In college, boys will be boys, and girls will ... kick butt

The Chronicle has two interesting takes on gender issues in higher education--welcome to my world!  Not the gender issues related to faculty or administrators, but students, who are the ones we ought to truly focus on when we talk about education, right?

Of course, I have blogged many, many times here on how much boys seem to be rapidly falling behind girls when it comes to education.  A male author worries about the underachieving males, and writes:

If the United States simply accepts that males will continue to lag behind their female counterparts in academic interest and performance, the consequences will be profound. This is no abstract issue: Ultimately, it could lead to a country in which millions of young men live with their parents and work lousy jobs with few or no benefits, and in which a class of highly educated, professionally engaged women is expected to support underemployed husbands.
The issue is not whether well-educated males should stay at home and take care of the kids. Today's "modern family" can work when it is a function of new opportunities, rather than a forced adjustment to limited horizons. If a husband can stay at home and run a successful online business while his wife practices medicine, great. But if he struggled in academics, dropped out of high school, and resents his wife's power and prestige, it will be a raw deal for all involved.

Not so fast, writes a female author.   She expands on the following three first:

• Women underestimate their abilities and express lower levels of self-confidence than their abilities suggest. Men overestimate their abilities and express higher levels of confidence than their abilities warrant.
• Men in college spend significantly more time in leisure activities (especially, for example, video-game play and athletic pursuits) than do women. College women are hyper-scheduled participants in co-curricular activities.
• Women have higher GPA's than do men—when they enter and leave college—even when the sexes show equivalent aptitude on standardized tests.

She ends with this:

while we were focusing on gaining access for girls and women, we neglected the needs of boys and men. We didn't plan well for the consequences of a society that taught one sex that it had to work harder to gain access, and the other sex that access was guaranteed. We find ourselves surprised each time we learn that the educational system is not serving boys and men as well as it might. We've barely begun to explore higher education's role in finding a balance that is good for all of our students and good for our country, and it is time we got started.

Yep. In fact, it is way past time that we got this discussion started.