Based on the search results and point scores, I'd wager that no article with "women" and "engineering" has ever been at the top of the front page, as this presently is.
You're moving the goalposts set in your original post, but a quick search[1] shows many articles on Hacker News about the gap between men and women in engineering. Many with more points than this post currently has.
It does seem like this post is growing more quickly than these did, but perhaps because this is a more surprising/novel development, whereas the gap of women in engineering roles is much more commonly known?
I'm implying that "a gender difference which ostensibly disadvantages boys in education" will get more attention than "a gender difference which ostensibly disadvantages women in engineering".
On a forum which is organised around engineering.
And people will claim that the latter gets more attention, despite being shown evidence to the contrary. That's pretty average sexism.
(I also would note that this hasn't been up for long enough for people to be up-voting for the content, given that you can only access it as a 23-minute podcast.)
As discussed above - despite widening the goalposts to include any article with 'women' and 'engineering' in the title, there is now only one such article which matches the popularity of this one - and based on the trajectory, that is unlikely to remain the case.
I've seen many discussions like that. The title sounds a bit weird because everyone already knows that many engineering fields are mostly male, so nobody would write a headline as if this was news.
I don’t know what point you’re making, but it’s certainly not uncommon to see articles noting that women lag men in certain professions, even insinuating strongly that the cause is discrimination without a shard of evidence.
I taught in public schools and studied pediatric ADHD. From those experiences, I found boys had a number of disadvantages. First off, they are more motor-hyperactive, they move, fidget, get out of their chairs: their very neurochemistry develops differently, making them less adept at the "sit still and write notes" aspect of school.
This isn't "bad parenting" or "overdiagnosis of ADHD" by the way, the brain of a young male develops differently, specifically their pre-frontal cortex (executive function, how to behave/regulate oneself) develops much slower, whereas the motor-neural cortex is overly developed, relative to girls.
Beyond any developmental difference in the sexes, there's culture. Where I taught, the South and West sides of Chicago, any troubled boy was more likely to join a gang, sell drugs, commit violence, etc. These poor boys could be jumped and beaten for living on the wrong street. One student was having anger issues, his cousin got killed, he had latent anger issues which prevented prioritization of school work. Another common issue: his father is gone, he's switching homes constantly, there's no stability to facilitate the slow, incremental progress that is school and learning.
Beyond sheer dangerous problems like the above, I'd say boys channel their effort into sports and gaming more, whereas the girls I taught were more concerned with social circles, popularity, social media, etc. Question, do we think gaming is "better" for mental health than social media? If so, boys may be advantaged, I recall my boy students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic.
There is a change that happens around puberty, when I was in seventh grade I noticed it acutely. Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus to follow the teacher's lesson. It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
Edit: There's a bit of discussion of "overdiagnosis" or "misdiagnosis" of ADHD. This is a complex issue, but I will say I don't think anecdata is constructive here. By blaming bad parenting or video games or candy, we ignore the reams of data which show that many children can not focus and struggle MIGHTILY due to this.
Children with ADHD have less friends, less academic success, more likelihood to abuse drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, cocaine/nicotine (their dopaminergic system is uniquely vulnerable to stimulants). This is a sad trajectory for these kids, and I think we should consider carefully before we blanket accuse the medical system of overdiagnosis or misdiagnosis.
> It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
My experience as well. I taught 7th and 6th grade and the 6th graders were especially fascinating as you could see the transition happening throughout the year and for different students.
> First off, they are more motor-hyperactive, they move, fidget, get out of their chairs: their very neurochemistry develops differently, making them less adept at "sit still and write notes" aspect of school.
Right. And instead of changing school to adapt to kids (e.g., less sitting in chairs, more free play), we change kids to adapt to school (e.g., medicate, discipline, hold back).
Montessori had the right idea here, but goes pretty much ignored by the mainstream. It's a travesty, really.
I think it has to do with scalability; our current education system scales much better within the ridiculous budget constraints education faces (in the US).
Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
The spending efficiency of public schools in US is horrible, and they tend to focus on quantity over quality with teachers, due to a misguided idea of reducing student teacher ratios that Malcolm Gladwell has written about.
This constant excuse repeated everywhere about not enough funding isn't backed up by data.
I spent my entire childhood in public schools. 3/4 of my teachers were lazy shitbags who treated it like a govt job. The other 1/4 were punished every time they broke the mold in any way to fix things.
The day public schools realize that their primary role is educating kids OVER providing jobs to as many teachers union members as possible, we can start fixing them.
Public schools like the one you describe exist, but they're on one end of a spectrum.
My wife teaches English at a pubic school on the other end. Their student body is mostly minorities. The library contains only books written by dead white men which the students are inherently mistrustful of. They can't afford new novels, so the teachers print excerpts at home and bring them to class. In 2017 they blew their printing budget. In 2018 and 2019 we printed more than 35k pages at home because the school couldn't afford more toner. In 2021 they'll be in the black re: toner again, so my home printer will get a break until they blow the budget again.
Public schools are funded based on property taxes of the surrounding neighborhoods. Some of them have money to burn, others can't afford books.
My wife's school has the best teachers in town. Nobody goes into teaching for the money, and nobody teaches as a school like hers because they think it's gonna be an easy job--those sorts gravitate to the schools with money to burn and students that aren't also homeless.
More important than fixing the absolute amount of funding that public schools have is fixing the way it's distributed. It should a flat rate per-student, adjusted only for cost of living at a city-by-city granularity, not a neighborhood-by-neighborhood granularity.
Once the public school experience is more equal across the board it will be easier to distinguish the good teachers that lack supplies from the bad teachers with resources to waste.
>Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
NYC public schools are #1; DC isn't in the top ten (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...). Baltimore is #3, though, and four DC suburbs are also in the top ten, all no doubt offering much better education than the Baltimore (or DC) schools.
>My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
Private schools pay teachers less money than public schools, too.
I would add to this that the presumption that private school tuition reflects the cost of private school on a per student basis in its entirety and can be fairly compared to per-student funding of schools is probably incorrect. (Even more so if only comparing based on the tuition of one particular kid.)
- Cost more money for the state
- Cost more time to the teacher (its an issue since early grade teachers are already swamped)
- is in "testing" since the late 90's at least and is not quite there yet.
So we took another approach, more like germans. Reduced schools hour and add 2x2 hours of learning something else. Woodworking, board game, wird sports, anything the teacher can put in place (often boring stuff tbh, but i heard really good initiatives from friends that stayed in the social "business").
Well, in the end, it costed more money, took more time from the teachers anyway, was poorly implemented all around and was rolled back in some areas. But weirdly, while rural areas often get the short end of the stick when this kind of change rolls out, in this case, this created a lot of social link and learning opportunities (as they got no money, they had to ask parent/grandparents and people living around for help and this often was a success)
My son was just born and we are already looking at alternatives to the public education system. Guys I work with that have school age children are constantly at odds with teachers and school administrators. Of course the kids hate it as well.
Couldn't disagree more. Humanity has developed a society with acceptable norms to make life more enjoyable for everybody. One of the important things school does is socialize kids.
If a stranger breaks into your home and kills your kid, the natural response for a lot of people is to kill the person that did it. There are a lot of reasons why we _don't_ allow that in civilized countries. People have to be socialized to reject that natural behavior.
More to school children, they as adults will not be successful if they frequently act impulsively. Adulthood in society is finding a fulfilling career, maintaining healthy relationships, paying your bills on time, and setting fulfilling long term goals for yourself. None of those things are helped by impulsive behavior.
* There's a massive gulf between revenge killing and boys fidgeting.
* Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
* I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
> There's a massive gulf between revenge killing and boys fidgeting.
I mean... no shit? The point wasn't to compare revenge killing to fidgeting. The point was to illustrate that impulse control is necessary for a civilized society to function.
> Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
It's frankly insulting that you would take the stupidest possible interpretation of my argument, make a counterargument, and claim slam dunk.
How do you think it is that kids become adults? Do you just let kids run wild, controlling none of their impulses, and then they turn 18 and suddenly they're in full control of themselves? That's absolutely laughable.
It's development for a reason: you're _developing_ the kids. They are going to be at a lower level of ability than an adult with regards to impulse control. That's why you start to teach them. Babies can't chew hard food. It's impossible. So you don't give them hard food. It's _NOT_ impossible to teach a kid to control some of their undesirable impulses.
> I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
Uh... wat? No, you can't train _all_ impulsiveness out of anybody. But you can absolutely train people to recognize and mitigate negative impulses.
Almost the very first skill any kid learns is to control the impulse of blurting out when they want to speak in a classroom. They are taught that they should raise their hand and wait to be called on. And lots of parents have to teach their kids that they can't hit other kids.
> Are you trying to compare public school to prison?
With respect to how both environments force humans to adapt to the institution, and thereby manifest a perverse socialization, yes. The differences are in magnitude, not direction.
I'm reminded of the flawed "alpha" theory of wolf behavior. Turns out the observed dominance struggles were directly related to being in captivity; this form of "socialization" doesn't emerge in the wild.
Sounds like you'd rather we just all live in tribes in the wild.
I, for one, appreciate not having to worry about going hungry, dying of thirst, freezing to death, or being chased down by a pack of wolves. You need a society to facilitate that. Society doesn't work without social norms. And you wouldn't be on Hacker News speculating about this if not for society.
Now you're the one misrepresenting him. We can have society without a school system that abuses kids, and for that matter, a prison system that's much less abusive as well.
I don't see where the misrepresentation is. Are you trying to say that we can have a functional society without raising people to put aside primitive impulses for the good of everyone? Because it should be obvious that is impossible.
Also, where are you getting this idea that kids in school are abused?
It's hard to learn math, history, science, and literature running around playing. Changing school to be what kids want compromises the school. Kids don't want to study.
Boys may have a harder time staying still and paying attention, but that isn't just a school thing. Doing any sort of research for any sort of theoretical learning in life requires those same things. You'll never get to fulfill your every desire in life. Learning the discipline to control yourself now and have fun later is just as important a life skill to learn as any. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
You seem to believe that boys never grow up - and a hyperactive 14 year old in need of both intellectual and physical competitive challenges will inevitably be unable to do the steady work required to gain a PhD as a 24 year old.
It doesn't have to be as extreme as you imply. Just getting away from "butts in seats" can make a big difference. Think learning stations/areas in the room where the kids move around from one to the next. Learning games that involve physical movement. Breaks every few hours to go outside and run around -- used to be called recess, and many schools have eliminated it.
"This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
"At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion.
"The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)"
> I recall my students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic, and they used area-numbers from the bubbles to strategize.
It's working now. I appreciate his points, however he is not a psychological researcher or psychiatrist, he seems to be a technologist selling apps. This is in NO way scientific evidence of ADHD misdiagnosis, it's a simple blog post about how to improve schools.
Pediatric ADHD is terribly misdiagnosed (to the point where it's hard to say if it's over- or under-diagnosed). The funnel is typically teachers complaining about classroom behavior and entering that funnel is biased towards specific personality types (and also towards people who get screening because of other learning disorders).
I also think there is a socialization problem from a fairly young age. Many elementary schools have zero-tolerance on fighting these days, but I've observed many preschool environments where the teachers are fatalistic about boys roughhousing, but will take girls to task about the same behaviors. It's certainly likely that there are biological differences as well, but the current environment seems designed to magnify them.
Where is your evidence "that ADHD is terribly misdiagnosed"? I studied the issue from a scholarly perspective, to me it seems like there is more a public perception that it's terribly diagnosed, because most people are operating on anecdata about someone they knew.
True, I/m just basing this on experience of people I know. Several people who went undiagnosed until adulthood and several people who had other issues[1] that (combined with typical boyish hyperactivity) were misdiagnosed as ADHD as a child.
1. Undiagnosed adults: This is a big issue because it can be hard to diagnose "primarily inattentive" subtype (common in girls), which fly under the radar. These are "spacey" kids who may just stare or daydream, not so disruptive compared to kids literally jumping on their chairs and screaming due to hyperactivity + other issues (happened multiple times to me as a teacher).
1a. Also, the disorder was MUCH less well known by teachers, parents, and doctors 20-30 years ago, which is resulting in more undiagnosed adults today at ages 50+
2. Multiple comorbidities: This is very true, good point. A person may be anxious, depressed, bipolar, or OCD, and these can share symptoms with ADHD, thus part of the DSM-V diagnosis of ADHD includes ruling out other disorders.
3. Spectra: All mental health disorders exist on a spectrum from "No symptoms" to "Many/All symptoms". There are mild, moderate, and severe diagnoses of ADHD, for instance, and that may warrant different treatment approaches.
> 1. Undiagnosed adults: This is a big issue because it can be hard to diagnose "primarily inattentive" subtype (common in girls), which fly under the radar. These are "spacey" kids who may just stare or daydream, not so disruptive compared to kids literally jumping on their chairs and screaming due to hyperactivity + other issues (happened multiple times to me as a teacher).
Right, this is kind of what I'm talking about. A kid jumping on his chair and screaming might have ADHD, ODD, RAD, PTSD, ASD, &c., or some combination of them (one of the more bizarre stories I have is a kid with dyslexia who would stand up on her desk to get sent to the principle's office to avoid her school work when she couldn't crib off of the kid next to her) . What happens in too many schools is the school psychologist diagnoses them with ADHD and sends them to a psychiatrist.
What happens next depends on the quality of the psychiatrist and the means of the parents. In, what qualitatively seems to be a large minority of the cases (I have no hard data to back this up, just a collection of anecdotes), the psychiatrist does little or no additional screening and prescribes a sequence of medications (Ritalin, then Adderall, ...) until something works or the parents stop bringing their kid in.
Meanwhile the majority of the "primarily inattentive" ADHD kids either fly under the radar, or do so badly academically that they get more generalized interventions involving tutors or assistants who either bug them to stay on task, or do 90% of the work for them.
I (also the "spacey" type, told by every therapist I've been to that my symptoms are quite severe) was only diagnosed when I got sent in for a generalized intervention due to terrible performance, and maxed out the WISC. If my symptoms were slightly less severe, (or I were born 5-10 years earlier) I probably would have just been the "lazy kid."
Again this is because the majority of the kids who enter the mental health "system" are due to behaviors observed by teachers in the classroom.
As an aside, I should note that at least in my lifetime, and possibly longer, we've asked teachers to take on a lot more jobs, while simultaneously eroding their autonomy to do any of their jobs, so I'm not blaming teachers for this, just noting what I've observed.
> Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus.
I remember this shift clearly. And I felt a lot more unity and focus afterwards than before, it's just that as a teacher, I would've been focused on unifying against you.
Beforehand there was a subtle sense of pride that I usually got straight A's and made my parents proud. Afterward I felt like I had had it wrong the whole time:
It's not me vs you according to whatever metrics the authorities choose, comrade. It's you and me against the status quo. We must specialize in wherever the authorities are weak and exploit that to the hilt. As it turned out, the authorities were confused by their technology, so the clear path forward was for us all to become hackers--or so it seemed at the time.
And so, twenty years later, all my male friends have mediocre academic records and decent salaries, while the girls (regrettably) have it the other way.
I don't know if my path is as open to thirteen year old boys today. We launched our games from a dos prompt, opportunity for exploration beckoned at every keystroke. Nowadays everything is part of a platform, you have to go out of your way to find opportunities to tinker. It's all so constrained.
As I see it, I lucked into a growth mindset that was compatible with my pubescent priority realignment (towards my friends and against authority). Do you think that the modern world offers similar opportunities that I'm just not seeing? If not, should we design for them?
> I recall my students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic, and they used area-numbers from the bubbles to strategize.
For those wondering, I believe this game is agar.io
Attitudes and norms around how school have changed a lot, and the modern school severely penalizes boys.
For instance it was typical for schools to encourage competition between students, but this is very frown upon in most places nowadays. For a lot of boys, the drive to compete is pretty much the only positive thing keeping them focused on schoolwork.
Another typical trend has been to reduce and to almost eliminate the amount of multiple choice testing and to change it to written questions. There’s evidence enough to claim that this significantly penalizes boys (specially in the 10 to 14 age range) due to developmental reasons.
The difference in ADHD diagnosis is easy to explain. As we’ve moved our expectations of kid behavior from what “the typical boy does” to “what the typical girl does”, a lot of perfectly normal boy behavior is reinterpreted as ADHD.
I haven't listened to this yet, but am wondering if the gender gap in teaching could be an issue?
I work in tech where the gender disparity between men and women is discussed very often -- but I don't see these conversations taking place amongst teachers, most especially for earlier primary education which is more female than male.
Maybe there is a bias here or maybe women teachers have teaching styles that resonate with female students more. It definitely needs more attention.
Yeah, I had women math teachers that sucked. Made it boring. Then I got a math teacher who was a guy with deep voice. Dude talked too much political stuff but he taught too good, it was like he had my attention. I didn't even study for the exam except for the last 10 minutes and aced it, his lectures were enough, I got everything in a single class, no revision. We used to have internationally accredited exams and everyone taught by him used to do well for some reason.
Before him I didn't care about math at all. I only learn when it's a guy teaching me for some reason. I can't focus on a woman if she's teaching, I get bored and started thinking about what to app to make.
But not every guy teacher was the one I could focus on. He was the guy with the deepest voice, for some reason it didn't let my attention drift away.
Before that, I sucked in Chemistry, until some guy taught me. I don't know how that worked but did.
Then some guy taught me physics but his voice wasn't manly, and I started sucking at physics after that.
So I'd say as a guy, I was almost always better taught by men. Women (young or middle aged) bored me away from the subject. And that used to reflect in the batch performance for almost every guy.
Girls weren't impacted by it at all. They got good grades either ways man or woman.
I realize now how horrible it all sounds, but trust me I tried.
Also there's a recognised gender bias in how teachers grade assignments. Boys messier handwriting results in lower scores than girls tidier handwriting, even controlling for content and legibility.
Women in general tend to be more compliant, which becomes an issue later in life when standing up for oneself in the workplace (e.g. getting promotions and pay raises), but it's an advantage in the classroom. Men need to be shown the value of something before they will learn it. This can be a problem as a lot of school lessons have no immediate practical value.
There was a high school English teacher in our school that was known for sexism. I was in the “honors” version of her class along with a few other guys that apparently weren’t warned. We were all A students normally, but we all regularly got Cs in her class and it tanked my GPA. My favorite example is that we had to make a diorama based on the Iliad, and I did Polyphemus’ cave. I was marked down because it wasn’t colorful enough.
There were girls in the class that clearly weren’t “honors” material that got As. Another teacher’s daughter actually went and complained to the principal on behalf of the boys to no effect.
She finally retired this past year. I do senior photography and she’s been brought up by a lot of former students and they all talked about her sexism.
I never ran into anything quite that extreme, but I remember having a number of teachers that openly disliked boys. Mostly unrelated, but it's hard to convince boys in high school that women are discriminated against when their lived experience is authority figures telling them that girls are better than boys
Could it be that girls get tons of encouragement, accolades, and praise when they do something, but when boys do they're told it's just their privilege that made them succeed?
In our current school there are 3 STEM programs for girls, one that is for both boys and girls. One of the programs for girls is very well funded by local startup money and gets designers, marketers, etc to make them fun. The one for both boys and girls is volunteer run and while I respect and appreciate the effort, frankly it not fun and exciting at all. It's little better than someone just handing you a textbook to read.
I'm all for making STEM (coding especially) inclusive and welcoming for all. Nobody should face discrimination or harassment based on gender (or any other attribute). Unfortunately it's the boys getting the shaft right now. I can't imagine the outrage that would happen if someone started a "boys only" program, yet it almost seems like that's what needs to happen. We're back to the days of striving for "separate but equal."
Also, most of the discrimination in STEM happens later in life, in the workplace - the only real effect of getting more girls into STEM is to have a larger pool of women entering STEM careers so you still have some left after driving a bunch of them off. Businesses donating to STEM-for-schoolgirls programs is a way for them to assuage their conscience (or to do PR) without having to ask what they can be doing directly to solve the actual problem.
And I'm afraid this increases the perception that men are naturally fine at STEM and women need special support because of inherent gender attributes (and not because of social problems that we could just address at the root)... which at the end of the day makes life harder for women in their careers.
+1. Everybody's setting up balloon drops and loud publicity stunts for these "let's get girls to code!" initiatives. Nobody's calling serious attention to the lack of female tech leads, directors, and VPs, because that would require uncomfortable investigation into why non-male employees aren't retained and promoted.
Scout groups are mixed all over the world, it really doesn't make much difference - the only thing I noticed moving from a mixed one to an older all-boys one is that the boys one was much much more violent but that was mostly due to the leaders not stopping it.
I got out just before the change and am hearing some pretty dopey stuff from buddies still in the program. Like they can't go pee behind a tree any more, can't swim with shirts off. Trust me, dynamics change when girls are around. There was a mixed program already, btw, called Venturing.
I'll add that one of the best things about Boy Scouts was that we could do stuff that was dangerous, but not too dangerous. We didn't have any moms come along either, and I think that helped. Dads would stop us from doing something truly stupid (like permanent injury type stupid), but not something dumb that would bruise us and teach us a lesson. It also allowed us to do lots more fun stuff.
These days, tree forts are a no-no, apparently. Some guys from my old troop were building one at a mixed event recently. Some girls from another troop came over and said it wasn't safe, then got some karen from their troop to come yell at the boys. Oh, and and apparently it's no longer okay to climb above chest height these days, because it's "not safe". I'm way too young to be saying, "Back when I was young, we did $UNSAFE_THING all the time! We liked it, and never got hurt." Or at least, I thought I was.
That's because males naturally use aggression/assertiveness to establish social hierarchy. That's the reason for having all-boys groups for youth, it gives them a space to work that out in a controlled way and learn how to channel their energy and aggression in positive directions.
There is a strange double standard in our society which posits that it is totally reasonable for women, people of color, people of different sexual orientations, etc. to all deserve their own 'safe spaces' to be around people of their intersectional group only; but the moment that males want this, or white people, or straight people, it's exclusionary and offensive. Nobody can defend this effectively without resorting to rhetoric that essentially just attacks people in the latter groups for things that are not their fault individually, and the entire mechanism that works to prevent them from having their own spaces seems fundamentally vengeful.
There is very much a need for boys to have a space to be boys: where they can let their boisterousness out, where they can act a little crazy, or just act closer to their true selves etc. without having to worry about how they're perceived by the girls. As soon as puberty kicks in, all co-ed events are affected by sexual dynamics; it's been a standard in every human society to provide plenty of contexts for boys where that is removed from the mix as much as possible in order to get better / different behaviour from the young cadre.
IDK I'd lean more towards mixing everyone as much as possible. All people should learn to handle being around diverse groups of people early and learn to handle themselves and respect others.
I actually think we need both. Boys need a place to be boys by themselves and girls need the same. Nothing wrong with mixing it up, but you also need the opposite.
Of course. This is obvious to anyone who has had kids of both genders. Boys and girls care about different things, play differently, react to different kinds of encouragement. And we need our boys to be the best they can be at whatever they genuinely care about, in the way they care about it, just as much as we need the same for our girls. We are in for deep, deep trouble as a society if we loose the masculine drive.
> There is very much a need for boys to have a space to be boys: where they can let their boisterousness out, where they can act a little crazy, or just act closer to their true selves etc. without having to worry about how they're perceived by the girls.
As the father of several boys, I agree. For anyone interested more in this concept, I recommend "Boys Adrift" by Leonard Sax (a psychologist) and "Boys Should Be Boys" by Dr. Meg Meeker (a pediatrician). Both books are very enlightening about some of the problems our boys face in America.
Somebody commented and then deleted their comment, but I do want to throw this out there: "Boys Adrift" was focused on psychological theories and what institutions can do, and it was more clinical in style. "Boys Should Be Boys" was more focused on what parents can do, and it was super upbeat and positive while keeping it real. Dr. Meeker (author of "Boys Should Be Boys") also has a podcast if you want to try out her style before buying [1].
Also a father of boys. They all tried Boy Scouts and none really took to it but all were involved in sports. Teams were ostensibly co-ed when they were younger but by middle school age they were all-male. Having that outlet to "be boys" and work out their energy and agressive impulses is important to growing into a well-balanced adult man.
One argument is these spaces exist, have existed for a long time, and are completely accessible to those who would want to join them. If you're a man, men's clubs and men only events still exist. Maybe they don't exist explicitly in tech? Are implicit spaces not enough? Seems easy enough to have a meetup and simply not invite any women, POC or LGBTQ people, especially in tech.
There is also a different between "explicit" and "implicit" safe spaces for different groups. Its just that they are only ever "marked" with a demographic identifier if they are for a non-dominant group. I.e., "Comic Book Shops" are geared towards (historically, typically) white boys, but "Black comic book shops" and "Girl comic book shops" also exist. We notice these, because they are marked as such, because they run counter the norm. What we don't always notice is that the unmarked "Comic Book Shop" is already geared towards a particular demographic—white men.
Basically, different safe spaces exist for different demographics, but are only marked for certain groups.
Take Boy Scouts. It used to be exactly the sort of group that GP describes. Now that's been destroyed; the boys have been told that no, you can't have a boys-only group or event.
Interesting question would be in which of the two programs more technical skill will be acquired.
Downvoters: why is this not interesting? Traditional textbook way of learning might be better than making things too much fun. (it still has to be fun, but intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic). We will never know if we don't measure the outcome.
Well at least in our case the skill in the co-ed program is 0 because my son hated it and wanted to quit. I'm now helping him learn to code on his own. Scratch has been a god send. I'm glad Scratch is available for all genders.
This is what's dangerous about affirmative action type programs. They're discrimination going in the other direction with the objective of equal outcomes, not equal opportunity. The ultimate equal outcome is communism - everyone ends up equally poor. That doesn't seem like the right direction.
On the other hand how do you get more girls into STEM without programs like this? Maybe it's the best of bad options.
Well, it depends on whether women stay out of STEM because they don't care about programming, or whether they stay out of STEM because they're worried about being alone in a toxic environment. Ideally a diversity program would not influence group 1 while solving the problem for group 2.
If you phrase the problem like that, there is no problem. Group 1 is tiny compared to group 2.
I think addressing group 2 is a desirable and valid goal.
Societal gender roles say nurses and teachers are women's work and STEM is man's work. That's the thing one would need to address, and at a young age. It's not entirely clear how one can do that. One "only" has to challenge the societal norms that define gender roles themselves. Not an easy problem.
That is in my opinion an unjustified assumption. Huge numbers of men and women are uninterested in programming. In fact, virtually everyone I know of either gender is uninterested in programming. The number of people who don't program because they're not interested anecdotally dwarfs the number of people who don't program for any other reason.
That’s a different problem. “Fix toxic environments that keep certain types of people out of an honest line of work” is a good problem to solve. That is not the same as “let’s increase the number of people of a certain demographic within an industry”, in and of itself, taken entirely on its own.
That’s interesting, that overt discrimination on the basis of a protected characteristic (sex, race) is allowed in these cases, even by public institutions. How is it not challenged in the courts under the various civil rights acts and nondiscrimination laws of states?
However, if we are going to solve a problem (eg non biodegradeable plastic) we must do it upstream (eg taxing non biodegradeable plastic and nudging corporations into switching to biodegradeable materials), rather than expend tons of effort downstream (eg banning plastic bags, straws and blaming individuals).
Same here... if we are going to be doing something about girls in STEM as a society, I’d rather do it upstream — earlier in life — because otherwise trying to fiddle around the edges later is just a bandaid.
PS: as an aside, I found the expression “it’s the boys getting the shaft right now” a bit ironic, given the origins of the phrase https://www.etymonline.com/word/shaft
On average [Not-Race] has more wealth to afford houses, or home ownership is more common than [Race] in these programs.
You do see anger when individuals perceive they can't afford homes, school, or other big ticket items and perceive that they aren't given help - but that isn't quite the same as denying people something.
>On average [Not-Race] has more wealth to afford houses //
Which is fine if you're part of that the well-off, but if you're just a person and not benefitted by the categroy association with rich people who happen to be the same race -- a simplistic association that discriminatory, racist people make -- then you're shit out of luck.
Discriminating against people is denying them something, it's denying them a fair shot, fair treatment by the government. Regardless of their sex or skin colour they deserve fair opportunity.
Given that there is only a finite amount of money/resources available to help people, giving extra to someone based on their race is equivalent to depriving another of help based on their race.
Is there something you can point me to, in order to learn more about Canada's approach? So you're saying that a program specifically to give cash to white men only as "extra help to own houses" would be perfectly fine?
This is what I’ve always said. I was just looking for scholarships in computer science, and I was surprised at the amount of women only scholarships I found. Society in general has less sympathy for men, and this is a pretty hard truth i’ve discovered.
I will second this. I was hunting for merit scholarships, as this has been a tough year and college is pricey, even with the scholarships I have. For existing college students, most of those I found were for women only, especially for CS. But I'm not eligible, because I was born a guy. fml.
Edit: btw the thing that annoys me about this is that I already won some tough and prestigious merit scholarships so I actually would have a good shot at these and probably get one if I applied to several. So it's more direct here for me.
If I remember correctly names on applications that are traditionally more likely to be given to a black person is still considered less qualified on an identical resume than a name that is traditionally given to a white person. I don’t know if sending photos with your resume is still practiced in the USA (I think it is illegal in the UK) but if that is still the case than gender and ethnicity are still very much on the average job application.
The problem with the original study was that it used names that denoted socio-economic status as much as race (ie, "Dahntay Smith" or "Shaniqua Thomas"). That's a problem, too, but I suspect a similar effect for professional job applicants can be shown using "lower" socio-economic status white names (ie, "Bobby Lee Jones" or "Tommy Ray Brown").
Regardless, I would be strongly in favor of anonymized job applications, since that would eliminate any suggestion of such bias in whichever direction.
Yes, just go to the interview wearing a wig and a skirt. Then on your first day you can wear your normal stuff, and if anyone says anything, you can just say you transitioned, and you really hope there won't be any discrimination against that.
At my company (FAANG), 2/3 of intern and entry level opportunities are given to women. Ironically virtually all of them come from the same few elite universities and were hardly held back by anyone, as far as I can tell.
Some of them play this game very aggressively. Once they are there, immediately organize into diversity projects and groups to push for quotas in promotions, project leads, etc. Despite these fast-track opportunities, they fully believe they are continuously being held back, at every level, and everything will be interpreted that way.
I think it will eventually break the org but I don't plan on staying.
I’ve also seen that FANG is actively discriminating against white men. I was asked to throw out all white male and Asian male resumes for an internship programs relatively recently.
Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it depends on the details of how and why.
A uniform decision regarding all interns across an entire company targeting specific racial charactaristics is very different from a policy that bases decisions on objective measurements done in good faith with intent to correct for some form of bias.
I also sat in a conversation with my team about not hiring the most qualified intern candidate because he was a white guy. Affirmative action is a double edged sword and it sucks that more left leaning people in places of power can't admit that.
Maybe people just try to do things they are interested in or care about and aren’t trying to scheme or gang up on others? I think if I were in such a position, I might see the process as too unegalitarian and want to change it. I wonder how one would get involved with changing such a thing.
You’re obviously able to organise in the workplace for basically whatever goals you want if you like (though in the US this organisation is only protected if more than one person is involved.)
This is a nice idea if they were trying to change the process to work better for everyone.
That's not what's happening. They just demand explicit quotas for themselves.
The whole 'diversity and inclusion/feminism makes things better for everyone' is largely a myth, it's just identity groups out for themselves in corporate America.
Probably not. If I remember correctly there is no correlation (and sometimes even negative) between unearned praise and performance.
A more likely explanation which is backed up by evidence is that generalized perception of a group by the teacher will yield grades accordingly, so the more research that shows girls being better at school will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers have to work hard to counter this bias (and many do).
There is also a possibility that there is some biological difference that makes certain teaching methods that just so happen to be favored by teachers at the moment are a tiny bit easier for one gender over others. However I would like to see some research before I subscribe to that, but remain open for the possibility meanwhile.
That all said, if there is a difference, but the effect size is small, then honestly: Does it matter?
As an employer I'm thrilled to hear about these programs to encourage more women in STEM.
They seem completely unrelated to overall academic performance however, and your complaint sounds a little whiny. I'm as tired of woke nonsense as anyone, but these programs are a great idea.
Could it be that girls get tons of encouragement, accolades, and praise when they do something, but when boys do they're told it's just their privilege that made them succeed?
Probably not, no. Setting aside the deliberately inflammatory description you chose to use here, this is a complex phenomenon observed over quite a long period in a variety of different locations and social backgrounds globally, and the suggestion that it could be simplified to "uneven praise" doesn't seem to correlate with any research I've seen.
Unfortunately it's the boys getting the shaft right now.
It's pretty difficult to make any real progress on issues of equal access if any targeted efforts to improve access for particular groups are going to be characterised as "giving others the shaft".
It boils down to what those targeted efforts are. If they are removing bias against a group, fine. If they are introducing artificial favoritism for the group, that's problematic as now others are losing equal opportunity.
> It's pretty difficult to make any real progress on issues of equal access if any targeted efforts to improve access for particular groups are going to be characterised as "giving others the shaft".
It depends on whether the efforts go from "equal access" to positive discrimination, and I'm not sure where that line is drawn or if people are interested in drawing it
> It's pretty difficult to make any real progress on issues of equal access if any targeted efforts to improve access for particular groups are going to be characterised as "giving others the shaft".
If "equal access" is the goal (which I agree it should be), why are we excluding a group based on immutable characteristics? You really see that as equal?
I don't think this is the case at all, this has been a trend since basically the start of all public schooling.
And on a tangent, as for "girls in STEM" programs, I'm not really sure why they need to exist. I think a "girls in STEM" program is as necessary as a "boys in teaching" program, and that is, not at all. Different genders will naturally gravitate towards different fields, and we don't need to fight that.
I read 10 years ago that males were on the verge of getting preferential acceptance at colleges.
There's a pop theory / crackpot idea that men tend to be on average "dumber" than women, but with a higher standard distribution, so they will have more "geniuses".
Women will be on average "smarter", but lower standard deviation.
If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that, since while women will have a high chance of reproduction, male biology will need to have more variance and "risk" to achieve some sort of distinction to get to the comparatively lower reproductive success rate of males.
In reality, our schooling is now so screwed up between grade inflation, teaching for the test, over-prescribing ADD drugs (which is opioid dependence grooming by the drug companies), reduced funding, destruction of the middle class, and a host of other changes to society and policy.
> There's a pop theory / crackpot idea that men tend to be on average "dumber" than women, but with a higher standard distribution, so they will have more "geniuses".
The current understanding is that the average is generally similar, and males have greater variability. So yes, vastly more male geniuses. But men have larger brains for a reason, so it might be we're biased against measuring anything men are better at.
> If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that
It doesn't. The main reason is because female mammals have duplicate sex chromosomes, and the effects get combined together. In some other kinds of animals (such as birds) females tend to have greater variability. So it's a haphazard consequence of some evolutionary split way back when. (Who knows, maybe the causation of disposable males is there, but in the other direction.)
That's not a "crackpot theory" but what the data currently show. This doesn't mean that there's a biological cause for this (although it's possible). But with IQ data, there's abundant evidence that the averages are similar, but men have greater variability:
I actually considered just enrolling him to see what would happen, but I didn't want my child to become a lightning rod for a political battle between adults.
The description of the program specifically says, "for girls" and it has a cartoon graphic with a few different female characters of different skin colors, each dressed as some profession. It doesn't say, "no boys" or anything like that, but as I said above I'm hesitant to try with my son. If it were me I would do it.
Your STEM example explains very little of this gender gap. The article says:
1. this gender gap begins very early (kindergarden), before the majority of "women in STEM" programs begin
2. are international (i'm fairly certain they don't have women in STEM programs in China, for example)
3. it doesn't explain why the differences are inversely related to income level (do you think there are more "women in STEM" programs at lower income levels?)
4. this difference is very old (>50 years of this effect)
> 4. this difference is very old (>50 years of this effect)
About 100 years ago, women were explicitly forbidden from most colleges and universities. The attitude that women aren't cut out for, and should be excluded from STEM dates back to Socrates (~400 bce), at least. I'm not a historian but that wasn't terribly long after Greeks started writing things down.
It could very well be that women have had the potential to outperform men in academic tasks since Socrates, but never had the chance until widespread and egalitarian schooling.
I'm not even 40 and in my education, I heard several STEM teachers say that girls can't hack it. The latest of which occurred a mere 10 years ago at a public university. "Egalitarian schooling" is an extremely novel concept and many parents and teachers (men and women) still haven't bought in on the idea.
They hack it perfectly fine in microbiology,(71% female) and veterinary science (65%). The main issue is that they really aren't represented in computer science and engineering STEM fields, as well as research scientists. But if you looked at all the STEM fields, it is probably more even, or there even are significant male shortages in some.
The issue is that a lot of people don't really define stem as stem, they define it as RCE-research, computers, and engineering.
Besides the point. Have you ever had a favorite teacher who told you that you were destined for failure? Probably not, that teacher is never gonna be your favorite -- and spending a semester, or even years, with that teacher might well sour you on the subject even if it was your favorite.
Very true. "Egalitarian" here is highly relative. Schools now are certainly more egalitarian than they were a few centuries ago (when barely anyone could even attend!) but they are still a long way off.
I'm optimistic that we will eventually reach a fully egalitarian future, but pessimistic at how much work is left to do.
Is that right? I'm in my mid-50s, and certainly in elementary school nearly 100% of the teachers were women. There were two men teaching in my entire school and they were both teaching 5th grade. In middle and high school there were more men but it was still at least 60-70% female teachers.
Something else to consider is that some times these hiring bises are explicit and others they are de facto the way things are be [1]. In my university there is a target to have at least x% of new faculty hires female. It's against the law to state a direct number (e.g. 7) but apparently that method is fine in my country...
Until STEM fields actually have at least a semi-decent gender balance, I don't have a problem with any of this, because apparently it's not even enough to counter the inherent cultural biases that push woman away from technology fields.
I mean, I suppose it's also possible that these programs just don't do anything and we should scrap them due to lack of results, but I'm inclined to believe they're helping somewhat.
(Semi-disclaimer: Prior to COVID I used to volunteer at Girls Who Code.)
What if the case is that the more choice our women in our society have, the more they choose jobs that deal with people (medicine, politics, management, marketing, social sciences, etc) and the less they choose jobs that deal with things (engineering, computer science, etc)?
Because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that's what happens. As measured by the Global Gender Gap Index , the countries with the highest levels of gender equality, such as Scandanavia, have the lowest levels of female programmers and engineers, whereas countries with much lower scores and more traditional views on genders (such as Iran UAE) have some of the highest levels of female programmers and engineers.
Dunno why you think "girls get tons of encouragement, accolades, and praise when they do something." My experience growing up as a girl totally contradicts that.
It's even de-evolving to outright discrimination. I worked in a lab where participants were asked to give away their social media data for a chance to win at an ipad. The collecting of the data and lottery selection was done by a group of women. One time a man had one it, and they were upset at that fact and were going to re-run the lottery until a woman won it. I stopped them, but look where we are now.
There were half a dozen of them and none of them even considered what they were about to do was wrong. I wonder how often this happens in other areas.
This was widely being talked about at least thirty years ago.
The elephant in the room is that Boys’ academic underperformance is tied to class, and thus resolving the issue has gone nowhere, because there’s no such thing as class and because the responsibility for all under-achievement therefore lies with the individual.
Its explained in the podcast by work of David Figlio [1]. One theory (from the podcast) is boys are more sensitive than girls to poor environmental factors involved in educational attainment.
I don't understand why you say these things are opposites.
This one suggests (socioeconomic) class is a factor in lower performing boys' performance. This is true: at least in the US, boys' academic performance is more affected by socioeconomic class than girls' (though both are very much so).
balls187 says that the way boys' and girls' academic performance evolves vs. age is different. This is also true.
Edited to add: please also see the work from David Figlio et al. mentioned in Krona’s comment below. That’s an interesting study design that tries to demonstrate that boys in aggregate need higher quality schooling to achieve the same level of performance as girls in aggregate.
these are those articles that in Italy are interpreted as media spam propaganda: women are smarter than men. misleading and inconsistent, and not because I am a male, but because as there are males intellectually superior to other females, there are inevitably females intellectually superior to males, and it is absolutely random and chaotic. if we then discuss what favors or disadvantages the intellect, it is quite another matter.
This was true when I was in grade school as well (late 80's-90's).
Prior to puberty, nearly all the top performing students were girls. After puberty, boys were more represented.
The theory I heard was societal pressure in the US was higher on girls to be "liked" and accepted, and that girls felt that doing well in school was counter to that. Girls would stop focusing on performance and ultimately move towards the center of the curve.
Pressure to be liked, and antithetical attitudes towards academic performance also applied to boys as well, but to a lesser degree.
I enjoyed homeschooling much more than public school. Both contain subjects that seem irrelevant, but with homeschool I could knock all that out quickly and move onto my favorite activities of reading, coding and playing outside. Then I went to public school and spent hours bored out of my mind because I didn't understand why different subjects mattered, and some seemed to be indoctrination which was both annoying and boring at the same time.
I like the older approach of emphasizing reading writing 'rithmetic, and then teaching practical skills and classics. All obviously relevant skills and knowledge for everyone.
No, I thought the goal of those programs was to invest in the education of girls where it is lacking, and improving the representation of women in STEM fields to reflect their school achievements?
The high level story is that men were doing better in society, so feminists tried to change that but they overcompensated which lead to boys starting to do worse.
It should also be mentioned that young men are now doing worse than young women in the workplace. That's because this is a generational thing. When millenials are 50, then 50 year old men will do worse than 50 year old women.
How specifically was this accomplished? Well many small actions were taken. So it's hard to pinpoint which one exactly it is. Women are favored both with explicit policies to favor them, as well as by being given more consideration when policies are designed ("How will this affect women"). Hence I don't think there is one big thing that needs fixing, rather it's many small things. And doing so will take a long time, decades possibly.
Just gave the whole thing a listen, it doesn't seem to add more to the discussion than what is already known (to people who've been following the discussion, at least). The most critical point seems to be the social aspect: Boys ostracize academically successful boys, and therefore boys are afraid to be seen as academically successful. Other minor social factors seem to be that teaching methods unintentionally disparage boys who weren't academically successful, often by creating competitive environments where they fall into a failing feedback loop and just quit participating in the competition altogether.
It ends on a note saying that the way to fix is by acknowledging the fact that boys are falling behind, and adjusting our teaching methods and schools' social environments.
Except this only reinforces the current environment.
Anyone with experience in teaching environments knows girls are way worse at ostracizing successful students.
It’s very interesting to me the claim that boys are quitting because there’s too much competition, because my experience is the complete opposite. The only thing that makes boys quit competing in my experience is either seeing the competition as pointless (“bad boy” attitude) or realizing that the competition is not fair.
A lot of teachers are unaware as to how smart some kids can be. I’ve seen kids swap their names in tests just to validate the hypothesis that their language teacher was assigning grades based on who wrote what (which, having seen their numbers, looks like it was indeed happening).
I don't at all disagree; the variety of researchers interviewed had their own focuses, neither necessarily discounted what the others said. I do believe that a part of your anecdotal 'seeing competition as pointless' case must've leaked into the researcher who was discussing competition being discouraging.
I attended the opening ceremony of the international physics Olympics, and it was interesting to see the gender distribution of the teams. Most western countries had 0-1 female in a team of 5. Countries traditionally perceived as less gender equal had more. I remember Kuwait having an all girls team.
Someone did a study on this recently. Women in the developing world are much more likely to study STEM than in the developed world. There was speculation as to why.
Anecdote: The two women whom I'm closest to (my spouse and my mom) both went into science because they were encouraged to do so by the nuns at the Catholic high schools that they attended.
One possible explanation is that the social expectation of becoming a wife and mother is decoupled from the choice of what they study in school.
Girls are more well-organised, and diligent, better at planning etc. Don't know why this would be a surprise to anyone. Apologies in advance for not beating around the bush.
Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more. In general somehow reading has seemed to grow more gendered over time; if you go into the average chain bookstore its apparent that its heavily targeted towards women, and something like Amazon's free Prime reads are often almost entirely women-targeted genre selections.
Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts.
Jon Scieszka, a kids author, noticed this over fifteen years ago and started guys read, a website trying to encourage boys to do so and raise awareness about it. But it seems to have stalled, and I don't hear a lot of talk about the feminization of reading.
I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away. There's always been cultural resistance against "book-larning" but its weird how gendered reading itself has become lately.
It is mentioned in the article, but I also have seen this anecdotally.
How often do school libraries have things boys want to read? In high school, even among those who did read, very few of us ever used the library because it mostly had fantasy novels, fiction, etc. My friend group wanted to read about history and economics, topics not really covered.
Your school library was mostly fiction? That's bizarre. Our school library probably had more books under the 500 section alone (pure science) than it had fiction. I went to the public library for fiction.
Supply side is an issue, but I don't think it explains everything. I think also some problems are that boys and men only like to read nonfiction and are too hyperactive to sit still.
Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all? We'd think it absurd right? But for some reason the idea men shun fiction is seemed as a truism. And if people would say "oh boys are too energetic, they can't sit still for a movie" we'd think they are nuts.
I'm not sure how it happened. I wish someone would research how this idea came into dominance
When I was in elementary and middle school (early 2010s) his books were very popular. I remember reading Percy Jackson & the Olympians and later The Kane Chronicles and The Heroes of Olympus.
From personal experience, Rick Riordan's series had similar interest levels between girls and boys but later series (Hunger Games, House of Night, Fault in Our Stars) did skew towards girls. My reading also fell off as I got older so I'm sure I wasn't as in touch with what my peers were reading.
There have been modern kids authors that focus on boys: Darren Shan's vampire series, Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider books, Rick Riordan, the Artemis Fowl series, etc. Jon Scieszka did his Time Warp Trio books for example. Dav Pilkey did Captain Underpants and various other series. There's the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and more.
However, the massive bulk of the market ends up being targeted towards women. It's something where you'd need to actually look on shelves for, as there's a weird dynamic where in female-dominated markets or places, you have male "figurehead" things while the rest of the market is dominated by and caters to women.
I noticed this in Christian fiction ironically. You will see a big author like Ted Dekker doing his spiritual action adventure/fantasy/mild horror for a wide audience, but the huge bulk of the books are historical/amish/mystery romance aimed at women, to the point where no male alternatives exist. Even the small religious science fiction market is female dominated soft romantic sf.
In this case it's milking established demographics, as the religion itself has a mild demographics issue (not enough men.) But go look at a young adult shelf sometime; even superhero books feature women protagonists and are targeted to them now.
The main problem with fiction for children and young adults is that there just isn't enough of the good stuff. Rick Riordan is popular, and he has written many books, but an avid reader can get through everything he's written in one summer.
I'm not too worried about YA fiction specifically (as compared to children's fiction), since a distinction between quality "YA fiction" and quality "fiction" is less of an issue today (I feel like there used to be a sense of certain content being inappropriate for YA, but browsing a the local bookstore's YA section makes me think that's mostly gone).
And academic "performance" is often regurgitation.
Remember that "intelligence" is tied to success on standardized tests, at least in the view of educational administration, because that is the alpha and omega of getting funding and keeping your job.
> I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away.
Have to disagree; the sort of reading discussed in that study isn't conducive to positive educational outcomes, but rather is more of a social activity. (Yeah, I know reading is often thought of as a solitary activity, but reading fictional narratives may be better understood as desynchronized socialization.)
Don't get me wrong, children can enjoy an educational advantage from pleasure-reading early on, as an introduction to how to read. But after that, pleasure-reading is a largely wasteful activity, at least in terms of educational advancement.
Further advancement in reading may come from learning to read expanded English -- including [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), $\mathrm{\TeX}$, `(string)"source code"`, M+A+T+H, technical texts, diagrams, schematics, etc. -- but it's unlikely that reading young-adult narratives provides the reader with any significant advantages. In fact, I suspect that it's likely to correlate with negative educational outcomes.
It seems more likely that a third variable is effecting both reading amount and education performance for boys.
A shot in the dark guess could be that the attention industry (and the ad industry in general) is better at targeting boys grabbing them away from both homework and at home reading at a greater scale then the other genders.
I don't agree. You can learn to read complicated schematics and technical texts in a vocational/technical high school; I don't think they are linked to educational achievement as much as people think. Disclosure: I am an ex-voc tech student; most of the people who would go on to higher education beyond it were the ones who were bad at their trades and mismatched, and they were mostly female with some exceptions. (I chose it because i was fiercely bullied in junior high, and wanted to avoid the students who would go on to the college prep high school.)
You definitely need to learn to read schematics and technical texts to acquire an advanced education. It's basic literacy in academic and professional contexts; being unable to read prevents one from communicating and is a serious impediment to learning.
David Epstein's Range has a great viewpoint on this.
He states that there are Kind Learning Environments. These are places like golf, chess, or classical piano. Here, the feedback is quick, the goals are clear, and relative ranking is knowable. To excel in these environments, it is all about drill-and-kill. Repetition and stick-hours are the name of the game.
This is in contrast to Unkind Learning Environments. These are places like tennis, business, or jazz. In the unkind world feedback is harder to come by, goals are unclear, and relative ranking is often not knowable. To excel in an unkind environment, Epstein states that you have to be an information grazer. Getting as many viewpoints and mental schemas as possible is the best way forward in an uncertain world.
Epstein's book goes much more into depth on this and has many very memorable examples. It's on Bill Gate's best books of 2020 list, despite being published in 2019.
So, I think that having more reading of any sort is then better for unkind environments, as it is a method of information grazing. Even terse dime-novels will often expose you to new ways of thinking, a new word, or a new idea. Though not the best method of information grazing (whatever that may be), it matters what boys replace it with, if anything. If they replace it with the kind learning environments of CoD or WorldofTanks, then that is not as good. If they replace it with foreign films and TV, that may be just as good.
Epstein goes into this better in the book, but from what I (a non tennis player) can tell, it's that it is mostly a mental game and not a physical one, at least once you achieve the baseline fitness and skill. Again, I don't play tennis so I am simply parroting here.
I would think that any person that reads broadly should be better at business or other unkind learning environments, all other things being equal. Unfortunately, at least in most of the world's business environments I know of, when it comes to gender all other things are very much not equal.
One part is that teachers are almost exclusively female in the early grades which sends an unequivocal message that education is a girl thing. Put that together with broken family structures and it means many kids grow up with no male role models which is harmful for boys and girls in different ways.
Unfortunately it will be another 30 years before the 'girls are disadvantaged in education' trope dies, but bad ideas like phlogestion and trickle down economics take a long time to die.
It's a much deeper problem than sending a message. Teachers are systematically sexist: they give girls better test scores than boys and treat them differently. This effect is so strong it's been studied and shows up statistically:
"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"
It also shows up in more anecdotal stories like this one, in which a teacher banned boys from playing with Lego whilst letting girls do it:
The problem is one of feminism. It's not that boys have somehow inexplicably got dumber over the past decades, it's that women have become radicalised and collectively concluded that it's OK to express explicit biases towards other women on the basis of gender, because progress.
I always thought it's weird how minimal favoritism + leniency can improve someone's performance, and over a long time, massively improve it. This works especially well on kids (but also on colleagues), while outright favoritism destroys any intelligence benefit faster than Facebook does.
> A big issue is that boys read less than girls overall.
Disagree. If you love to read fictions, doesn't help you at all to read tech books unless you're in it.
My hunch is, it is related with puberty. Biologically boys hit puberty late while that time girls are already on the way being matured. So it could be more about distractions during puberty. (But I am not expert in this field, need proper data to validate), May be it will be good to increasge age criteria for boys to attend school like marriage.
Another related point is, incentives in puberty. Simple thing like being good in sports make you popular in crowd. So it is more important to have proper incentives for boys for studies.
> Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more
Disagree. Many boys are in comics, manga, sci-fi reading than classic and fictions. In my experience, where academic curriculum is more focused on memorization boys trail behind. But they do good in competative exams where analytical questions play big role.
> Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts
This is somewhat true, specifically in states. One of the reason behind it is, marketing agencies started to target teen-age girl group heavily for whatever reasons recently.
Boys require more physical activity. They're just wired for it. Sitting at a desk for hours on end is incompatible with their physiology. Sitting like that isn't good for girls, either, but they seem to cope better. Schooling, as it is widely administered today, is not humane. It's not that it benefits one sex. It's that it hurts one more than it hurts the other.
If you have a boy who's on the verge of failing because he can't pay attention, make a serious effort to get him several hours of moderate or intense physical activity every day.
* Sex differences in general intelligence are small, so the F>M achievement gap in higher education likely is not explained by women being smarter.
* The gap emerges already in elementary school and the gap in elementary school is predictive of performance in higher education.
* The gap in elementary school is not new, and can likely be attributed to females maturing earlier in their attention skills and being less unruly.
* So girls/women may have always been more fit for school, but they lacked incentives to make something of themselves and were held back by their biology in earlier times.
* What is new is a strong incentive for girls to succeed in school due to the economic opportunities and reduced investment in the children and birth (e.g. birth control).
* The gap mainly exists in lower-to-middle income families, not so much higher income, so a good environment can presumably aid boys to be more focused, or boys may be more sensitive to a poor environment.
* It concludes with anecdotes by a teacher about how a return to more manly competition may not actually be helpful for boys as it discourages slow learners. Rather, boys should be more supported, and they need to get over the stereotype that nerdiness and conscientiousness is for the girls. Plus the topic of boys falling behind should not be a taboo.
I don't have direct links to the papers, but IQ levels are statistically similar, with the standard deviation for males a bit larger. Will dig for papers and update.
I have always wondered if girls knowledge that they're likely to want a child some day factors into this. That is it gives them a timeframe (between late 20's and late 30's say) that they kinda know they want to be in a position to have a child and working back from that they need to get an education and begin a career.
It gives them almost a timescale to plan against and boys have nothing similar in the biological sense.
I genuinely have no clue if it actually holds any weight, just something I've always been curious about.
Are girls actually outperforming boys academically?
It's repeated a few times, that girls attend college more often than boys, and achieve higher grades. But college is a broad term; you can study electrical engineering or gender studies and get a master's degree either way, yet these are very different fields and require very different skills. Relatively more girls pick gender studies over electrical engineering.
It's possible that boys outperform girls in every single field, but averaged over all fields, it appears the other way around (Simpson's Paradox). I wonder if there is any data that shows girls' superior performance broken down by field.
As with all of these types of posts there are those who complain about how women (or insert any protected class) have unfair advantages. They seem to see the world as a zero sum. If anyone class has an advantage, the other class will be disadvantaged.
The proposed solution is usually to do a blind audition. If you don't know anything about the candidate there is no discrimination. However this seems to have a major flaw. How do you account for all of the disadvantages that occurred before or might occur after the blind audition?
You strive to eliminate bias everywhere. Putting your thumb on the scale during the audition portion because there may have discrimination before does not make sense.
I get that it would be impossible to solve all forms of discrimination everywhere. I think my fundamental question is can you solve the problem of systemic discrimination, by ignoring it? My problem with the blind audition is you are fixing a local problem and in turn ignoring the global problem.
It seems that corporations and governments are trying to solve the global problem (lack of diversity due to discrimination) which then in turn causes local problems (reverse discrimination).
I come from Kenya, and this thing is already apparent. If you what is happening in our country, the new constitution mandates gender equality. So, what is happening is this, tribes, such as mine, which do not favor men over women, have many highly educated women. Therefore, when government jobs are being distributed, I am at disadvantage. Men from other tribes are hired but to comply with gender equality, women from our tribes are hired to our exclusion. So, people like me have lost opportunities. This gender thing is kinda discriminatory. We need to think about it more carefully.
As society, humanity still lacks a proper vision and far away from calling a modern society.
Same problem persists under different disguises e.g. Gender based policies, religion based policies, cast based policies, region based policies. You name it. There are people who suffer for being in minority and then there are people who take advantage of being in minority.
- Why only black lives matters, what about white people, asians and many others? Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter' ?
- Why only 'lets girls to get code', what about boys and trans ? Why do we scare to say 'lets get everyone to code' ?
- Why do countries identify themselves with a single religion ? Why can't we respect the all religions ?
In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge. People are so scared to say right things and get shunned publicly. We should not create our policies based on phobias, stigmas and to allur particular votebank, but for universal integration.
Let's have first right vision. It needs a real courage to say the right things and more to do the same.
The answer to your 'why' questions is that there are (and were) exclusionary behaviors and/or tactics that either actively prevent or passively discourage those minorities from participating.
> and then there are people who take advantage of being in minority
I honestly don’t see this as a problem. So what if a person gets a little privilege just because they belong in a minority? What bothers me is the more common case of privileged person taking advantage of their privilege.
> Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter'?
Because I always hear “all lives matter” said in response to “black lives matter”. To me that sounds like you are discounting my previous statement, as if it’s not entirely sufficient, that black lives matter.
“All lives matter” is something that people also say. e.g. I hear animal rights activists say that all the time. Even the very same people that say “black lives matter” in an anti-racist rally are likely to say “all lives matter” in an pro-immigration rally, pointing to the fact that many immigrants suffer preventable deaths on the migratory routes.
> In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge
Good. If I say something that insults a lot of people I would like to know about it, so that I can know better in the future. I hate to be the one that speaks like an idiot and never gets corrected.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] thread"Girls are trailing boys in engineering jobs: why?"
implicitly identifying that as a problem which needed to be fixed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37254851
Not really sure what you're implying
Based on the search results and point scores, I'd wager that no article with "women" and "engineering" has ever been at the top of the front page, as this presently is.
It does seem like this post is growing more quickly than these did, but perhaps because this is a more surprising/novel development, whereas the gap of women in engineering roles is much more commonly known?
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=women+engineering
There are also 4 such articles with more points referencing boys and education (not including this one).
On a forum which is organised around engineering.
And people will claim that the latter gets more attention, despite being shown evidence to the contrary. That's pretty average sexism.
(I also would note that this hasn't been up for long enough for people to be up-voting for the content, given that you can only access it as a 23-minute podcast.)
Except this has not been demonstrated at all. The BBC has both covered the topic and it has been discussed in highly upvoted posts on Hacker News.
Because the headline you gave seems pretty close to what is in fact reported all the time.
This isn't "bad parenting" or "overdiagnosis of ADHD" by the way, the brain of a young male develops differently, specifically their pre-frontal cortex (executive function, how to behave/regulate oneself) develops much slower, whereas the motor-neural cortex is overly developed, relative to girls.
Beyond any developmental difference in the sexes, there's culture. Where I taught, the South and West sides of Chicago, any troubled boy was more likely to join a gang, sell drugs, commit violence, etc. These poor boys could be jumped and beaten for living on the wrong street. One student was having anger issues, his cousin got killed, he had latent anger issues which prevented prioritization of school work. Another common issue: his father is gone, he's switching homes constantly, there's no stability to facilitate the slow, incremental progress that is school and learning.
Beyond sheer dangerous problems like the above, I'd say boys channel their effort into sports and gaming more, whereas the girls I taught were more concerned with social circles, popularity, social media, etc. Question, do we think gaming is "better" for mental health than social media? If so, boys may be advantaged, I recall my boy students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic.
There is a change that happens around puberty, when I was in seventh grade I noticed it acutely. Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus to follow the teacher's lesson. It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
Edit: There's a bit of discussion of "overdiagnosis" or "misdiagnosis" of ADHD. This is a complex issue, but I will say I don't think anecdata is constructive here. By blaming bad parenting or video games or candy, we ignore the reams of data which show that many children can not focus and struggle MIGHTILY due to this.
Children with ADHD have less friends, less academic success, more likelihood to abuse drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, cocaine/nicotine (their dopaminergic system is uniquely vulnerable to stimulants). This is a sad trajectory for these kids, and I think we should consider carefully before we blanket accuse the medical system of overdiagnosis or misdiagnosis.
My experience as well. I taught 7th and 6th grade and the 6th graders were especially fascinating as you could see the transition happening throughout the year and for different students.
Right. And instead of changing school to adapt to kids (e.g., less sitting in chairs, more free play), we change kids to adapt to school (e.g., medicate, discipline, hold back).
Our approach is completely backwards.
I think it has to do with scalability; our current education system scales much better within the ridiculous budget constraints education faces (in the US).
Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
The spending efficiency of public schools in US is horrible, and they tend to focus on quantity over quality with teachers, due to a misguided idea of reducing student teacher ratios that Malcolm Gladwell has written about.
This constant excuse repeated everywhere about not enough funding isn't backed up by data.
I spent my entire childhood in public schools. 3/4 of my teachers were lazy shitbags who treated it like a govt job. The other 1/4 were punished every time they broke the mold in any way to fix things.
The day public schools realize that their primary role is educating kids OVER providing jobs to as many teachers union members as possible, we can start fixing them.
My wife teaches English at a pubic school on the other end. Their student body is mostly minorities. The library contains only books written by dead white men which the students are inherently mistrustful of. They can't afford new novels, so the teachers print excerpts at home and bring them to class. In 2017 they blew their printing budget. In 2018 and 2019 we printed more than 35k pages at home because the school couldn't afford more toner. In 2021 they'll be in the black re: toner again, so my home printer will get a break until they blow the budget again. Public schools are funded based on property taxes of the surrounding neighborhoods. Some of them have money to burn, others can't afford books.
My wife's school has the best teachers in town. Nobody goes into teaching for the money, and nobody teaches as a school like hers because they think it's gonna be an easy job--those sorts gravitate to the schools with money to burn and students that aren't also homeless.
More important than fixing the absolute amount of funding that public schools have is fixing the way it's distributed. It should a flat rate per-student, adjusted only for cost of living at a city-by-city granularity, not a neighborhood-by-neighborhood granularity.
Once the public school experience is more equal across the board it will be easier to distinguish the good teachers that lack supplies from the bad teachers with resources to waste.
>Washington DC public schools get more money per student than anywhere else in US.
NYC public schools are #1; DC isn't in the top ten (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...). Baltimore is #3, though, and four DC suburbs are also in the top ten, all no doubt offering much better education than the Baltimore (or DC) schools.
>My son's private school tuition is half what the average public school system in the US gets from taxpayers (local, state, and federal combined).
Private schools pay teachers less money than public schools, too.
- Cost more money for the state - Cost more time to the teacher (its an issue since early grade teachers are already swamped) - is in "testing" since the late 90's at least and is not quite there yet.
So we took another approach, more like germans. Reduced schools hour and add 2x2 hours of learning something else. Woodworking, board game, wird sports, anything the teacher can put in place (often boring stuff tbh, but i heard really good initiatives from friends that stayed in the social "business").
Well, in the end, it costed more money, took more time from the teachers anyway, was poorly implemented all around and was rolled back in some areas. But weirdly, while rural areas often get the short end of the stick when this kind of change rolls out, in this case, this created a lot of social link and learning opportunities (as they got no money, they had to ask parent/grandparents and people living around for help and this often was a success)
If a stranger breaks into your home and kills your kid, the natural response for a lot of people is to kill the person that did it. There are a lot of reasons why we _don't_ allow that in civilized countries. People have to be socialized to reject that natural behavior.
More to school children, they as adults will not be successful if they frequently act impulsively. Adulthood in society is finding a fulfilling career, maintaining healthy relationships, paying your bills on time, and setting fulfilling long term goals for yourself. None of those things are helped by impulsive behavior.
* Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
* I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
I mean... no shit? The point wasn't to compare revenge killing to fidgeting. The point was to illustrate that impulse control is necessary for a civilized society to function.
> Development is different than adulthood. Your argument is like saying breast feeding a child is crippling it's ability to integrate into society later in life.
It's frankly insulting that you would take the stupidest possible interpretation of my argument, make a counterargument, and claim slam dunk.
How do you think it is that kids become adults? Do you just let kids run wild, controlling none of their impulses, and then they turn 18 and suddenly they're in full control of themselves? That's absolutely laughable.
It's development for a reason: you're _developing_ the kids. They are going to be at a lower level of ability than an adult with regards to impulse control. That's why you start to teach them. Babies can't chew hard food. It's impossible. So you don't give them hard food. It's _NOT_ impossible to teach a kid to control some of their undesirable impulses.
> I haven't seen any compelling evidence that you can train impulsiveness out of a child. You have a lot more faith in public schools than I do if you think language arts workbooks have that effect.
Uh... wat? No, you can't train _all_ impulsiveness out of anybody. But you can absolutely train people to recognize and mitigate negative impulses.
Almost the very first skill any kid learns is to control the impulse of blurting out when they want to speak in a classroom. They are taught that they should raise their hand and wait to be called on. And lots of parents have to teach their kids that they can't hit other kids.
With respect to how both environments force humans to adapt to the institution, and thereby manifest a perverse socialization, yes. The differences are in magnitude, not direction.
I'm reminded of the flawed "alpha" theory of wolf behavior. Turns out the observed dominance struggles were directly related to being in captivity; this form of "socialization" doesn't emerge in the wild.
I, for one, appreciate not having to worry about going hungry, dying of thirst, freezing to death, or being chased down by a pack of wolves. You need a society to facilitate that. Society doesn't work without social norms. And you wouldn't be on Hacker News speculating about this if not for society.
Also, where are you getting this idea that kids in school are abused?
Boys may have a harder time staying still and paying attention, but that isn't just a school thing. Doing any sort of research for any sort of theoretical learning in life requires those same things. You'll never get to fulfill your every desire in life. Learning the discipline to control yourself now and have fun later is just as important a life skill to learn as any. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Citation, desperately, needed.
The anecdotal evidence available to me from my experiences and my social circle strongly contradicts that.
You may want to reconsider that assumption.
"This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
"At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion.
"The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)"
Agar.io?
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I don't agree with this sentiment, there simply wasn't great evidence that ADHD is misdiagnosed, at least when I studied it a few years back.
I also think there is a socialization problem from a fairly young age. Many elementary schools have zero-tolerance on fighting these days, but I've observed many preschool environments where the teachers are fatalistic about boys roughhousing, but will take girls to task about the same behaviors. It's certainly likely that there are biological differences as well, but the current environment seems designed to magnify them.
1: Bipolar, processing disorder, dyslexia
1a. Also, the disorder was MUCH less well known by teachers, parents, and doctors 20-30 years ago, which is resulting in more undiagnosed adults today at ages 50+
2. Multiple comorbidities: This is very true, good point. A person may be anxious, depressed, bipolar, or OCD, and these can share symptoms with ADHD, thus part of the DSM-V diagnosis of ADHD includes ruling out other disorders.
3. Spectra: All mental health disorders exist on a spectrum from "No symptoms" to "Many/All symptoms". There are mild, moderate, and severe diagnoses of ADHD, for instance, and that may warrant different treatment approaches.
Right, this is kind of what I'm talking about. A kid jumping on his chair and screaming might have ADHD, ODD, RAD, PTSD, ASD, &c., or some combination of them (one of the more bizarre stories I have is a kid with dyslexia who would stand up on her desk to get sent to the principle's office to avoid her school work when she couldn't crib off of the kid next to her) . What happens in too many schools is the school psychologist diagnoses them with ADHD and sends them to a psychiatrist.
What happens next depends on the quality of the psychiatrist and the means of the parents. In, what qualitatively seems to be a large minority of the cases (I have no hard data to back this up, just a collection of anecdotes), the psychiatrist does little or no additional screening and prescribes a sequence of medications (Ritalin, then Adderall, ...) until something works or the parents stop bringing their kid in.
Meanwhile the majority of the "primarily inattentive" ADHD kids either fly under the radar, or do so badly academically that they get more generalized interventions involving tutors or assistants who either bug them to stay on task, or do 90% of the work for them.
I (also the "spacey" type, told by every therapist I've been to that my symptoms are quite severe) was only diagnosed when I got sent in for a generalized intervention due to terrible performance, and maxed out the WISC. If my symptoms were slightly less severe, (or I were born 5-10 years earlier) I probably would have just been the "lazy kid."
Again this is because the majority of the kids who enter the mental health "system" are due to behaviors observed by teachers in the classroom.
As an aside, I should note that at least in my lifetime, and possibly longer, we've asked teachers to take on a lot more jobs, while simultaneously eroding their autonomy to do any of their jobs, so I'm not blaming teachers for this, just noting what I've observed.
I remember this shift clearly. And I felt a lot more unity and focus afterwards than before, it's just that as a teacher, I would've been focused on unifying against you.
Beforehand there was a subtle sense of pride that I usually got straight A's and made my parents proud. Afterward I felt like I had had it wrong the whole time:
It's not me vs you according to whatever metrics the authorities choose, comrade. It's you and me against the status quo. We must specialize in wherever the authorities are weak and exploit that to the hilt. As it turned out, the authorities were confused by their technology, so the clear path forward was for us all to become hackers--or so it seemed at the time.
And so, twenty years later, all my male friends have mediocre academic records and decent salaries, while the girls (regrettably) have it the other way.
I don't know if my path is as open to thirteen year old boys today. We launched our games from a dos prompt, opportunity for exploration beckoned at every keystroke. Nowadays everything is part of a platform, you have to go out of your way to find opportunities to tinker. It's all so constrained.
As I see it, I lucked into a growth mindset that was compatible with my pubescent priority realignment (towards my friends and against authority). Do you think that the modern world offers similar opportunities that I'm just not seeing? If not, should we design for them?
For those wondering, I believe this game is agar.io
Attitudes and norms around how school have changed a lot, and the modern school severely penalizes boys.
For instance it was typical for schools to encourage competition between students, but this is very frown upon in most places nowadays. For a lot of boys, the drive to compete is pretty much the only positive thing keeping them focused on schoolwork.
Another typical trend has been to reduce and to almost eliminate the amount of multiple choice testing and to change it to written questions. There’s evidence enough to claim that this significantly penalizes boys (specially in the 10 to 14 age range) due to developmental reasons.
The difference in ADHD diagnosis is easy to explain. As we’ve moved our expectations of kid behavior from what “the typical boy does” to “what the typical girl does”, a lot of perfectly normal boy behavior is reinterpreted as ADHD.
I work in tech where the gender disparity between men and women is discussed very often -- but I don't see these conversations taking place amongst teachers, most especially for earlier primary education which is more female than male.
Maybe there is a bias here or maybe women teachers have teaching styles that resonate with female students more. It definitely needs more attention.
Before him I didn't care about math at all. I only learn when it's a guy teaching me for some reason. I can't focus on a woman if she's teaching, I get bored and started thinking about what to app to make.
But not every guy teacher was the one I could focus on. He was the guy with the deepest voice, for some reason it didn't let my attention drift away.
Before that, I sucked in Chemistry, until some guy taught me. I don't know how that worked but did.
Then some guy taught me physics but his voice wasn't manly, and I started sucking at physics after that.
So I'd say as a guy, I was almost always better taught by men. Women (young or middle aged) bored me away from the subject. And that used to reflect in the batch performance for almost every guy.
Girls weren't impacted by it at all. They got good grades either ways man or woman.
I realize now how horrible it all sounds, but trust me I tried.
source: https://www.tes.com/news/could-handwriting-bias-write-exam-c...
Women in general tend to be more compliant, which becomes an issue later in life when standing up for oneself in the workplace (e.g. getting promotions and pay raises), but it's an advantage in the classroom. Men need to be shown the value of something before they will learn it. This can be a problem as a lot of school lessons have no immediate practical value.
That's because it doesn't fit the SJW narrative.
Because it doesn't fit the SJW narrative.
In our current school there are 3 STEM programs for girls, one that is for both boys and girls. One of the programs for girls is very well funded by local startup money and gets designers, marketers, etc to make them fun. The one for both boys and girls is volunteer run and while I respect and appreciate the effort, frankly it not fun and exciting at all. It's little better than someone just handing you a textbook to read.
I'm all for making STEM (coding especially) inclusive and welcoming for all. Nobody should face discrimination or harassment based on gender (or any other attribute). Unfortunately it's the boys getting the shaft right now. I can't imagine the outrage that would happen if someone started a "boys only" program, yet it almost seems like that's what needs to happen. We're back to the days of striving for "separate but equal."
And I'm afraid this increases the perception that men are naturally fine at STEM and women need special support because of inherent gender attributes (and not because of social problems that we could just address at the root)... which at the end of the day makes life harder for women in their careers.
Even the "boy scouts" are just the scouts now: https://www.scouting.org/
I'll add that one of the best things about Boy Scouts was that we could do stuff that was dangerous, but not too dangerous. We didn't have any moms come along either, and I think that helped. Dads would stop us from doing something truly stupid (like permanent injury type stupid), but not something dumb that would bruise us and teach us a lesson. It also allowed us to do lots more fun stuff.
These days, tree forts are a no-no, apparently. Some guys from my old troop were building one at a mixed event recently. Some girls from another troop came over and said it wasn't safe, then got some karen from their troop to come yell at the boys. Oh, and and apparently it's no longer okay to climb above chest height these days, because it's "not safe". I'm way too young to be saying, "Back when I was young, we did $UNSAFE_THING all the time! We liked it, and never got hurt." Or at least, I thought I was.
There is very much a need for boys to have a space to be boys: where they can let their boisterousness out, where they can act a little crazy, or just act closer to their true selves etc. without having to worry about how they're perceived by the girls. As soon as puberty kicks in, all co-ed events are affected by sexual dynamics; it's been a standard in every human society to provide plenty of contexts for boys where that is removed from the mix as much as possible in order to get better / different behaviour from the young cadre.
As the father of several boys, I agree. For anyone interested more in this concept, I recommend "Boys Adrift" by Leonard Sax (a psychologist) and "Boys Should Be Boys" by Dr. Meg Meeker (a pediatrician). Both books are very enlightening about some of the problems our boys face in America.
[1] https://www.meekerparenting.com/podcast
Basically, different safe spaces exist for different demographics, but are only marked for certain groups.
Downvoters: why is this not interesting? Traditional textbook way of learning might be better than making things too much fun. (it still has to be fun, but intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic). We will never know if we don't measure the outcome.
On the other hand how do you get more girls into STEM without programs like this? Maybe it's the best of bad options.
I think addressing group 2 is a desirable and valid goal.
Societal gender roles say nurses and teachers are women's work and STEM is man's work. That's the thing one would need to address, and at a young age. It's not entirely clear how one can do that. One "only" has to challenge the societal norms that define gender roles themselves. Not an easy problem.
That is in my opinion an unjustified assumption. Huge numbers of men and women are uninterested in programming. In fact, virtually everyone I know of either gender is uninterested in programming. The number of people who don't program because they're not interested anecdotally dwarfs the number of people who don't program for any other reason.
However, if we are going to solve a problem (eg non biodegradeable plastic) we must do it upstream (eg taxing non biodegradeable plastic and nudging corporations into switching to biodegradeable materials), rather than expend tons of effort downstream (eg banning plastic bags, straws and blaming individuals).
Same here... if we are going to be doing something about girls in STEM as a society, I’d rather do it upstream — earlier in life — because otherwise trying to fiddle around the edges later is just a bandaid.
PS: as an aside, I found the expression “it’s the boys getting the shaft right now” a bit ironic, given the origins of the phrase https://www.etymonline.com/word/shaft
[Race] may not own houses. -- Illegal. [Race] is given extra help to own houses. -- Legal
You do see anger when individuals perceive they can't afford homes, school, or other big ticket items and perceive that they aren't given help - but that isn't quite the same as denying people something.
Which is fine if you're part of that the well-off, but if you're just a person and not benefitted by the categroy association with rich people who happen to be the same race -- a simplistic association that discriminatory, racist people make -- then you're shit out of luck.
Discriminating against people is denying them something, it's denying them a fair shot, fair treatment by the government. Regardless of their sex or skin colour they deserve fair opportunity.
How is that not denying them help?
> On average [Not-Race] has more wealth to afford houses, or home ownership is more common than [Race] in these programs.
So why not just have your aid program be based on wealth, rather than race?
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html#:~:te....
However the organization’s programming can be very feminist, turning off boys.
Edit: btw the thing that annoys me about this is that I already won some tough and prestigious merit scholarships so I actually would have a good shot at these and probably get one if I applied to several. So it's more direct here for me.
Evey beyond names people tend to assign class, gender, and race to surprisingly mundane things that are found on resumes.
Here's an article that discusses one recent study:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-bias-hiring-0504-...
The problem with the original study was that it used names that denoted socio-economic status as much as race (ie, "Dahntay Smith" or "Shaniqua Thomas"). That's a problem, too, but I suspect a similar effect for professional job applicants can be shown using "lower" socio-economic status white names (ie, "Bobby Lee Jones" or "Tommy Ray Brown").
Regardless, I would be strongly in favor of anonymized job applications, since that would eliminate any suggestion of such bias in whichever direction.
I assumed this was fairly typical.
Either way I was responding to "if we took sex and race off... job apps... it would really help."
And I don't think this can be achieved by accident. There must be intentionality to achieve this.
Just look at this NYT hit piece on Coinbase yesterday and all the data available from big tech like Google and Facebook: https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/13440449092006952...
I'm not endorsing it. I'm just noting that it's happening.
Some of them play this game very aggressively. Once they are there, immediately organize into diversity projects and groups to push for quotas in promotions, project leads, etc. Despite these fast-track opportunities, they fully believe they are continuously being held back, at every level, and everything will be interpreted that way.
I think it will eventually break the org but I don't plan on staying.
That said, FAANG companies have provided countless textbook examples of what HR departments should not do in almost every imaginable situation.
I’d love to see the aclu sue FANG over their Diversity programs. I highly suspect they are illegal in one way shape or form.
A uniform decision regarding all interns across an entire company targeting specific racial charactaristics is very different from a policy that bases decisions on objective measurements done in good faith with intent to correct for some form of bias.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524333
You’re obviously able to organise in the workplace for basically whatever goals you want if you like (though in the US this organisation is only protected if more than one person is involved.)
That's not what's happening. They just demand explicit quotas for themselves.
The whole 'diversity and inclusion/feminism makes things better for everyone' is largely a myth, it's just identity groups out for themselves in corporate America.
A more likely explanation which is backed up by evidence is that generalized perception of a group by the teacher will yield grades accordingly, so the more research that shows girls being better at school will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers have to work hard to counter this bias (and many do).
There is also a possibility that there is some biological difference that makes certain teaching methods that just so happen to be favored by teachers at the moment are a tiny bit easier for one gender over others. However I would like to see some research before I subscribe to that, but remain open for the possibility meanwhile.
That all said, if there is a difference, but the effect size is small, then honestly: Does it matter?
That's not what the parent comment is saying - it's saying that earned praise is not given at the same rate for males as for females.
They seem completely unrelated to overall academic performance however, and your complaint sounds a little whiny. I'm as tired of woke nonsense as anyone, but these programs are a great idea.
Being cool is a chump thing
Definitely not, because this gender difference far predates our belief as a society that women are as capable as men in STEM subjects and careers.
Probably not, no. Setting aside the deliberately inflammatory description you chose to use here, this is a complex phenomenon observed over quite a long period in a variety of different locations and social backgrounds globally, and the suggestion that it could be simplified to "uneven praise" doesn't seem to correlate with any research I've seen.
Unfortunately it's the boys getting the shaft right now.
It's pretty difficult to make any real progress on issues of equal access if any targeted efforts to improve access for particular groups are going to be characterised as "giving others the shaft".
It depends on whether the efforts go from "equal access" to positive discrimination, and I'm not sure where that line is drawn or if people are interested in drawing it
If "equal access" is the goal (which I agree it should be), why are we excluding a group based on immutable characteristics? You really see that as equal?
And on a tangent, as for "girls in STEM" programs, I'm not really sure why they need to exist. I think a "girls in STEM" program is as necessary as a "boys in teaching" program, and that is, not at all. Different genders will naturally gravitate towards different fields, and we don't need to fight that.
There's a pop theory / crackpot idea that men tend to be on average "dumber" than women, but with a higher standard distribution, so they will have more "geniuses".
Women will be on average "smarter", but lower standard deviation.
If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that, since while women will have a high chance of reproduction, male biology will need to have more variance and "risk" to achieve some sort of distinction to get to the comparatively lower reproductive success rate of males.
In reality, our schooling is now so screwed up between grade inflation, teaching for the test, over-prescribing ADD drugs (which is opioid dependence grooming by the drug companies), reduced funding, destruction of the middle class, and a host of other changes to society and policy.
The current understanding is that the average is generally similar, and males have greater variability. So yes, vastly more male geniuses. But men have larger brains for a reason, so it might be we're biased against measuring anything men are better at.
> If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that
It doesn't. The main reason is because female mammals have duplicate sex chromosomes, and the effects get combined together. In some other kinds of animals (such as birds) females tend to have greater variability. So it's a haphazard consequence of some evolutionary split way back when. (Who knows, maybe the causation of disposable males is there, but in the other direction.)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/dr-paul-...
Is this a public school? What does "for girls" mean? Like, can you enroll a boy?
The description of the program specifically says, "for girls" and it has a cartoon graphic with a few different female characters of different skin colors, each dressed as some profession. It doesn't say, "no boys" or anything like that, but as I said above I'm hesitant to try with my son. If it were me I would do it.
1. this gender gap begins very early (kindergarden), before the majority of "women in STEM" programs begin
2. are international (i'm fairly certain they don't have women in STEM programs in China, for example)
3. it doesn't explain why the differences are inversely related to income level (do you think there are more "women in STEM" programs at lower income levels?)
4. this difference is very old (>50 years of this effect)
About 100 years ago, women were explicitly forbidden from most colleges and universities. The attitude that women aren't cut out for, and should be excluded from STEM dates back to Socrates (~400 bce), at least. I'm not a historian but that wasn't terribly long after Greeks started writing things down.
The issue is that a lot of people don't really define stem as stem, they define it as RCE-research, computers, and engineering.
Linking the pew article for more detail: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-...
Besides the point. Have you ever had a favorite teacher who told you that you were destined for failure? Probably not, that teacher is never gonna be your favorite -- and spending a semester, or even years, with that teacher might well sour you on the subject even if it was your favorite.
I'm optimistic that we will eventually reach a fully egalitarian future, but pessimistic at how much work is left to do.
this wasn't true 50 years ago
could it be that simple? yeah I think it is actually
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360
I mean, I suppose it's also possible that these programs just don't do anything and we should scrap them due to lack of results, but I'm inclined to believe they're helping somewhat.
(Semi-disclaimer: Prior to COVID I used to volunteer at Girls Who Code.)
Because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that's what happens. As measured by the Global Gender Gap Index , the countries with the highest levels of gender equality, such as Scandanavia, have the lowest levels of female programmers and engineers, whereas countries with much lower scores and more traditional views on genders (such as Iran UAE) have some of the highest levels of female programmers and engineers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...
There were half a dozen of them and none of them even considered what they were about to do was wrong. I wonder how often this happens in other areas.
The elephant in the room is that Boys’ academic underperformance is tied to class, and thus resolving the issue has gone nowhere, because there’s no such thing as class and because the responsibility for all under-achievement therefore lies with the individual.
Can you explain this?
1. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20161074
This one suggests (socioeconomic) class is a factor in lower performing boys' performance. This is true: at least in the US, boys' academic performance is more affected by socioeconomic class than girls' (though both are very much so).
balls187 says that the way boys' and girls' academic performance evolves vs. age is different. This is also true.
Edited to add: please also see the work from David Figlio et al. mentioned in Krona’s comment below. That’s an interesting study design that tries to demonstrate that boys in aggregate need higher quality schooling to achieve the same level of performance as girls in aggregate.
Prior to puberty, nearly all the top performing students were girls. After puberty, boys were more represented.
The theory I heard was societal pressure in the US was higher on girls to be "liked" and accepted, and that girls felt that doing well in school was counter to that. Girls would stop focusing on performance and ultimately move towards the center of the curve.
Pressure to be liked, and antithetical attitudes towards academic performance also applied to boys as well, but to a lesser degree.
This article from 18 years ago suggests that girls received extra encouragement to overcome the lowered expectations due to their gender.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/
I like the older approach of emphasizing reading writing 'rithmetic, and then teaching practical skills and classics. All obviously relevant skills and knowledge for everyone.
UNESCO [1], World Bank [2], Unicef [3] have specific goal programs here.
[1] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/priority-areas...
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/girlseducation
[3] https://www.unicef.org/education/girls-education
It should also be mentioned that young men are now doing worse than young women in the workplace. That's because this is a generational thing. When millenials are 50, then 50 year old men will do worse than 50 year old women.
How specifically was this accomplished? Well many small actions were taken. So it's hard to pinpoint which one exactly it is. Women are favored both with explicit policies to favor them, as well as by being given more consideration when policies are designed ("How will this affect women"). Hence I don't think there is one big thing that needs fixing, rather it's many small things. And doing so will take a long time, decades possibly.
It ends on a note saying that the way to fix is by acknowledging the fact that boys are falling behind, and adjusting our teaching methods and schools' social environments.
Anyone with experience in teaching environments knows girls are way worse at ostracizing successful students.
It’s very interesting to me the claim that boys are quitting because there’s too much competition, because my experience is the complete opposite. The only thing that makes boys quit competing in my experience is either seeing the competition as pointless (“bad boy” attitude) or realizing that the competition is not fair.
A lot of teachers are unaware as to how smart some kids can be. I’ve seen kids swap their names in tests just to validate the hypothesis that their language teacher was assigning grades based on who wrote what (which, having seen their numbers, looks like it was indeed happening).
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
One possible explanation is that the social expectation of becoming a wife and mother is decoupled from the choice of what they study in school.
It’s what happens when people see less opportunities for them and their children.
The system as current stands doesn’t care about middle class white Westerners. A group who’s slowly becoming poorer and poorer.
Donald trump and people like him will continue to rise into power as the middle class is oppressed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-gi...
Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more. In general somehow reading has seemed to grow more gendered over time; if you go into the average chain bookstore its apparent that its heavily targeted towards women, and something like Amazon's free Prime reads are often almost entirely women-targeted genre selections.
Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts.
Jon Scieszka, a kids author, noticed this over fifteen years ago and started guys read, a website trying to encourage boys to do so and raise awareness about it. But it seems to have stalled, and I don't hear a lot of talk about the feminization of reading.
I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away. There's always been cultural resistance against "book-larning" but its weird how gendered reading itself has become lately.
How often do school libraries have things boys want to read? In high school, even among those who did read, very few of us ever used the library because it mostly had fantasy novels, fiction, etc. My friend group wanted to read about history and economics, topics not really covered.
Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all? We'd think it absurd right? But for some reason the idea men shun fiction is seemed as a truism. And if people would say "oh boys are too energetic, they can't sit still for a movie" we'd think they are nuts.
I'm not sure how it happened. I wish someone would research how this idea came into dominance
I couldn't find any research on this, but it would not surprise me if viewership skewed towards men for documentary.
From personal experience, Rick Riordan's series had similar interest levels between girls and boys but later series (Hunger Games, House of Night, Fault in Our Stars) did skew towards girls. My reading also fell off as I got older so I'm sure I wasn't as in touch with what my peers were reading.
However, the massive bulk of the market ends up being targeted towards women. It's something where you'd need to actually look on shelves for, as there's a weird dynamic where in female-dominated markets or places, you have male "figurehead" things while the rest of the market is dominated by and caters to women.
I noticed this in Christian fiction ironically. You will see a big author like Ted Dekker doing his spiritual action adventure/fantasy/mild horror for a wide audience, but the huge bulk of the books are historical/amish/mystery romance aimed at women, to the point where no male alternatives exist. Even the small religious science fiction market is female dominated soft romantic sf.
In this case it's milking established demographics, as the religion itself has a mild demographics issue (not enough men.) But go look at a young adult shelf sometime; even superhero books feature women protagonists and are targeted to them now.
Remember that "intelligence" is tied to success on standardized tests, at least in the view of educational administration, because that is the alpha and omega of getting funding and keeping your job.
Have to disagree; the sort of reading discussed in that study isn't conducive to positive educational outcomes, but rather is more of a social activity. (Yeah, I know reading is often thought of as a solitary activity, but reading fictional narratives may be better understood as desynchronized socialization.)
Don't get me wrong, children can enjoy an educational advantage from pleasure-reading early on, as an introduction to how to read. But after that, pleasure-reading is a largely wasteful activity, at least in terms of educational advancement.
Further advancement in reading may come from learning to read expanded English -- including [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), $\mathrm{\TeX}$, `(string)"source code"`, M+A+T+H, technical texts, diagrams, schematics, etc. -- but it's unlikely that reading young-adult narratives provides the reader with any significant advantages. In fact, I suspect that it's likely to correlate with negative educational outcomes.
A shot in the dark guess could be that the attention industry (and the ad industry in general) is better at targeting boys grabbing them away from both homework and at home reading at a greater scale then the other genders.
He states that there are Kind Learning Environments. These are places like golf, chess, or classical piano. Here, the feedback is quick, the goals are clear, and relative ranking is knowable. To excel in these environments, it is all about drill-and-kill. Repetition and stick-hours are the name of the game.
This is in contrast to Unkind Learning Environments. These are places like tennis, business, or jazz. In the unkind world feedback is harder to come by, goals are unclear, and relative ranking is often not knowable. To excel in an unkind environment, Epstein states that you have to be an information grazer. Getting as many viewpoints and mental schemas as possible is the best way forward in an uncertain world.
Epstein's book goes much more into depth on this and has many very memorable examples. It's on Bill Gate's best books of 2020 list, despite being published in 2019.
So, I think that having more reading of any sort is then better for unkind environments, as it is a method of information grazing. Even terse dime-novels will often expose you to new ways of thinking, a new word, or a new idea. Though not the best method of information grazing (whatever that may be), it matters what boys replace it with, if anything. If they replace it with the kind learning environments of CoD or WorldofTanks, then that is not as good. If they replace it with foreign films and TV, that may be just as good.
I would think that any person that reads broadly should be better at business or other unkind learning environments, all other things being equal. Unfortunately, at least in most of the world's business environments I know of, when it comes to gender all other things are very much not equal.
Unfortunately it will be another 30 years before the 'girls are disadvantaged in education' trope dies, but bad ideas like phlogestion and trickle down economics take a long time to die.
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"
It also shows up in more anecdotal stories like this one, in which a teacher banned boys from playing with Lego whilst letting girls do it:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/31/kindergarten-teache...
The problem is one of feminism. It's not that boys have somehow inexplicably got dumber over the past decades, it's that women have become radicalised and collectively concluded that it's OK to express explicit biases towards other women on the basis of gender, because progress.
Disagree. If you love to read fictions, doesn't help you at all to read tech books unless you're in it.
My hunch is, it is related with puberty. Biologically boys hit puberty late while that time girls are already on the way being matured. So it could be more about distractions during puberty. (But I am not expert in this field, need proper data to validate), May be it will be good to increasge age criteria for boys to attend school like marriage.
Another related point is, incentives in puberty. Simple thing like being good in sports make you popular in crowd. So it is more important to have proper incentives for boys for studies.
> Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more
Disagree. Many boys are in comics, manga, sci-fi reading than classic and fictions. In my experience, where academic curriculum is more focused on memorization boys trail behind. But they do good in competative exams where analytical questions play big role.
> Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts
This is somewhat true, specifically in states. One of the reason behind it is, marketing agencies started to target teen-age girl group heavily for whatever reasons recently.
If you have a boy who's on the verge of failing because he can't pay attention, make a serious effort to get him several hours of moderate or intense physical activity every day.
You'll see a world of difference.
* Sex differences in general intelligence are small, so the F>M achievement gap in higher education likely is not explained by women being smarter.
* The gap emerges already in elementary school and the gap in elementary school is predictive of performance in higher education.
* The gap in elementary school is not new, and can likely be attributed to females maturing earlier in their attention skills and being less unruly.
* So girls/women may have always been more fit for school, but they lacked incentives to make something of themselves and were held back by their biology in earlier times.
* What is new is a strong incentive for girls to succeed in school due to the economic opportunities and reduced investment in the children and birth (e.g. birth control).
* The gap mainly exists in lower-to-middle income families, not so much higher income, so a good environment can presumably aid boys to be more focused, or boys may be more sensitive to a poor environment.
* It concludes with anecdotes by a teacher about how a return to more manly competition may not actually be helpful for boys as it discourages slow learners. Rather, boys should be more supported, and they need to get over the stereotype that nerdiness and conscientiousness is for the girls. Plus the topic of boys falling behind should not be a taboo.
Edit:
One paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Another: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.180...
It gives them almost a timescale to plan against and boys have nothing similar in the biological sense.
I genuinely have no clue if it actually holds any weight, just something I've always been curious about.
It's repeated a few times, that girls attend college more often than boys, and achieve higher grades. But college is a broad term; you can study electrical engineering or gender studies and get a master's degree either way, yet these are very different fields and require very different skills. Relatively more girls pick gender studies over electrical engineering.
It's possible that boys outperform girls in every single field, but averaged over all fields, it appears the other way around (Simpson's Paradox). I wonder if there is any data that shows girls' superior performance broken down by field.
The proposed solution is usually to do a blind audition. If you don't know anything about the candidate there is no discrimination. However this seems to have a major flaw. How do you account for all of the disadvantages that occurred before or might occur after the blind audition?
It seems that corporations and governments are trying to solve the global problem (lack of diversity due to discrimination) which then in turn causes local problems (reverse discrimination).
- Why only black lives matters, what about white people, asians and many others? Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter' ?
- Why only 'lets girls to get code', what about boys and trans ? Why do we scare to say 'lets get everyone to code' ?
- Why do countries identify themselves with a single religion ? Why can't we respect the all religions ?
In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge. People are so scared to say right things and get shunned publicly. We should not create our policies based on phobias, stigmas and to allur particular votebank, but for universal integration.
Let's have first right vision. It needs a real courage to say the right things and more to do the same.
I honestly don’t see this as a problem. So what if a person gets a little privilege just because they belong in a minority? What bothers me is the more common case of privileged person taking advantage of their privilege.
> Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter'?
Because I always hear “all lives matter” said in response to “black lives matter”. To me that sounds like you are discounting my previous statement, as if it’s not entirely sufficient, that black lives matter.
“All lives matter” is something that people also say. e.g. I hear animal rights activists say that all the time. Even the very same people that say “black lives matter” in an anti-racist rally are likely to say “all lives matter” in an pro-immigration rally, pointing to the fact that many immigrants suffer preventable deaths on the migratory routes.
> In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge
Good. If I say something that insults a lot of people I would like to know about it, so that I can know better in the future. I hate to be the one that speaks like an idiot and never gets corrected.