http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2021/6/why-are-we-failing-our-s...
Are they harder to teach? Possibly, even probably.
Does that mean we should just resign ourselves to mediocrity in teaching them based off of sexist stereotyping? Hard no.
I suspect that getting more men involved with elementary school teaching would help ease this issue because you'd provide more role models for young boys in elementary school. At the school I went to, there was only one male teacher for all of pre-kindergarten through 6th grade. That absence of male role models can't be a good thing.
That's interesting, I always kind of assumed it was for bored housewives, because in my direct experience most of my women teachers were married to doctors & lawyers, and it seemed like they were able to pursue a career in teaching because it didn't matter that the job paid next to nothing because they had a husband with significantly more income.
Wow, so this is exactly what people are talking about when they say check your privilege. Do you expect children to seek out a father figure in their community and have the presences of mind to consider their options and pick a good one? I grew up in a pretty privileged community and know multiple guys who had no significant father figure, or (probably worse)a very unhealthy one. As Ive gotten older I’ve come to appreciate how unless your parents are both complete rockstar geniuses, it really helps to have a variety of both father and mother figures in your life to give you better context for how to mature and succeed in life.
> but we did not have this problem.
Yeah, I guess when the patriarchal aristocracy was virtually the only group getting advanced degrees we didn't have this problem. lol. Nevermind that society was extremely geared toward getting and staying married and was very judgemental about women who chose not to have kids and out of wedlock children in times gone by. There’s a reason we celebrate people like Marie Curie and Grace Hopper, they stood against social expectations and showed the male-dominated world what women were capable of.
>it really helps to have a variety of both father and mother figures in your life to give you better context for how to mature and succeed in life.
Isn't that exactly what the GP is saying, and relates to the question they are asking? We have more options than just school for male role models, so why would a lack of male role models in just school be the problem?
>I grew up in a pretty privileged community and know multiple guys who had no significant father figure, or (probably worse)a very unhealthy one.
And here is the real crux of it all. The argument that it doesn't matter where the role model is coming from, as long as the children have one. Yet one can argue in recent years, the family unit has been breaking down. Not just in the form of broken homes and divorces causing fathers to lose touch with their kids, but also expecting society and education to raise kids despite the severe lack in father figures (read: boy-positive male teachers).
>Showed the male-dominated world what women were capable of.
As an aside, where men were dominating the top, they were also dominating the bottom. And they still are dominating both the top and the bottom. The whole "patriarchy" thing isn't as rose-colored for men as people like to believe it is, and such statements contribute to the current narrative which leaves the boys described in the article on the wayside.
I do not think child participates in "patriarchal aristocracy", I only say that me and many other people I know have found other role model than biological father even without having male teacher. I do not know why there is pertinence on children out of wedlock, we mostly still see it as bad but I think you have already some anger on this subject and it has no relation here. Are you making statements that government school must provide male role model so women can have children without marriage and those children have role model? In loco parentis is not the intended normal course for all children to such an extent.
And this is exactly why I said you are acting privileged, most of my friends have no religion and I dont even know anyone who was in the scouts. Going to a friend's house wasnt easy, male teachers absolutely helped, in a big way. I'm glad that worked for those guys, but that's hardly universal. Not everyone has a community to support them.
>I think we must limit degree to which government employee acts as role model for child.
Care to elaborate as to why you think that? I have the diametrically opposite opinion. Looking at this data, society is currently failing boys, I think that providing more role models is a step in the right direction. If the government doesnt do it for those less fortunate boys, who will?
>I do not know why there is pertinence on children out of wedlock, we mostly still see it as bad but I think you have already some anger on this subject and it has no relation here.
What? I have anger on this subject? nah. Please don't make assumptions about how others feel, its pretty rude and destructive. We're talking about societal trends of boys having less father figures, that absolutely has relavence here. I also find your presumption of seeing single mothers as bad as pretty... archaic. Live and let live.
> I do not think child participates in "patriarchal aristocracy
I'm sorry, I guess I was clear enough, my point was directed at:
>>>For a long time teacher was only a job for young unwed women, but we did not have this problem with boys
When being a teacher was only a job for young unmarried women and we weren't having this problem with boys, elite academics absolutely was the realm of the patriarchal aristocracy. To be very clear, I'm positing that we didnt have this problem because academics used to be sexist and classist. Times change, society changes and government needs to adapt.
And yet not long ago: "In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men ... This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about." President Barack Obama.
It goes back to kindergarten. We have known for over a decade that this occurs. And yet we get these fake baffled faces. Education is currently actively hostile towards boys and young men. Just imagine how fraught trying to date would be if you were a young man in a university now and had heterosexual leanings.
And yet that wage gap "factoid" continues to be chanted at every turn.
> Just imagine how fraught trying to date would be if you were a young man in a university now and had heterosexual leanings.
What? THAT's why the educational system is actively hostile towards boys and young men? Because non-consensual sex is less acceptable than it was 20 years ago?
I know young men in college, and things are fine. People drink a little less, talk a little more, are more careful about sex. Everyone still dates, and has sex, and has a good time.
And I've seen what happens to rape victims, and it is awful. No one should have to experience that. If the tradeoff is people communicating more and drinking less in exchange for fewer campus rapes, I'm all for it.
If you didn't "believe," actual fistfights occurred. The accuser would later change her story, and managed to fabricate other things as time went on, including frankly supernatural events.
A pointing finger is all that is required these days. And perhaps you should do a bit more reading on some current travesties of justice that have occurred on campuses as of late.
Everyone knows it's overkill, but nobody wants to be the exception that proves the rule.
Not sure what you mean:
- What does the difficulty of dating have to do with the education system?
- My understanding is that the abundance of dating apps should have made dating significantly easier nowadays than in the past. Is that not the case?
- Why is sexuality relevant for this point? The article is primarily focused on gender
If anything my single friends biggest complaint is that apps are the defacto way of dating, even before the pandemic. Your options were basically apps, mutual introduction, or bars. Even bars I would say were slowing down, at least amongst my age group, because everyone was so busy with work, or just general life stuff.
Also you are dating yourself with that last sentence.
> Also you are dating yourself with that last sentence.
Nice pun but no, I am typical college age. I dont see how it's "dating myself" to not want to marry somebody in 7-10 years who hooks up a lot now.
Out of curiosity what would you define as "a lot"?
Here's a little unsolicited advice from one older man to a younger one, take it or leave it: As you age, you will find older women more attractive, and younger women less attractive. I dunno why that is; maybe this is because older women no longer resemble your mother (because she's aged as well), and younger women start to resemble your own children (who you shouldn't be attracted to). But I've found it to be true. If you have a relationship with the same woman over a long period of time (long meaning decades), you'll find yourself attracted to her at any age, and increasingly over the years. You'll see, even as her looks fade (and they will, just as yours will) you will still find her more attractive than when she was ostensibly "in her prime".
Most people have ~5-8 sexual partners, so that’s not that likely.
As far as what I think is a lot, if I’m seeing someone who slept around a lot, if they did it because they enjoy sex and were having healthy sexual relationships, I really don’t care about the number. If anything, the women who have more experience are more open and confident.
I guess the last time I thought “man maybe that’s getting to be a high number”, a friend of mine crossed the 50-partner mark. Sooo, I suppose that’s the general zone of “a lot”. But I don’t ascribe any moral or character issues to that number.
Maybe! Though if the 25-year-old women don't want to get married, and the 30-year-old women are just starting to think about it, the primary options for guys will be the 35-year-olds.
Here's the long Eurostat link (use the Sex dropdown to look at the different sexes):
https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKM...
Though the relatively large jump between 2018 and 2019 seems odd, I assume there's some additional factor(s) I'm unaware of affecting the totals.
It is always the same story and nothing seems to change.
An example from Daniel Kahneman's Noise (I'm paraphrasing) - When university faculty was told of their bias in marking from hunger/mood/normal daily human sways, why didn't the first person marking it write the grade on the back so the second couldn't see it until the end: They responded that they used to do it that way, but it caused arguments.
There are lots of book about this. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ...
Motivation...just is. It is also highly changeable.
The same student might enter a course with a highly intrinsic motivation for a topic, slide towards a more extrinsic motivation as a test or exam approaches, and then migrates back to intrinsic if a well thought out project is given.
Course and pedagogy design are highly influential on the types of motivation as are social and emotional factors. Self-regulation of emotion is definitely an area of development and (maturity) but there is no right, the potential for multiple different forms of motivation exists in everyone.
I'm talking about empirical research about motivation rather than platitudes though. It would be wonderful if all of my students were motivated to learn the subject matter I teach, believe me. However, it is more useful to understand their motivation and engage with it. That can include identifying ways to link what would motivate them to learn a subject matter (personal interests) to the class material.
Favor shouldn't really enter the equation when linking motivation and education.
It has absolutely nothing to do with doctoral degrees. Why even bring it up?
It is a difference, but hardly shows that men are disengaged masses.
0.00000001% can be significant so long as the sample size be large enough.
It simply means it's unlikely that the numbers are caused by a statistical fluke and expected to show up again in a reproductive attempt.
Of course significant numbers are very often not reproduced, both due to that the publishing industry selects upon creating this result and because the mathematical principles that compute significance are simply abused, both willfully, and due to lack of understanding of the assumptions behind it.
Because honestly; I feel this secondary meaning is a buzzword transferred from the first meaning which actually has meaning, but in the secondary case it's simply used to use an expensive word without understanding it.
Edit: Another example is significant digits. Significant digits is a much older concept than significance in statistics, and maps much better to the original meaning of significance. Basically significant things are things you can't ignore when you do your analysis.
That doesn't answer what I asked: what exactly is the meaning here because I remain unconvinced that it's not simply an empty buzzword inserted that transferred from it's usage of statistics, especially when used in conjunction with percentages.
> Edit: Another example is significant digits. Significant digits is a much older concept than significance in statistics, and maps much better to the original meaning of significance. Basically significant things are things you can't ignore when you do your analysis.
Indeed, and that has a meaning that I understand which is also morphologically transparent, but in this supposed meaning of the word which you've to elaborate upon it is neither morphologically transparent, nor do I actually see any meaning in it and I still feel it's used as a buzzword to simply make use of a fancy word for it's own sake.
As for what it means: "important and deserving of attention; of consequence" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/significant)
Where did this come from? When did the discussion apparently become about this?
Edit: For the sake of clarity, my comment was tongue-in-cheek as it's the justification I repeatedly see whenever gender imbalance/inequality is mentioned on HN. I think it's patently ridiculous to say that one gender is for some reason more interested in learning than another.
Ideally we would have a Germany-like system that better guides training for these populations and professions to help create a more robust working class.
If the books are about robots and the manual task is taking care of kids you'd draw the opposite conclusion.
Building mechanized and static systems with a specialized subset of tools has been found to be more of interest by men across cultures. Who knows if this is due to natural selection.
The main reason universities see more women than men is that universities focuses more on subjects women likes than men likes. If universities removed most social science courses you'd see mostly men in higher education.
The reason you see people complain about these things here is that they reverse the complaints about men dominating engineering. It wouldn't be right if people only complained about men dominating engineering, so to even that out people also complain when women dominate other subjects.
You see the same just-so storytelling when it's observed that women achieve more chemistry doctorates than they do physics doctorates. "But women are interested in medical careers". A chemistry PhD is not part of the ordinary path towards getting a medical degree. Or with math: "women are interested in being teachers, so they get math degrees". Not PhD's, they don't.
Your theory that women are held back by bias would require that every developed country coordinated their biases so they map the same by field. That doesn't make sense, there is no way I'll believe that is true unless some really extreme evidence is provided. How else would you explain that the gender ratio for these subjects in Russia is very close to the same as in USA? It isn't like they share culture etc. There are so many fields, why would biology have the most women, then chemistry, then civil, then mechanical etc? It is too much of a coincidence.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
1. Tech in the US is super lucrative and you can't cherry-pick it--women's salaries increase by 77% if they switch to tech here. This is true across the board: in the bottom 13 of your linked Index (sorted by % Difference of Women in Workforce and Women in Tech) women get a 29% salary increase, whereas in the top 13 the increase is 51%. This probably indicates a more parsimonious explanation: despite being more hostile to women, tech in these countries is more lucrative.
2. More broadly though, it doesn't pass a simple smoke test. Just in the top 13, how are Iceland, Ireland, and Canada right next to Romania, Turkey, and Mexico? There's a sincere lack of correlation.
This chart represents this. It extracts the "T" from the rest of STEM.
All fields were dominated by men 80 years ago and were extremely hostile to women. Since some fields attracted women and others didn't, if that was just random chance then you'd expect different cultures to see women take interest in different fields, but that didn't happen. Instead this evolved similarly all over the world.
So to me your explanation looks extremely weak. You can believe in that, but you wont convince me on this, there is just too much data in my favor. Of course the future could prove me wrong and I am open to that, but I'd argue that the data we have today strongly supports my stance.
Note, I am not saying that we should discourage women who want to enter these fields. That serves absolutely no purpose.
They certainly shared patriarchy which has been around a lot longer than the cold war. You haven't provided much in the way of numbers being 'the same' but the comparison would also be skewed by these countries' significantly different gender ratios, on top of many other factors.
You don’t think evolution plays a role in behavior?
Seen as another example of Sexism in Higher Education
Interesting how things change
So it's fascinating that there are issues faced by this population that aren't moving despite everything being aligned to just make them go away and that you have to fight for them like they were minority issues. And what's crazy is that for these issues the population you need to convince that these issues are important are white men!
Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers to have to be broken down to get people to care about them.
1. That the factors that are keeping men out of teaching and nursing are internal -- lack of motivation or ability, rather than external factors like discrimination or access to education.
2. That nursing and teaching are "low status" careers so it doesn't matter if there's a gender gap because nobody is really clamoring to be one.
3. That nursing and teaching are "women's work," which is especially funny since teaching used to be male dominated.
Any evidence for this? To me it seems like people care much more about homeless women even though most homeless are men, they care more about womens suicides even though men kill themselves more, they care more about when women get murdered even though men get murdered more etc.
People care more about white people than black people, yes. People care more about cis than trans, yes. But I have seen no evidence at all that people care more about men than women.
The people who talk about female suicides are the ones who argue that women should go back to traditional home. They are hardly feminists and suicides are not much topic related to women.
Are you just making that up? Have you seen any homeless shelters exclusively serving men? There are plenty for women. Or do you just assume that when people say "homeless" they mean a man since most homeless women have already gotten help and therefore isn't homeless? I haven't seen a single article arguing that we should prioritize male homelessness, but plenty that we should prioritize female homelessness.
This is such a lie, From mental Health, to Domestic Abuse, to Substance abuse, there is almost zero funding, or support for programs targeting men; race not withstanding.
Try opening a Domestic Violence Shelter for men and see what happens, as a man try going to a domestic violence shelter for aid and see what happens
It is "Suck it up and be a man" that is societal response and has been for decades. This is why male suicide is through the roof.
>>Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers
While some of those are true, there is also a societal narrative that men are abusers, that men can not be trusted with children. Be a single dad and take your child to the park and see the looks from others there, in some cases maybe even has the cops called on you...
This extends to teaching and nursing as well. This is related to number 3, but you paint it has a gender norms issue, and while that is some of it, that issue is far more complex then you are leading on.
The thing that makes it hard to write off is that over a large enough population and across time you would expect it to even out. That doesn't mean that year over year there won't natural swings one way or another but the fact that it's always more women says something interesting about higher education that almost surely we'd want to correct. We don't necessarily know what it says without looking but something is making it so that men aren't pursuing, getting excluded from, or having difficulty getting their doctorates.