Hacker News Reader

> The education gap between men and women are growing. More women enroll and graduate from college then men. Many young men, mostly lower-middle class, (whether fairly or not) feel like the education system does not work for them.

So, like, isn't the question "why"?

Why do boys, particularly lower- or lower-middle class, not believe in the education system as much as their sisters?

School sucks, work sucks, then you die. But that's not new. And it's not stopping the girls/women. So why aren't the boys doing what previous generations did?

I don't know the answer, but just saying "they don't like it" is hard to action on. Are parents too indulgent with boys in a way they aren't with girls? Is boy-oriented media setting up more unrealistic expectations relative to girl-oriented stuff? Are there just that many boys who can't deal with a world where uncontrolled aggression is less tolerated? I haven't seen a really good thorough investigation of this. (I've seen lots of bad-faith "this is what happens when you leave the Bible behind and women don't have to serve their men" ones...)

I'm also not sure how much "we" as a society should care in the aggregate, vs having empathy for in the specific. Things never stay static, the system (institutions, culture, and individuals) will likely adjust. It's sad an overachieving woman reaches the top and can't find the ideal person she had built up in her head. It's sad a man doesn't apply himself in school or to building his social skills can't find dates. But it's also great that that woman was able to do all that. And there are still countless happy relationships and marriages happening - and many of them eventually separate, but overall, it seems like there is less violence and misery than in the past.

A possible explanation is that most teachers in primary school are female, which creates an environment and behavioral expectations that favor girls, e.g.:

- Teachers and the Gender Gaps in Student Achievement - https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLII/3/528

- Gender differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ temperament, educational competence, and teachability - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.2010.02017.x

That seems weird though, right? Cause in the US teachers, especially for early-childhood, have been predominantly female since before this gap.

The world is much larger than the US ;)

It could be that there were other external factors that used to counter-balance this effect, and are now being removed, such as, for example, the quest for increasing female participation in STEM no matter what, or general societal norms beyond school spurred by the rise of femminism.

In any case, the academinc literature on this topic is vast (and not so clear cut), so if you really have not seen thorough investigations on the topic beyond "boys don't like it" or something from the Bible you can start by reading papers citing those I mentioned above:

- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3048749496880924830...

- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8365905588440304050...

Let me rephrase my complain about what I've seen. There is a lot of academic work on this stuff, but I'd characterize it as very "leaf node" oriented on certain aspects. E.g., grabbing a few at random:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652... - boys may not have or get given the right sort of motivations

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/016237371771405... - teacher demographic match affects student perceptions of abilities and confidence and such

https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12... - young kids tend to believe boys do worse at school

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/129/3/1409/181... - boys being more competitive pushes them towards more prestigious fields but the genders show overall similar levels of ability

That's just sort of how the modern academic system works. Specialization.

There's nothing wrong with that, but where I live it isn't turning into serious policy conversations that look at thing more broadly and with a longer view. It might in other places, but I can't speak to those.

I would love to see more of those serious conversations where I live. For instance, again specific to my experience in the US, it seems unlikely that "get more male teachers" would make a dent in a problem that started independently of primary teachers being overwhelmingly women.

I've read that even among female teachers theres a big difference in approach to misbehaving boys depending on if they had a male sibling or not. With declining fertility rates, you can imagine that being less and less common.

In France, the female teacher ratio is 80+% in primary school and ~60% in secondary.

From what I can see, women are statistically more OK to accept and fit in. Men are more likely to become the challengers and want to have their share of the pie.

We didn't just create opportunities, we also stigmatized challenging the status quo and shifted the focus to complying and keeping the lights on. Many men would find this deal kinda empty, pointless and ultimately depressing.

"It's sad an overachieving woman reaches the top and can't find the ideal person she had built up in her head"

If you're at the top, and select for men higher than that top, that's not sad. It's delusional. A 1%-er selecting for a 0.1%-er is the least of society's problems.

Unhappiness is the natural conclusion of unrealistic expectations meeting realty.

> School sucks, work sucks, then you die. But that's not new. And it's not stopping the girls/women. So why aren't the boys doing what previous generations did?

Because schooling is now expensive and doesn't immediately translate to better economic outcomes nowadays for men. It generally does over time, but it takes a bit for the return, nowadays.

For women, as the article points out, school is also an economic investment for hunting for a partner. The fact that women won't "date down" like men will means that there is a difference in reciprocity in the investment.

It's because the education system is systematically biased against males and they pick up on this, correctly perceiving education as a system run by sexists that will penalize them for their gender and which doesn't really want them there.

Anti-male hiring bias in academia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762380

Grading biases in high school:

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school.

This is a problem with society but especially amongst liberals, who dominate the education system. Your own comments display very clear and strong anti-male bias, ascribing the issue to parents being indulgent (!), boys uncontrolled aggression being the problem, the media, that men don't apply themselves ... any explanation except the obvious one that teachers aren't treating people fairly.

Boys respond almost an order of magnitude worse to missing father figures than girls. This is understood to be one of the causes in aggregate. Fewer involved fathers these days.

> Many women still hold on to the idea of finding a partner that is wealthier and more educated. This is due to the past (over)reliance of their partners for stability. But this is no longer true.

I'm not sure this is absolutely true - at least for Germany. Here the figures show, that women and men, ceteris paribus, earn pretty much the same (+-3%). Until... children come into the mix. The lack of child care and societies view on parental leave (for men at least) means, that generally speaking the woman stays home to take care of the child and later on moves on to a part time position thus earning less and having to rely on the partners income again.

I think that’s a good point but the idea your (male) partner has to make more seems silly.

The core idea of finding a partner that is strictly better is the concern the article raises. If she makes 300k a year and he makes 150k a year, the studies suggest women would refuse to take that.

But if we suppose they get together, even with the haircut in wages from taking time for childcare, they will still have a great standard of living.

I'm skeptical that the studies cover income that far above the median actually.

I think it’ll sort itself out fairly quickly. Women who refuse to “date down” will find themselves getting older and lonelier. They’ll open themselves up to more potential partners because long term loneliness is much worse than status anxiety (and people tend to lose their status anxiety as they get older).

I am not optimistic that it’ll sort itself out. In my experience spinsters get more radical and less agreeable, in effect double down on their beliefs. It’s like watching a train wreck that takes 30 years.

I’ve seen both women and men become embittered over time and I don’t think any of them will recover.

Yeah, bitterness has a way of sustaining itself.

After a while being bitter becomes your primary coping mechanism, it gets harder to let go of it.

I had a striking conversation with my dad recently, where he said that the thing that helped him get better was being alone, because he had nobody left to blame his problems on except himself. But some people can sustain the bitterness even alone!

I don't think so. My anecdotal experience in life is that people tend to settle in their beliefs somewhere in their 30s, and will stick to it even if it's a type of self harm.

Both men and women will turn bitter and simply opt-out for life. Not all, but many. Women that do this tend to be better off than men, as they have a type of alternative support network whilst many men do not.

Added bonus of selecting for the 0.01% of men: if you're extraordinarily lucky to secure him, you have a new problem: the man has options.

Thats one thing I don't understand about hypergamy (dating app data proves it), why would a woman be in a situation in which she is easily the second, third wheel or worse

Status signaling to other women, I imagine. But perhaps also media/social media fueling these unrealistic expectations and incorrectly normalizing them.

I think it's a direct representation of how unequal the power in society is.

Being the 10th wife of a price is better than being the first wife of a commoner somewhere like Saudi Arabia (as an example - can pick any society with high power inequality) in terms of the chances of reproductive success of your offspring.

> But in 10-20 years women will out number men in many fields requiring higher education

The irony is, that those white-collar higher education jobs might be the first to be replaced by AI, and in the end not result in high income. We might be looking at a future where a builder, plumber, craftsman etc. will be high up in income and status. I'm curious to see if women with high education but low income would suddenly be attracted to men with low (formal) education and high income.

Because leftist women/men in "power cities" in the Coasts would be affected, I expect enormous regulations to protect them, unless strategically (against china) damaging.

"Many women still hold on to the idea of finding a partner that is wealthier and more educated. This is due to the past (over)reliance of their partners for stability. But this is no longer true."

This independence remains to be seen. The assumption is that a higher education for women will structurally lead to complete financial independence across their life's path but I believe this to be a rosy view.

First, for all but the top 10%, the cost of living is so high that it almost requires a partner. There goes your independence.

Second, you have to make it to the end. Say you go at it alone, that means ~45 years of relentless full-time work, managing the 401K and nothing can happen under way, as there will be nobody to help. This is the existential stress that men have always faced in their provider role. The complete lack of optionality, zero tolerance for failure, and lack of any safety net. This is not to say that women can't handle this, I'm saying it remains to be seen.

Third, whilst women may be highly educated, a huge portion of them work in administrative functions, NGOs, the like. Fields that are very exposed to the swings of the economy.