Save the males. The girls-boys gap in education is widening!

In what seems like eons ago, when my daughter was in high school, I began sensing ground-level data on my intuitive understanding that girls were beginning to outperform boys in school.  The data was this--my daughter was one of the girls who got elected to the student body.  That year, not a single boy in any elected position in their student government.  The girls then felt the need to bring on at least one male, and they made sure to recruit one into an appointed position.  "Affirmative action" I recalled joking with her.

Since then, I have closely watched what I refer to in this blog as "save the males."

The intuitive understanding, and the ground-level data, had pretty much only one solid intellectual support--from Christina Sommers, about whom I had a lengthy post a year ago.  A year into my daughter's undergrad program, when she was home, I asked her for feedback on this piece that Sommers had written.  She barely read the first page and then gave the magazine back to me with a comment along the lines of "tell me something that I don't know."

Teaching at regional public universities, first in California and then in Oregon, I have witnessed nothing but more of the same trend--female students outperforming males.  To begin with, the gender ratio is highly skewed.  Even more so when it comes to certain programs--in one class that I am teaching this term, the female/male students ratio is nearly six to one!  I am not the only one,of course, to note these trends. There are those who even write satirically about these--like my favorite "Valentine's Day note to amorous undergraduate females."

Of course, through all these, the observation that led drove Larry Summers out of the presidency at Harvard continues to persist.  Summers made a mistake of loudly thinking about an intellectual point in this gender issue: he wondered what the reasons might be for boys to outperform girls at the highest end, and to underperform girls at the lowest end, while girls occupy a vast middle.

I am reminded of all those and more thanks to this piece in the Economist, which notes: "Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university, and the gap is widening."

Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way.

 As my daughter did, I too should merely shrug my shoulders.  But then, I can't!

The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling.

Sixty-four country data!

I often wonder whether the "gender studies" programs--including at my university--address such issues, or whether they continue to operate as if the world has not changed in the last fifty years.  What do you think is the case? Hint: their world has not changed ;)

The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter.
Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it. They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late. Just as teachers used to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement.

Will you be ok if I wrote, "I told you so?"  I just did! ;)

Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved ahead.

Hey, what?  I have been correct all along?  Tell me something that I didn't know already! ;)

the return on investment in a college degree for women was lower than or at best the same as for men. Although women as a group are now better qualified, they earn about three-quarters as much as men. A big reason is the choice of subject: education, the humanities and social work pay less than engineering or computer science. But academic research shows that women attach less importance than men to the graduate pay premium, suggesting that a high financial return is not the main reason for their further education.

Come on, enough already.  Anything new at all for me?

At the highest levels of business and the professions, women remain notably scarce. In a reversal of the pattern at school, the anonymous and therefore gender-blind essays and exams at university protect female students from bias. But in the workplace, says Elisabeth Kelan of Britain’s Cranfield School of Management, “traditional patterns assert themselves in miraculous ways”. Men and women join the medical and legal professions in roughly equal numbers, but 10-15 years later many women have chosen unambitious career paths or dropped out to spend time with their children. Meanwhile men are rising through the ranks as qualifications gained long ago fade in importance and personality, ambition and experience come to matter more.

Seriously, anything new at all?

The glass-ceiling is the only thing left for the males to hold women back.  But, as Hillary Clinton (gasp, I am quoting her!) famously said:

Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it.  And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.

On this International Women's Day, here is to hoping for a better future, where gender will not be an issue at all.

Premature male dropout. As in sex, so in college?

Way back in high school, we read a HG Wells short story about a sighted fellow wandering into a valley of the blind.  Wells (I am pretty sure he was the author of that story) did a fantastic job of turning upside down the adage about the one-eyed man being the king of a country of the blind.

As one who for years has been reading, thinking, and writing about boys and men falling behind girls and women in higher education, I find it rather bizarre that by and large society itself pays very little attention to this phenomenon.  For now, I suppose I should simply be thankful that I have not been forced off a cliff, which was the case with the sighted person in the Wells story.

Thus, it is neat to have company with whom I can share this misery.  This book review of The Rise of Women notes:

Starting with the people born around 1950, the rate of men’s bachelor’s degree completion stopped growing, and it stayed stagnant for years. In 1970, 20 percent of men and 14 percent of women finished college. By 2010, women’s graduation rates had “skyrocketed” to 36 percent, DiPrete said, while the rate among men grew only seven points, to 27 percent.
Today, women outpace men in college enrollment by a ratio of 1.4 to 1.

Ok, you say "a ratio of 1.4 to 1" and I have always preferred expressing that as a 60/40 split.  Sometimes, I make it even powerful a point by saying that there are three female students in college for every two male students.

My suspicion is that this ratio will widen a tad more and then stabilize.  I suspect it will get closer to a two-to-one ratio.

I have always reasoned that this trend is is caused by equal opportunities opening up for girls, with boys simultaneously simply assuming that the world hand't changed a great deal and that they would be successful no matter what.  

Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore.
Even today, DiPrete said, young men are “overly optimistic” about their ability to earn a livable salary, even though they’re less educated than women. That may cause them to “under-invest” in schoolwork, lowering their academic performance and probability of completing college.

Exactly!  It is not any skills gap as much as the getting things done.  Two days ago, I wrote in an email to a male student "your days are numbered, man :)" and added:

The new reality requires a different approach to understanding gender roles in society.  However, I am worried that gender studies in universities focus more [on the past] atrocious discrimination of anyone who was not a white male

But, as with anything else, it will be a while before academia catches up, thanks to its glacial speeds. 

The review ends with this:

Full-time working women in 2011 earned only 82 percent of what men earned. That’s up 20 percentage points from 30 years ago, thanks in part to women getting more education and access to high-paying managerial positions, but also an internal motivation to get a degree as “insurance” to be able to make a middle-class living.

Yes, female students are playing that long game that life is.  And that is what this Jezebel commentary notes:

[Women,] rather than men, who have the more realistic long-term view of the relationship between debt and earnings. As the study makes clear, it's not that women are more inherently comfortable with a heavy debt burden — it's that women are more likely to see borrowing for education as a worthwhile long-term investment. As Gender and Society editor Joya Misra puts it, "Women's recent advantage in college graduation rates is associated with their relative disadvantage in the job market. At the same time, men's seeming advantages in the short run can lure them away from a surer path — college completion — to longer term economic security."
Precisely because young men still benefit from an enduring wage gap, they are apparently more likely to deceive themselves into imagining that a college education may not be worth the price.

Another student seemed to be concerned that his wife will outearn him, and that could even force them to seriously consider him--the man--as the stay-at-home parent of their infant child.  I reassured him that he will not be the first, and will be joined in that "secondary" rank by many more males in the coming years.  Of course, I then sent him this piece to read as well.  A male architect writes about his life as a full-time homemaker:

All choices have a cost. My architectural skills have a shelf life, and it's likely that I am damaging my prospects for future employment. In general, architecture isn't something I can do halfway, and given the choice, I choose the quality of life we are afforded by me being a full-time homemaker. Our circumstances may change and I may be forced to re-evaluate, but for now, feeling that the benefits far outweigh the professional cost, I want to be a great homemaker supporting a fantastic spouse.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 33 percent of wives outearned their husbands (who may or may not have been employed) in 2006, one-third higher than the figure of 24 percent in 1987. As this number rises, more men will be faced with the decision of what to do when their work is no longer “necessary.” In the case of couples with children, I expect the decision is more sharply defined; for other couples with no plans for children (like us) how will things play out?
Me? The stay-at-home dude abides.

I will keep on blogging about this topic, even if one day the blind mob drives me off the campus!

Save the males! Sex has become too cheap for them

A topic that is not new by any means to this blog and, as a male, I am not sure whether it is my pleasure to add one more post to that collection, or whether I ought to regret this :)

Hanna Rosin, about whom I have blogged before, is getting ready to publish her book, which means, naturally, we can expect quite a few opinion essays like this one that she has authored in the Wall Street Journal.  Rosin writes there about how sexual freedom has transformed women's success:

In the 1970s the sexual revolution was really mostly about sex. But now the sexual revolution has deepened into a more permanent kind of power for women. Young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s—are generally better off than young men. They are better educated and earn more money on average. What made this possible is the sexual revolution—the ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don't derail a career. Or to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.

If women are more ready than ever to have sex with men without forcing them to get married, then there is an important corollary: the evolutionary argument is that males have to work a great deal to have sex.  If they don't have to work hard to gain sexual favors, then, well, they don't have to, for instance, work hard for their grades and try to have successful careers, do they?

sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment.

Rosin writes that this lack of love or lifelong commitment doesn't hassle women all that much.  Their unhappiness comes from having way too many choices now, in the bedroom and on their way to the boardrooms!

Someday, the GOP, too, will begin to understand that we are way past the Eisenhower era :)

Where have the good men gone?

Wait, here is one--blogging away :)

Ok, jokes aside, the title of this post is the title of an article in the Wall Street Journal.
(editor: do you want your socialist colleagues to know you read this capitalist publication?  Hey, it is not like they get me Christmas gifts even now!)

The article is yet another addition to my ongoing blogging on the the rapidly disappearing males--"save the males" as one author put it.

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends. Still, for these women, one key question won't go away:
Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers

How might we look at this from the perspective of a young male?

Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
...
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do. They might as well just have another beer.

Ouch!  I wonder when "gender studies" in American universities will begin to address this situation.  (editor: was that a rhetorical question? We are supposed to say "never," right? Awshutup!)



I am not at all surprised with these developments--after having grown up with an elder sister, who excelled in school, and having been educated in a coeducational setting where girls gave us boys pretty good competition for grades and ranking (no, make that pretty girls who gave us boys good competition for grades and ranking), and then having lived a family life with talented women.  If not for men restraining women through centuries, well, this day would have arrived a lot, lot earlier.

Mystery solved: why boys like sticks!

I have always been tempted to pick up a stick when I see one while walking/hiking.  Sometimes to fling them. Sometimes to simply carry.  And sometimes to simply poke the plants :)  If Will Rogers thought that there was never a dollar bill he didn't like, I suppose there are very few sticks that I have never liked!

And my non-random observation right from when I was young was that boys in general liked sticks, and girls did not.  I thought it was merely a gender thing.

Turns out that this was the number one question that intrigued Slate readers too, and am mighty glad that there is an answer as well :)

The question of the year (2010) that Slate's Explainer examines is:

I've always pondered why boys like having sticks. Whether it be walking down a hiking trail with a stick they picked up or running a stick across a white picket fence, boys (including me when I was small) seem to have a knack for having a stick. Is there some kind of explanation for this behavior?

What is the answer you ask?  Click here for the explanations, where you will also find out how porcupines use sticks.  Am not kidding ...

"The hurling habit dies hard" :)

Or, as one commenter has described it,

Wham, Bam, thank you Ma'am! 

BBC has blocked access to that clip, which includes footage after the victorious male meets the female.  The following clip stops with the male and female shaking hands, er, legs :)