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Where 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, whic

Where 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)

nv-vn 11y ago
>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. This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really skewed edge cases. >Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America... I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Isn't North America / Western Europe going the flattening way? Most of the gender equality movement today seems to be focused on creating hatred and making life harder for one group, as well as forcing arbitrary and artificial adjustments.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  > think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do. I disagree there is a binary choice. Educational system in Finland was intended to address the inequality, but in the effect it actually helped the performance. On the other hand, the U.S. with No Child Left Behind policy failed, mostly because it didn't address the inequality. I think there are two things conflated here: power and choice. We should strive for equality in power, but still give people the choice. If you have the choice, then no one puts you below. I think the fallacy here is that people actually don't need huge resources to become successful, only modest ones. So you can distribute resources equally and yet the best people won't be topped out. Contrary to popular opinion, lack of possibility to be rich wasn't the biggest obstacle in Eastern European countries. The biggest obstacle was existing bureaucracy (which actually had more power than normal people, it just wasn't expressed in money). Good innovators don't need financial incentives; they need (at least modest) access to resources and freedom. For example, this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle

nv-vn 11y ago

>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. This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really skewed edge cases. >Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America... I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Isn't North America / Western Europe going the flattening way? Most of the gender equality movement today seems to be focused on creating hatred and making life harder for one group, as well as forcing arbitrary and artificial adjustments.
asgard1024 11y ago
> think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do. I disagree there is a binary choice. Educational system in Finland was intended to address the inequality, but in the effect it actually helped the performance. On the other hand, the U.S. with No Child Left Behind policy failed, mostly because it didn't address the inequality. I think there are two things conflated here: power and choice. We should strive for equality in power, but still give people the choice. If you have the choice, then no one puts you below. I think the fallacy here is that people actually don't need huge resources to become successful, only modest ones. So you can distribute resources equally and yet the best people won't be topped out. Contrary to popular opinion, lack of possibility to be rich wasn't the biggest obstacle in Eastern European countries. The biggest obstacle was existing bureaucracy (which actually had more power than normal people, it just wasn't expressed in money). Good innovators don't need financial incentives; they need (at least modest) access to resources and freedom. For example, this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle