right thing to do. Find ways to help men improve reading and writing skills so they aren't left behind, and help women improve math and computer skills so they aren't left behind. The purpose of education is to uplift. Sometimes we get too caught up in it as a competition.

Men run most governments. Men own most companies. Men dominate the higher levels of corporations. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and other highly paid professionals are men. Men simply own more capital than women, by a huge margin.

It looks like schools are performing better for men than women.

You are looking at metrics with a lag period of 50 years, and also assuming a 50 50 split is the natural state

> Most ... doctors, lawyers ... are men.

Today there are more women graduating medical and law school than men. Given the trends the current imbalance (of sheer numbers) will be a thing of the past in a decade or two.

> It looks like schools are performing better for men than women.

Or school isn't the only factor? Schools could be failing boys, and society could be failing women in other ways.

Allow me to correct the two logical distortions in your proposition.

Distortion 1) You can't take the outliers of a flatter distribution and generalize that to the entire population. You can't even compare the averages of two separate distributions without qualifiers.

It is true, most of the people who run governments are men. Most of the people who own companies are men. Most of the people who dominate C levels are men. Most highly paid professionals are mostly held by men. Most of the top outliers of capital ownership are men.

But it is also true most men don't run governments. Most men are not even remotely close to running companies. Most men are not C level execs. Most men don't have high paying jobs. Most men don't have any capital (if not negative).

Distortion 2) Even if it was true that it was exclusively powerful men's fault that boys are failing, it is completely irrelevant to bring it up when talking about men as victims, unless one would also suggest that boys somehow deserve to suffer educational disadvantages because of those men have a lot of capital, or there is some hidden variable that connects the two events.

So, what is your take on this? Do we ignore the fact that the top of our society is dominated by men and only focus on the men in the 40th to 60th percentile of income? Even then, you would see a similar pattern between the earning potential between men and women. I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.

>>>I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.

Start with men suffering ~90% of workplace fatalities?

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf

Why is there no push for women to be equally represented in the jobs that SUCK? Where are the feminists advocating for 50% of coal miners and loggers to be female? Nowhere to be found....because they want to secure the benefits that accrue to a small fraction of men, produced by the whole civilization (C-level positions, etc.) without sharing the bone-crushing burdens endured by the larger swathe of the male population that actually enables it.

>> Start with men suffering ~90% of workplace fatalities?

Well, given that we’re talking about labour…

And how many men die in childbirth? Men have a choice to take dangerous jobs. Women don’t have a choice to have medical complications during labour.

> And how many men die in childbirth?

I'd say about 50% of the neonatal death rate.

Seriously though, US has an unexpectedly high maternal death rate for a western country: https://www.statista.com/chart/23541/maternal-mortality-deve...

>>>And how many men die in childbirth?

100% of the males who get naturally pregnant. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. It's almost like there are biological differences between men and women, and that these organisms are largely optimized for distinct roles in the human system.

>>>Men have a choice to take dangerous jobs.

If men flat-out refused to do dangerous work....our entire industrialized economy would collapse, because at the end of the day all of it is built on top of natural resource extraction. Are you suggesting that all those men digging rare earth metals out of the ground should just #learntocode?

>>>Women don’t have a choice to have medical complications during labour.

But they DO have choice to not get pregnant at all, right? If men are accountable for their choice of profession and the inherent risks, are women not accountable for their reproductive choices and inherent risks? If reducing (obviously gender-skewed) labor complications is a valid societal concern, than shouldn't reducing (also gender-skewed) workplace fatalities also be a valid societal concern? I'm not really sure what you are arguing here with the pregnancy angle.

> 100% of the males who get naturally pregnant.

Almost, some trans men can get pregnant. But I am being pedantic.

If you want to look at improving people's economic success, why not group people by that metric?

Far better to send economic help to the poor, instead of by gender/race/religion etc.

My take is that we ought to be careful about framing biases. I don't think "men" is the most useful variable to formulate every problem with. Unless we have evidence that there is an essence to every man that manifests itself in every one of these instances, we can't reduce solving these problems to "solving men".

> Do we ignore the fact that the top of our society is dominated by men and only focus on the men in the 40th to 60th percentile of income?

Like I said, we have to be careful not to treat them as joint issues. Unless proven otherwise, problems regarding a lack diversity of representation at executive classes is not related to economic problems of lower income percentiles, or educational prospects of young boys for that matter.

The other framing bias is to treat as if can only fix one problem and we can only focus on that. It is actually a blessing that these are disjoint issues and we can multitask as a society and make incremental progress.

> I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.

I think again this is because of attaching too much valence to category "men". You sound like a compassionate person and I think you wouldn't disagree if we formulated the problem as "any individual who is suffering raw deals should be treated fairly", even if those individuals happened to be low-income men or undereducated boys. I think true justice can only happen if no one is left behind. And treating men as a monolithic category will have the consequence of leaving some behind that shouldn't have been.

Men are subject to more natural selection pressure than women. There is genetic evidence for this.

You do understand there’s lag between school outcomes and mid-career adults, yes?

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