This is sure to get the speculative vague generalization making juices flowing. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/08/08/kay-hymowitz/whats-happening-to-men/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/08/08/ ... ng-to-men/</a> Kay Hymowitz writes a very interesting piece about the existence of and possible explanations for the declining achievement of men in the developed world. There are lots of interesting statistics and it certainly looks well researched. Some of her explanations I agree with, others I don't. She does do a good job of at least touching upon all the major explanations I have heard posited on the phenomenon. Plus, I sure do love a topic for which I can see a lock coming from a mile away so let's have at it. Focus: Why are women steadily outperforming men? Alt. Focus: Make sexist generalizations.
Why fixed? It wasnt meant to be sexist or a negative, it's absolutely true. Now that the playing field is relatively level (relative to history, that is), women are able to excel when they haven't had the opportunity before. And men drift along as they always have. Not to mention theres probably traits that women have that men lack as a gender that might make them better at certainty things, multitasking perhaps? I don't know, just my $0.02
Oh, my bad, I misread. I thought you were saying that they were being overcompensated (like, monetarily or something). There is an easy counter-point though: minorities. Minorities have been similarly disenfranchised for centuries yet blacks and hispanics continue to underachieve relative to other races. Why have they not overcompensated?
Instead writing this stupid fucking essay, she should have just got to the point and told us where these chick-infested schools are. We're men, eventually our boner-compasses will even out the statistics.
Basically. She's clearly got a chip on her shoulder that can be alleviated with some poorly-cited, neither-qualitative-nor-quantitative extrapolations.
My brother is a mathlete. Regardless of the fact that he's a fucking mathlete, dude's pretty damn good at it; his four-person team got 2nd out of 90 schools. One thing I noticed from the news article was that pretty much all of the teams were dudes (the champion team was entirely Asian). And yet statistically, girls outperform boys in school. Girls have a higher mean performance... but because boys have a much larger standard deviation, most of the top ranks are occupied by males. I don't know why this is. Is it genuine differences in the sexes, or is it the sexist expectation that while it's okay for women to be smart, it's bad for them to be truly brilliant? I'm not a sociologist, and I don't pretend to know. But I do find it interesting that despite females' better academic performance, men do most of the research both in the academic world and in the working world.
You don't need to be that smart to be a foot soldier, or carry heavy things all day. Which for at least 10,000 years has driven male natural selection. Being smart aides in controlling those doing these things, but you don’t need a huge % of the male population for this, in some ways it could even problematic. In this same environment where a women’s role is to stay at home, raise the children and generally make sure society runs smoothly a level playing field would be more advantageous. As society stands today those “lets play nice together and communicate without hurting anyones feelings” skills gives a competitive advantage on average to women in the white collar fields. I suspect the top 5% of men will always hold more power in society. Humans were just designed that way. (And women make shitty bosses)
Performance in school is about as pertinent to the real world as toe nail length, and the conclusions derived thereof. Personally I generally tend to avoid the conclusions of a passive aggressive feminist. They are far worse then a flaming bull dyke feminist.
I think this point is based upon the type of teachers you had and the standards for education that they were held up to. Also, at least half of the things we learned in school are not taught point-blank. Please correct me if this was just my education, but the high school curriculum is based around teaching problem-solving, team work, recognizing right from wrong within a gray area, as well as the surface level maths, sciences, and humanities. There is a genuine thought-process around having to learn geometry, biology, and British literature. Teachers aren't just teaching this stuff to be assholes (except for the English teacher who chooses to teach The Scarlet Letter. That person is an asshole.)
If we're talking about STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math), that's at least in part because you need to be a stubborn, tenacious, ball busting bitch to put up with trying to maintain a career in the top ranks of STEM fields. If you've got half a brain, you'll realize that you can be much happier moving to a less woman hating field or loitering around the mid level. I have a ton of respect for women who make it STEM fields - but if I had to put up with the shit girls have to put up with to work in IT? Fuck it, I'd go into marketing or HR. If we're talking about senior business management - for all that women have much greater equality now than they have in the past, senior management types are heavily influenced by things that happened 30+ years ago. Most senior management types are at least late 40's - almost all the ones you'd describe as the top ranks. And late 40's means you went through puberty thirty plus years ago - where it was far more rare for girls to be groomed towards business and far more rare for women to be groomed towards running businesses. You went through college 25 or 30 years ago - when women still weren't getting anything like the kind of equality they get in business schools they get today. And you formed your major professional networks 20 or 25 years ago - when there were a lot more boys only clubs - especially in major business. In the real world, very few men every drop 2 years from their career at 30 to start a family. Very few men coming through grad school with great GPA's get knocked up and devote the next five years to being a single parent who can't work. Very few men have to maintain the flexibility in their career to collect kids from school when they're sick or misbehaving or have to decide if taking a career hit is a smarter decision than paying for day care, when their partner who is 3 years further into a career because they didn't take maternity leave, out earns them anyway. I think for people born 80s and onward, outside of boys fields like STEM/mining/construction - there's probably not much gender relevance to career paths if you don't have kids. But so many people do have kids, and primary care givers are so often women, and that's always going to skew the way major business leaders are represented. The disparity will close somewhat in the next 15 years I think. But STEM fields continue to be a boys club where trying to be the token woman is hard enough. Achieving as a leader as the token woman takes a rare and remarkable personality. And in business careers - women will continue to be under represented for as long as women take maternity leave and act as primary care givers to children.
For some reason women complaining about too many men in STEM fields comes off like Lebron complaining about too many short Chinese basketball players on the court.
A guy in one of my classes gave a 40 minute oral presentation on this topic, specifically the feminization of the school system. Not saying it's girly, but that it's based towards girls. He had tons of studies, stats and quotes, talking about how boys are at a disadvantage their entire time. Girls have a lower drop out rate, have a higher graduation rate and higher average grades. When girls do well in high school, they're praised by everyone around them. When guys do well, all their friends give them shit for being nerds. I'm gonna try and get all the notes and his power point from the presentation, because there was so much good information.
Is this true? Does anyone actually have any experiences like this? I'll grant you I went to a series of expensive private schools; my high school had (and still has) starched white tablecloths on the lunch tables every day, so my experience may be different from some people's. Academic achievement wasn't ever mocked. Again, is this a real thing or are people taking a tiny amount of anecdotal evidence and extrapolating a nationwide end of the world what-happened-to-real-men trend from it?
I went to 4 different public schools after 3rd grade and had the same experience as you. Academic achievement wasn't mocked. Now, some of the top academic achievers also had weird personalities or were into dungeons and dragons or whatever, and they might be mocked - but they would have been teased even if they were C students.