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Comment by lordgroff | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what the situation is like in the United States, but in Canada, this "abandoning" (ahem) is a direct function of eroding performance of boys that starts right in elementary school and continues right through high school. This leads to obviously fewer male university students. The trend is clear and has been going on for two decades.

Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It's not a discussion that can currently be had.

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Here is your chance to talk about it, these discussions are permitted on HN. How do we know it's really happening and what can we do about it? Let me throw out a few takes to stir things up.

- Maybe girls are naturally better at sitting still, and have always had an advantage in learning spelling and times tables that was not revealed until recently because the system was biased against them.

- Maybe a change in amounts of permitted physical activity has negatively impacted the ability to focus in anyone with a natural propensity to exercise, showing up in hyperactive kids and of course anyone with a lot of testosterone... or prenatal testosterone exposure, or whatever makes boys more likely to run around the playground hitting each other with sticks (I'm not an endocrinologist if you can't tell), in their systems.

- Maybe all we accomplished in the 1980s was replacing sexism type A with sexism type B.

- Maybe the performance gap is due to some kind of measurement error, like not comparing the performance of boys and girls at the same task. Maybe boys, due to (I'm just making stuff up here) being pushed towards math and science even if they don't want to do it, end up in more difficult classes and get lower grades in spite of equal ability.

The only thing I really know is that there's not an IQ difference between genders and the innate capacity of both groups, preferences, attention span, etc. notwithstanding, is about equal.

There is a relevant iq difference in the distribution pattern. Not the average

I guess that inspires another take:

- Suppose performance in the school system has an upper limit slightly above average, but no lower limit. Then anything that increases the variance of one group, whether innate ability or environmental effects, will show up as a fall in the group's average, because the growth in the high end of the curve is disproportionately not being measured, while the growth in the low end is.

Grade inflation ('A's becoming more common, 'D's less common etc) would also show up as boys performing relatively worse over time in this scenario.

"The only thing I really know is that there's not an IQ difference between genders and the innate capacity of both groups, preferences, attention span, etc. notwithstanding, is about equal."

This doesn't seem to be completely true. The averages are nearly identical, but the variability is quite different. Most studies will show that males have a wider bell curve than females on nearly every task (Math, Reading Comprehension, etc.).

Having this kind discussion would be good even through it is likely to tread ground that people might not want to think about.

One researched explanation is gender bias in how teachers grade student performance. Studies done over standardized test has demonstrated gains for boys when grading is done gender-blind. There has also been studies done that looked at the gender of the teacher which shown favoritism towards the teachers own gender. One explanation for that is that empathy is easier along race and gender lines which then impact grading to be more harsher towards the out group.

The one thing I would not look too much at is hormones of either girls or boys as it has a long history of being abused, over valued and miss-interpreted. Estrogens does not cause girls to become emotional unstable nor does testosterone cause boys to be become wild beasts. The biggest effect they have generally is to regulate behavior towards social status, which if its not obvious has a big dose of culture attached to it.

And here we see the cost of privilege discourse.

Once a particular identity is designated as "privileged", it becomes untenable in political circles to acknowledge problems that uniquely face them, or propose solutions to those problems which can't be acknowledged.

...which is why young male suicide goes absolutely unaddressed.

It impacts predominately young white men.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...

We can't discuss difference between genders and how important it is that we recognize it because of crucial key differences.

It's going to be part of our downfall if it hasn't already started happening.

The educational system is suboptimal for everyone. A optimal one would customize the experience for every student.

Creating a seperate education system for each sex would likely create more problems than it solves.

It really shouldn't be that hard. Where I grew up there were four same-sex only schools. Two for boys, two for girls.

Sure, and that probably creates difficulties for men and women to understand each other.

I think it gave them a chance to understand themselves better. I went to the co-ed school, but my friends from all of the same-sex schools all expressed the benefit of not having to worry about the other sex during school time.

I will say I greatly enjoyed my time at all boys catholic school. Much more focus and camaraderie throughout the entire grade instead of the drama that ensues when you have couples holding hands in the hallway.

edit: Note I did 2 years of high school at catholic and 2 years at public.

How would we generate the identical cog factory workers that 1921 requires if we customize education?

The problem with education in the USA is its even more backwards focused than what happens with military strategy. "Better education" in the USA means optimizing for your great grandparents experience. If thats the opposite of modern reality, well, too bad, it'll filter for kids that are flexible and open minded, which ironically is pretty useful in the modern world.

Canadian here. Is it a no-go zone? Because discussing targeted measures to help underperforming groups is very widespread and those programs exist. They also tend to be maligned and denounced with arguments like railing against equality of outcomes, vs equality of opportunity. I also can't help but notice that these arguments are usually made by the exact same people as the ones who complain about boys falling behind.

That is to say, I don't see Pierre Poilievre types advocating for things like TDSB's Afrocentric Alternative Schools.

I can't get into too much detail because I've been historically involved in this research and I'd rather not have my identity public on HN.

I do have to say that I was more than a little surprised that this would be such a controversial subject given the rather obvious patterns observed. But it very much was, and it still is.

Frankly, this experience was not positive for me, since it showed me how politically charged these things are, something which makes no sense to me. I mean, even your comment strays off right into who-is-making-the-argument, rather than whether it might be a problem that half of the school kids are falling further and further behind. I know that if I had boys entering school, this would concern me, but it's hardly even acknowledged.

I don't know you, nor your views, but consider that the reason this happens is that the people pushing this are acting in complete bad faith. They are not interested in using objective measures to help struggling groups succeed, they are merely using this fact to reinforce and promote their reactionary politics. Solving the problem will weaken these groups and their views which is why actually doing anything is out of the question.

As you can see from the rest of the replies to your comment, it is merely a convenient launchpad for advocating incel-derived views of men's "rights", white supremacy etc. Maybe you don't see anything odd about this, but the reactions you're seeing in the real world happen because normal people don't want to be seen advocating for these views.

I worry far, far more about boys falling into black hole of cynicism and victimhood. I've seen it happen to adult friends of mine and it's tragic.

I saw neither incel nor white supremacy in any of the replies to lordgroff's top-level comment. Are you sure you're not projecting?

It seems they were deleted. There were comments going several levels deep about how this is as a result of the vilification of white males, how colleges are full of days celebrating everyone but whites, how it's totally understandable why white supremacist groups have taken "it's ok to be white" as their slogan, etc, etc. Lots of pretty standard right-wing dreg.

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