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A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls
- enlightenedfool 11y agoGlad that there's a discussion. It would help humanity to also give enough focus on boy child development so that we could save their future, avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails.
- jbeja 11y agoFeminist?
- forrestthewoods 11y agoI've always wondered how much of the gap comes from a near total lack of male teachers in K-5.
- cperciva 11y agoProbably quite a lot. I'm reminded of a study I read a year or two ago which looked at academic performance in high school; girls received considerably higher class marks on average. However, this effect vanished when they took standardized tests ... and it also vanished when they had male teachers. Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something else, I don't know; but gender definitely makes a difference in teaching.
- woah 11y agoWould there be a suspicion that this was because of sexism, if the genders were reversed?
- comrh 11y agoIt still could be sexism, it's a gender neutral term even though it is mostly applicable to women.
- wpietri 11y agoI was wondering the same thing. It might be gender, but it could also be a strongly gender-focused society.
- htns 11y agoIt's actually a global phenomenon. Boys are performing worse in most of the Western world as well as much of the rest. When there are similar issues in the US, Japan, and Scandinavia you can rule out many cultural aspects as the cause.
- XorNot 11y agoThis is news to me. The results I've seen have always uniformly suggested that low socioeconomic status tends to impact the outcomes of young men more then women, and smoothes out for the middle and upper classes. Which is hardly surprising.
- htns 11y agoI guess this depends on what you consider low socioeconomic status. There is also a disparity in tertiary education. Women have higher enrollment and completion rates and thus get more degrees, even though sex ratio is skewed towards boys at birth. For example in 2010 in the Netherlands (from http://barrolee.com/ http://barrolee.com/) 45% of women aged 30-34 have some tertiary education and 31% have completed tertiary education (31 / 45 = 69%) whereas the male statistics are 39% and 25% (25 / 39 = 64%). This is then offset by women working fewer hours per week (from Eurostat): in the Netherlands men average only 35 hours per week, and women only 25. Dutch working hours are a little extreme, but the general trend is worldwide.
- wpietri 11y agoI could rule out cultural aspects. If I wanted to ignore the long history of gendered culture in both places. As well as centuries of male dominance.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoI've come to accept that people simply like people that look like them. And there's nothing wrong with that. Women in tech is important. Minority representation is important. And yes positive white male role models for little suburban straight white American boys is important.
- oldmanjay 11y agoYou know what happens when everything is important, right?
- aaaaaa1121 11y agoLess discrimination?
- RyanZAG 11y agoEverything really is important though. If we push the guy who will cure cancer out of the system because he is white and male, then everyone who is not white and male loses out just as much. Obviously pushing out a Latino girl who would cure cancer would be equally bad. But the key words here are 'equally bad'. Equally important.
- anon4 11y agoYou give equal time share to everything?
- jacalata 11y agoPeople aim for a diverse group that roughly reflects society instead of partitioning industries/jobs by randomly chosen personal characteristics?
- bsder 11y agoI think you are looking for something voluntary when that is almost certainly not the case. 1) A friend of mine once astutely commented that the diagnosis for ADHD was basically "middle class with behaviors which annoy female schoolteachers." 2) Boys tend to challenge authority from teens to early 20's to try and work out their place in the world. Most male teachers just roll with it until they have to make a sarcastic, embarrassing remark which short circuits it (never heckle a teacher or a stand-up comic--they've seen it all before). Female teachers tend to react more strongly. I suspect its a physical thing--boys start getting problematically large for most women about 7th or 8th grade and if, as a female, you don't nip it in the bud hard and fast, you can lose control over the situation. 3) Boys need male role models just as women need female role models. 4) Male teachers don't tend to view approval by their students as something useful or desirable (in the case of approval by the female students--it's downright dangerous). The better female teachers are in the same boat, but there are a LOT of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's approval. If we stew all that together with an absence of male teachers, I suspect that you have more than enough unconscious bias to account for everything.
- emsy 11y ago> I think you are looking for something voluntary when that is almost certainly not the case. Your parent post never argued that it was voluntary, but contemplated if it would be perceived to be voluntary sexism if the genders were reveresed.
- XorNot 11y ago(1) doesn't apply to the actual results of the study reported, which finds the (oft-found) effect that boys from low socioeconomic groups (not the middle class) are disproportionately disadvantaged compared to their female peers. The usual explanation tends to be that the outs in progression to university-level education are much more available to young men than women overall, as well as the worst excesses of lost potential (i.e. gang membership and fatalities are disproportionately male). (2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will, what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real improvement in teaching outcomes. (4) also demands actual evidence.
- gaius 11y agoOne of the teaching unions here in the UK was asked why they weren't doing more to get men into teaching. They replied that that was sexist as it implied that female teachers weren't doing a good enough job! You can't win.
- federico3 11y ago"win"?
- ionised 11y agoPlease everybody, perhaps?
- Nadya 11y ago"Win" means come out of the argument as "not a sexist". We need more female teachers -> "Why? Is teaching a female job? Fucking sexist!" We need more male teachers -> "Why? Are female teachers not good enough? Fucking sexist!" Lose-lose scenario. Therefore you can't "win".
- Spiritus 11y agoWhat's K-5?
- vacri 11y agoKindergarten to Grade 5
- pavornyoh 11y ago>It would help humanity to also give enough focus on boy child development so that we could save their future, avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails. You are right. I saw this show on CNN a few days ago and it was sad how these people have to re-learn basic things. http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/21/us/prison-reform-overview/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/21/us/prison-reform-overview/
- tajen 11y agoFor the statistics: In French prisons there are 3,5% of women.
- ggchappell 11y agoOkay, waaaaay off topic (but still from the article!): > Low-income families are often led by single mothers, which has been found to affect boys differently than girls. "Differently than"? This is the New York Times. I expect better. (For those who don't get it, the snooty among us prefer "differently from".) A quick search shows any number of occurrences of this jarring bit of word choice in the NY Times of late: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+%22different+than%22 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+%22different+th... So, does this mean that "different than" is officially legal in the NYT? Or does it mean that the bean counters & cost cutters at a once great paper have fired everyone who cares about grammar & usage? ---------------------------------------------------- EDIT. It appears that, officially, they frown just a bit on "different than", but it isn't really a stern frown. From The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 1999, page 107: > different. To satisfy the most exacting readers, use different with from, in front of a noun: Newspaper writing is different from poetry. When different unavoidably figures in a comparison with a full clause (including its own verb), different than is accepted by many authorities: Newspaper writing is different than it was 25 years ago. But if a graceful change can convert the phrasing to allow different from, it should be made: Newspaper writing is different from what it was 25 years ago. Google Books link: https://books.google.com/books?id=CnwIVkAQgFwC&q=different+than#v=snippet&q=different%20than&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=CnwIVkAQgFwC&q=different+t...
- mtinkerhess 11y agoIn this case "than" seems correct because it's short for "affect boys differently than [it affects] girls", right? In order to re-order that to use "from" you'd have to do something like "... the effect of which upon boys has been found to be different from that upon girls."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mturmon 11y agoThat's the way I read it also. Omitting words in a parallel structure like this is a form of "elliptical construction" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)
- jug5 11y agoI thought only women are allowed to be victims
- treadingvapor 11y agoThis article was pretty all over the place, and had too many speculative, opinion based quotes. Shouldn't this problem be handed over to the CDC? The writer briefly alludes to the fact that gender inequity may be related to gender roles, which are a construct. Yes, the CDC should study gender roles.
- JPKab 11y agoWhat I found particularly frustrating about the article was its focus on race, despite the fact that poverty and absentee fathers are the true culprits, with race simply having a correlation to the root cause condition. I grew up in an impoverished, white rural community, and the boys without fathers go nuts. It's a common pattern that doesn't even call for data. Everyone just knows it. My wife's father died when she was young, and her mother simply collected social security checks and lapsed into depression. Her sister and her did alright. Both of her brothers dropped out of high school, one of them committed suicide, and the other died at 21 of a medical condition while attempting to earn a GED and working for $8/hour at a gas station. Both were in and out of jail from their teen years and up.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>Shouldn't this problem be handed over to the CDC? I wouldn't want them handling any male issues. In the 2010 study of intimate partner violence, they specifically used a definition of rape that turned most male rape into contact sexual assault and not rape. Then in their summary, they focused on rape and non-contact sexual assault. Anyone doing a light reading would have assumed from the study that males did not experience much sexual violence. Personal anecdote: my experience has been this misunderstanding is the more common than not among those who have done a light reading of the study.
- dropit_sphere 11y agoMy guess is that most things---good and bad---have a disproportionate effect on boys.
- hugh4 11y agoMakes sense. Consistent with a greater prevalence of men than women at both of society's extremes. Evolutionary strategy suggests taking higher-risk paths for male phenotypes than female phenotypes.
- mherkender 11y agoMaybe it's just cultural. I don't see why risk taking favors men millions of years ago.
- corin_ 11y agoIf a man gets a woman pregnant and then the male takes risks then even if the risk results in death he still has offspring on the way, if the woman dies while pregnant then not so - could that be a reason?
- Super_Jambo 11y agoLarge risks imply large potential rewards (otherwise you're just being dumb). But in terms of genetics the female upside is limited by the very high costs of child bearing & the limited number of children they can physically have. The male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can have sex with. 1 / 200 men are apparently descended from Genghis Khan! This feat would simply be impossible for any woman of that era.
- belorn 11y agoYou are describing one reproductive strategy used by males, which is not true for all men, and is defently not true when looking beyond humans. Having many low investments into offspring can be effective, but it is also risky. The more champion based a race is (one male per many females), the more energy is going to be spent on competition. The offspring will also have to depend solely on the mother, since each child is just one of many from a single male and has thus less individual investment value. The alternative strategy is to focus on a smaller number of children, making sure that that the reproductive investment has a higher chance to be successful. Children gets the value of having two parents that are invested in the offspring, but there are issues of "cheating" (an observed behavior in many animals). Of course, I am only describing male strategy here and naturally it can not exist in a vacuum. Female strategy often has higher initial cost, but it does not dictate the outcome. In the case of humans also, the observed strategy in both sexes is normally said to be a mix strategy, so it is far more complex than just saying that the male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can have sex with.
- pmalynin 11y agoWhere to even begin, Part of this issue I feel is, as mentioned in the article, is that boys are taught from the young age to take care of their problems, which leads to more isolation. Another important reason I feel is the rising amount of "girls-only" opportunities that systematically make boys feel inadequate and since they are not able to participate for whatever reason (e.g. "its only for girls") they continue to lag behind. I even have a perfect example of this, my city has a "Girls Learning Code" meetup / lecture series that while advertises being gender neutral is clearly not so, the question is how many meetups are there that are for boys, e.g. "Boys Learning Code" (creating these would be classified under men 's rights activism and therefore dismissed). My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds. There has also been a decline in male bonding occurring at the young age, which I (and some academics) believe is very important to male development over all. This is caused by the fact that traditionally boys-only facilities (in this specific example Scouts Canada) have been pressured into accepting girls, which prohibits boys from...essentially being boys. Girl Guides of Canada received no such pressure. Coming back to the issue of masculinity, even though many young adults might have good enough grades to get into university they might not be high enough to go into fields that wouldn't cause strange questions and don't have stigma around them if you're male (I'm talking about fields such as Medicine, Law, Engineering, Computer Science), they might have the grades to get into Arts, specifically psychology, nursing and things such as women studies, all of which have a very high female to male ratio (and are generally considered a "girls" field) making boys pursue other interests (such as not going to university) instead for the fears of unsexing themselves. (Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America? I've immigrated from an Eastern-Block country as a teenager to NA and I've never seen these problems because communism required that all members of the society do essentially the same jobs, that is why would you sacrifice half of the working populace, so you have women in high power positions, police, factories, the military, a lot of girls even take mathematics and computational sciences, sure there were problems but not at this scale (my grandmother was a Chemist and my mother was a corporal in the Defense Ministry and also studied thermal physics in University); I've never even imagined it was an issue elsewhere in the world until after I moved to Canada)
- Mimick 11y agoWhat I notice on boys vs girls is that girls are more likely to get/accept help from their families and people around them. Specially financially for like the purpose of education. I was there, I just pretended like more education doesn't worth it that much (not on US btw).
- jqm 11y agoBoys have trouble being ready for kindergarten and having self discipline. But those that do make it, even though they are fewer, tend to do better than their female counterparts in later life. Kindergarten activities and society's ideas of self discipline aren't really the conditions human life evolved under. Maybe fighting and looking for action/excitement are the same qualities that make boys successful later (if it doesn't kill or otherwise ruin them first). Here is my theory (after hours of watching the discovery channel). You don't need many males biologically speaking. So for males, it's do or die from day one. Mostly it's die, but there are a few winners that pass their genes on. Women, as long as they are fertile, don't necessarily enter the same competition... they are the prizes. Of course civilization doesn't work very well with all the males running around trying to kill each other and breed all the women, so we have laws and religions and kindergartens and diversity training classes. Which kind of puts males (and females maybe to an extent) in a biologically uncomfortable position. Those that succeed in this unnatural environment are those that channel their natural impulses into the pathways society has set up. The poor disadvantaged souls that aren't ready for kindergarten and wind up in prison for violent crimes? Well... they might have been leading the pack 20,000 years ago.
- lambdapie 11y agoDo you think this also implies that men have more incentive to become successful in their careers, if they choose the socially acceptable route? And if so, do you think this might partly explain why we see more men in high prestige/pay professions (e.g. tech)?
- tajen 11y agoShould we really keep using the word "incentive"? It keeps presenting any success as something that doesn't belong to them. If they've worked hard for it, it's theirs, whatever the incentives.
- vlehto 11y agoMy native language somewhat lacks this word. The translation exists but is mostly too clumsy for use. Our nation is also infamous for lacking ambition and fostering perverce incentives. I think all of these things are connected. Wittgenstein would probably agree.
- parennoob 11y agoI suspect this is true for a larger cross-section of society in the USA – disadvantaged males are hurt more than disadvantaged females. However, advantaged males are way more successful than advantaged females. This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where males in high positions positing that men have an advantage because of their gender (because in the already advantaged group, they have seen the additional advantages of being male), and calling for more opportunities for females. To give a practical example – as an Asian male who is not that good at coding, if I ask someone to explain some code to me, I am met with way less enthusiasm than if a female coder asks the same question. On the other hand, the guy giving the talk at the event has already written 10 libraries used by thousands of users, and codes kernel exploits in his spare time. He is already at a high position in life (in geek terms anyway), and tells me, "Hey, you have male privilege and weren't told to not code at elementary school. So we're going to focus on helping women more at this event." I wonder how we can solve this conundrum and give disadvantaged women at the top, and disadvantaged men at the bottom access to opportunities. One thing that would definitely lead to progress (in my opinion) is a recognition and broader understanding that "male privilege" is often (but not always) confined to the top 1-2% of males in a given broad category. The rest of us often suffer the same impostor syndrome, rejection, and nervousness, regardless of our gender.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think a good start would be getting rid of the feminism-as-status-symbol problem. That guy who dismissed you because you're not a woman and therefore privileged was expressing a belief that's most likely just signalling his status as "enlightened person". If we can stop that, we can start having a movement towards equality that doesn't hurt both genders more than it helps them.
- politicallines 11y agoWhat a sexist comment. In this world where equality for men means "avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails", does equality for women means that they will start take a job and not just spend the money of men? Is the discussion so infected that we can't simply share a goal that every person should be equal in worth, be able to pursue their passion in life, and to have liberty. If we can't agree to such simple goals, then how can we ever have progress beyond political lines than just shout at each other, forever arguing and never fixing anything for the better.
- grovulent 11y agoYou're punching air mate. I think the point was just that if we don't help these boys - then they are more likely to fall into patterns of crime and violence - which is a cost everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?
- politicallines 11y ago"If we don't help these girls - then they are more likely to fall into patterns of parasitic behavior - which is a cost everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?" You don't see a problem with phrasing equality in that way?
- durzagott 11y agoAre you suggesting there are zero behavioural differences between boys and girls?
- politicallines 11y agoCalling boys for future criminals and girls for future parasites is not going to help creating equality. It has nothing to do with "behavioural" differences from genes, and everything to do about sexism.
- copsarebastards 11y agoAt a very basic level, when I was volunteering helping the homeless, I saw a great deal of disparity. There are many homeless shelters and programs that only take in women and children, and many shelters which accept people of all genders but have limited space will make men wait to gain entrance, while letting in women and children, so that if someone doesn't get in, it's always men. Donations are frequently given under the condition that they go to help homeless women and children. I do understand some of the legitimate reasons for this: women are at higher risk to be raped and experience more medical issues related to homelessness. But this only accounts for some of the disparity. Part of the issue here is that there's a belief that adult males should be able to support themselves. This is evident in the programs that do serve men: while homeless programs that target women provide food, shelter, medical care, and childcare, the few homeless programs which target men almost universally focus on helping homeless men get jobs. Men do experience privilege in employment when they're actually employed, but this idea is inapplicable to the homeless. Most homeless people are mentally ill, and a mentally ill man is no more employable than a mentally ill woman.
- justifier 11y agochildren?! where do you live? in sf finding a shelter for children is disgustingly difficult and, as i finally concluded, impossible on weekends i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs' about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing ire programs to help the homeless are flawed, i know it first hand, but complaining about someone else's idea of a solution does the least possible to help if you want a shelter organised under your own incentives i'd suggest starting your own it's an asshole thing to say but look at the landscape of shelters currently we have overcrowded, underfunded understaffed solutions: some universal, few women only, few men only how do we remove the gender bias? bulk the universal with the necessary staff that administer the specific needs of the gender exclusive shelters but the universal shelters are already overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed so to ask more of them would only aggravate the issues further so we need more shelters, and to have more people willing to open and operate a shelter, and some people get the will to do so by focusing their attention on a specific group, in this case gender based why is there gender bias in shelters? i'd argue because the people who are willing to put in the work choose to create an environment for the gender bias should we regulate out the bias with legislation forbidding discrimination based on gender? in the current landscape i only see that harming the issues because then those that have the personal will to run a gender biased shelter will lose their incentive and simply do something else, limiting the number of shelters available to share in the solution instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out proactively