Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better.
Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.
With shrinking recess time and PE disappearing from some schools, I also wonder if a lot of this is caused by boys having more energy and needing more movement than girls. Energy has to go somewhere so it ends up manifesting itself in behaviors that are deemed "disruptive" (really, not sitting still and being unable to concentrate on tasks).
Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand.
It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
Future generations will consider us barbarians for dosing our young boys with drugs because we providing them with physical education/exercise was inconvenient to us. They'll also be able to datamine the internet from this time period and use our own words to hang us.
Runnning around does not make a child with ADHD more sedate or perform better in the classroom. "Just go do some exercise" is like telling depressed people to "just cheer up".
Yes, exercise definitely helps. But it doesn't make one's mind less noisy internally. Buddhists talk of monkey minds. ADHD is like having a zoo of minds.
This anti-medication bias is causing a lot of stigma in society for children who actually need them.
My understanding of the parent and grandparent comments are that they are lamenting that boys are being diagnosed and/or dosed with ADHD medication just because they aren't given time and space to work out their energy. So schools and society are dealing with fidgety unfocused boys by giving them false diagnosis and inappropriate medication.
This is all distinct from people who actually really have ADHD and in which case medications can be appropriate.
I have properly clinically diagnosed ADHD- for me in HS there was a definite correlation between time spent exercising and grades- when the sports season ended, there was almost always a dip in my grades from tests and the like two weeks later. Call it anecdata if you will, but there's got to be at least some sort of correlation between exercise and mental state- I doubt it's just a thing for people with ADHD, either.
> Runnning around does not make a child with ADHD more sedate or perform better in the classroom. "Just go do some exercise" is like telling depressed people to "just cheer up".
You are completely right.
What I meant is that I have a feeling that often ADHD is diagnosed out of convenience rather than a real illness. I certainly didn't mean that all ADHD diagnosis are a scam.
There is a anti medication bias because these psychotropics medications were not designed to be used longer term. I’ve tried medication, it warped me into a shell of my creative self. We’ve got to stop using psychotropic drugs to fit people to society. And starting helping people integrate.
We’ve had risings rates of mental illness for years. And these method of diagnose and prescribe is only making it worse.
There’s obviously benefits to medicine but we’ve gone insane with how we’re describing the mass amount of personal mental variance in the world as illness and trying to eliminate it.
These medications have lasting long term effects that are unknown. If kids that are the brightest are struggling to succeed change the rules not the kids. I learned more when I dropped out and studied what I love instead of following curriculum. We've got to have more varied paths towards success.
I don't have any stigma against medication, but I do think our current understanding of treating things like ADHD is primitive. I have a kid that's too young for a formal diagnosis, but has a genetic predisposition for it and has a lot of signs. His sensory input issues might be unrelated, but making sure he gets proper proprioceptive and vestibular input help him regulate (a sensory diet--or exercise). As does nightly melatonin to make sure he's sleeping properly. These are things others in his family never had the attention paid to.
A lot of the complaints and stigma I've seen are from people who took medication growing up. They saw the need and value, but loathe the side effects.
To me (and a lot of other people), most ADHD diagnosis is clearly not something that should be medicated, especially at such young ages. So this is not a general anti-medication bias, but something that is specifically related to ADHD, and how it is over-diagnosed and over-medicated.
I hope that's what will happen. It means that the future will not need to dose people with drugs. We'll have created a world where people's natural physique is mostly enough for living a happy life.
In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
It will not, because it doesn't impact the genetic/hereditary factors in any way. Getting your body in shape does not cure actual ADHD. Exercise makes it at best manageable for the low-severity cases.
> In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
It's kind of a given, until we transition to post-drug era, where we inject our bodies with nanobots that fix what wasn't already fixed by genetic engineering of the gametes.
Until then, I think it's worth re-evaluating this view while replacing "ADHD" with "diabetes" or "hypertension" or "rheumatism" or "asthma" or... insert any persistent and disruptive condition a person may suffer from regardless of the shape in which they keep their body. We should apply drugs where they help more than they harm, until we have better alternatives.
More likely people will make excuses for us and say 'well it was a different time' even though comments like yours and articles like this are clear exceptions.
There is a certain condescending sympathy that we afford to people just because they lived in the past. It comes from a misplaced desire to avoid anachronism, but ends up committing anachronism anyway.
Depends on the medication. If they're on stims in particular, and the meds actually improve their behavior, then the cause most likely isn't insufficient PE time.
The effect of amphetamines on kids with ADHD is to improve school performance.
The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD is to improve school performance.
The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD but who've been diagnosed with ADHD because they're not getting enough exercise is... to improve school performance.
Amphetamines aren't magic. There are qualitative differences in response between people with and without ADHD, that manifest across the board, not just on few school metrics - and a psychiatrist will be able to see them.
The "young unruly boys without enough PE" is a well-known trope, and modern school is very much kid torture - but I'm not willing to say yet that we're medicating children too much, when the world is only slowly waking up to the fact that we've been underdiagnosing ADHD by at least factor of 2 - this stereotype of unruly boys means the Primarily Inattentive subtype of ADHD is being frequently ignored (vs. the Primarily Hyperactive that creates all the stereotypes), that girls suffering from ADHD are not being diagnosed, not to mention adults.
> There are qualitative differences in response between people with and without ADHD, that manifest across the board, not just on few school metrics - and a psychiatrist will be able to see them.
I was under the impression that this "it works differently on people with ADHD" thing was essentially a pleasant myth. If you've got solid citations that stimulants do somehow work differently on people with ADHD I'd be interested in reading them. My understanding was that the effect is broadly similar, with the only meaningful distinction being that ADHD-diagnosed individuals have been judged as needing those effects, and others have not.
"By high school, nearly 20% of all boys will have been diagnosed with ADHD."
Either 1. we are medicate children too much and schooling is very screwed up or 2. 20% of boys defective to extent that they require amphetamines. I am not see third option. I am not believe 20% of boys defective to such extent. So I believe we are medicate children too much.
20% is how many boys that age were ever diagnosed with ADHD. 89% of children ever diagnosed have a current diagnosis. Only 62% of children with a current diagnosis take any medication.[1] So much fewer than 20% take a specific medication probably.
Almost 40% of boys that age need vision correction.[2]
Which are absolutely insane numbers compared to very similar societies all around the world. I doubt there is some sort of truly unique illness doing rounds only in America.
America isn't an extreme outlier. And most of the variation around the world can be explained by different diagnostic criteria.[1] Look for numbers around the world to jump as countries adopt ICD-11.
84% of total world wide ADHD meds are eaten in the USA. There is a difference between identifying symptoms and thinking stimulants are the answer or just not paying any attention.
Just like in Europe the medical consensus is that people have to learn to live with pain rather eating oxy's. It doesnt meant the doctors pain didn't exist in their patients.
I know you don't intend it this way, but it does come across as cruel when confronted with realities.
> 84% of total world wide ADHD meds are eaten in the USA.
That's of course because US is ahead of the curve in medicine.
> Just like in Europe the medical consensus is that people have to learn to live with pain rather eating oxy's.
This isn't a medical consensus. We just don't push opioids for everything so early. We start with paracetamol and ibuprofen, upgrade to ketoprofen and other NSAIDs in more specialized or severe cases, and continue as needed. But living with pain is not an acceptable answer here either.
Stimulant meds work very well on ADHD and are very safe, both short and long-term; it's a much better story than say SSRIs and depression. The main problem here is the combination of stigma (oh no, amphetamines!) and fears of abuse by people not suffering from ADHD (oh yes, amphetamines!) - both of which are in large part fueled by the US War on Drugs, the unending source of pathologies and suffering worldwide.
Stimulants also work very well on people without ADHD, so why not give them to everyone!?
It seems crazy that we've made it this far as a species without medication; so why should it be required now? Maybe the issue isn't the children, but the environment they are in?
- teachers had a lot more options when it came to disciplining kids
- many left school for work at age 15 - 16
Do you want the good old times back?
(Another thing is many countries have changed the curriculum to be even more heavy on theory than it used to be. That I would like to change, both for the kids and for future employers: broad practical experience probably increases someones chances in engineering and probably other disciplines as well.)
Says in the article 7 times more likely to get adhd meds in the US than UK. America is wealthy but these numbers are way off compared to similarly developed nation.
Could you point out where the article claims that? It's padded extensively with selective and often irrelevant factoids and speculation about ADHD diagnosis, recreational drug use, etc.
How about 3: schooling is increasingly good at exacerbating symptoms of a problem that's considered to be strongly genetic[0] (a point curiously omitted in the article you linked) and widespread in the population. And the numbers seem less surprising if you consider that adult life is also good at making the symptoms apparent - except we brush them away with labels like "lazy", "unorganized", "chronic procrastinator", "rude", etc. and let people figure out coping mechanisms on their own, which often include substance abuse, or on the lighter end, self-medicating with coffee and cigarettes.
The effect of stimulants on the brain is to stimulate it.
For those who need it it makes mind-numbingly boring stuff such as homework (as opposed to reading history books or creating elaborate formulas etc etc) less painful.
I don't know about you but I personally have seen some examples that have gotten significantly improved lives because of it.
If you don't know this stuff first hand, please refrain from making broad statements about it.
BTW, I'll give you this: one of the most interesting explanations I saw was that ADHD is very overdiagnosed - and at the same time underdiagnosed.
Some people get ADHD meds that shouldn't have, others struggle for years because some people have irrational fear against stimulats.
Can we try to avoid moving that needle and instead try to lower the errors on both sides?
> If you don't know this stuff first hand, please refrain from making broad statements about it.
Unless all the kids illegally buying ADHD meds to do better in school when they have not been diagnosed with ADHD (and adults doing the same, for that matter, to do better at work) are doing that for no reason, I'm pretty sure I'm correct that amphetamines improve performance for most everyone, and that distinguishing between ADHD-and-improved-on-meds and not-ADHD-and-improved-on-meds is not trivial.
I was replying to a post that read:
> If they're on stims in particular, and the meds actually improve their behavior, then the cause most likely isn't insufficient PE time.
I object to that being proof of much other than amphetamines making most people perform better in school, without commenting on whether ADHD is a "real" thing (I'm not even sure what it would even mean for it not to be "real", given the state of our understanding and diagnosis of mental disorders). "We gave the kid amphetamines and they improved, must have had ADHD" is dangerously misguided.
But it is, because we're talking about persistent deficiency of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, that's most likely[0] due to different brain makeup. You can't do enough PE to mitigate this and have enough energy left for everything else.
--
[0] - I say "most likely" because I didn't investigate the claims that MRI can pick up on the difference. But from my initial difference, the effect is still hereditary, in at least large part genetic.
It is good to mention that it this is not a global phenomenon. I am from Czechia, of course there are some kids diagnosed with ADHD and taking medication, but I would guess it is a very low number compared to USA.
Indeed. My point is that we haven't matured to the point of respecting our children enough to not mutilate them, which is a far more basic accomplishment than respecting their psychological needs. We force teenagers to adhere to the sleep schedules of adults despite numerous studies indicating doing so damages their health and academic performance. There are a lot of steps between where we are now and a society that will condemn us as barbarians for not providing boys extra PE.
> It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
It's a common trope, but AFAIK ADHD has a big hereditary component and currently is deemed to be extremely underdiagnosed in girls and adults in general, so I think this cliche isn't holding water. I will agree that modern schooling is extremely good at surfacing the symptoms (but then so is adult life in general, if you know what to look for).
As the father of 6 years old twins (one boy, one girl) I agree with this 100%. My son needs more discipline than my daughter, he's more likely to get into trouble at school, he likes physical activities, etc. almost the opposite of his sister.
Two of my kids (one a boy and one a girl) act absolutely nuts and "must" have something like ADHD... until you make sure they run around outside at least 4hrs a day, consistently. Then they're fine.
Unfortunately this is effectively impossible to achieve for 2-3 months every year, with school in session and short Winter days. They're in lower elementary school but I think their total recess time per day is only about 30-40 minutes, and much of the time they don't even get that because it's raining or too cold (pft, whatever, wear coats) or something else, and they have them watch a movie more often than not in those cases (nb. this is a "good" school district)
We have one other kid—a girl—who doesn't seem to need this to not "act wild".
The other trigger for "crazy" behavior seems to be when they're presented with unpleasant social situations and don't know how to deal with them. Like, say, being forced to be around kids who are mean to them. Gee, I wonder where that happens a whole bunch.
As someone that didn't get their diagnosis until I was in my 30s, I'd encourage you to talk to a doctor about what's going on. It definitely sounds like ADHD, particularly the social stress triggering acting out or avoidance.
On the whole I've been fortunate in life, but it's not an exaggeration to say my life would be dramatically different if I'd learned what was going on as a kid. Instead it was interpreted as a character flaw: that I just wasn't applying myself. Even though I know that's wrong now intellectually, emotionally I still had that message beat into me for years as a kid, and that doesn't just go away sadly. I'd be particularly vigilant about teachers creating that dynamic, as sometimes they do it with good intentions but fail to understand doubling down on a "tough love" approach will utterly backfire here.
In a coldish part of Canada, I think I had 2.5hours of outside or PE time through elementary school
The same amount of PE, along with became optional through junior high school and high school.
In elementary school, recess/lunch were required to be spent outside (unless it's -30C or so)
You could spend up to 15min at a time inside to warm up, dry off your mittens, and maybe grab a hot chocolate but after that you were kicked back outside
Anecdotally, I have 4.5 year old boy and see a lot of similar-aged boys and girls at the playground, etc. (unfortunately not as much in our/their homes, during this global pandemic), and from what I see most small kids are just incredibly active a lot of the time.
They crave (and physically need) hours every day spent running and climbing and swinging and rolling around, chasing each-other, etc.
Furthermore, many of them are quite self-directed and stubborn. They get some idea in their head about something to try, and then want to carry the plan through and can get extremely frustrated if thwarted (whether by the plan's intrinsic problems, or by interference from other people). Sometimes the plans are problematic (e.g. «I wonder if I can get adult attention if I take every toy my younger sibling wants to play with, until they start sobbing»), but often the goals/plans are perfectly innocuous, but adults step in and block action for poor reasons or no reason at all, or because the adult wants the kid to be focusing on something different. After being thwarted at a few different projects in a row, kids can become very agitated and defiant, or even melt down completely.
Once the kid has accomplished their immediate goal or given up on it, they sometimes instantly switch to some completely different idea, and don't want to switch back.
It is incredibly difficult to convince a big group of young kids (and especially boys it seems, though many girls are also very active) to sit still and focus on some specific close work without conflicts, especially when they have pent up energy. Trying to force them ends up creating a confrontation, and plenty of kids are looking around for ways to push boundaries and get attention. This is entirely normal age-appropriate behavior, and should not be pathologized. Letting the kids choose their own activities and decide when to switch from one to another goes a long way toward avoiding unnecessary bad feelings.
Sure, I believe you. I’m just saying the parent you replied to said his son needs a lot more discipline, but gave no co text for that statement. Maybe he’s saying that his son doesn’t want to do chores? We don’t know.
> I'd assume most school administrators are women.
At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true. A disproportionate number of administrators (especially when adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown) are male.
There have also been many studies that show that teachers call on boys more, praised them more (they acknowledge girls, praise boys), and talk with them more.
So your assumptions are completely at odds with decades of data.
My wife was a teacher and she noted that most over her male colleagues were leaving, especially in on the elementary and middle school level.
Too many assumptions or allegations, plus the perception that guys can't be nurturing.
Most of the men still in education were older and were able to migrate away from day-to-day teaching into admin roles. In 20 years those guys will be gone and there won't be any male teachers to replace them.
In today's climate perfectly gender diverse means 100% women.
There was a bank that bragged some years ago about being the most diverse bank, since they had 65% or whatever women on the board. 50% was explicitly less diverse than 65%.
Also, "administrator" gender breakdowns is a diversion. The actual thing that needs addressing is the gender breakdown of teachers. I.e. the people that physically talk/teach to students during their education.
I don't agree with the rest of your comment (my school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers), but anecdotally the primary difference between boys and girls was exactly what you mentioned: the former were more likely to skip classes, study things that were not in the syllabus (which helps sometimes), not maintain notes as well, etc. whereas the latter would typically follow the syllabus, teachers' instructions etc. more closely and maintain very thorough notes.
In the US, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm shows that female teachers are 98.8% of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 79.6% of elementary and middle school teachers.
If your school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers then your school was the exception.
LAUSD: ~4.5:1 in elementary school, ~1:1 in secondary, ~4:1 in special ed[1]
Across all CA public schools: ~2.5:1 [2]
Across the US: 3:1 [3]
So, more women? Yes. 20:1? Wild outlier.
So, what about the claim that it's more women, somehow building a system more friendly to girls? Turns out the data says "not so much" there, too. Principals are roughly 1:1[4]
According to your data, a 20:1 ratio could be explained. The first figure of your link [3] shows that the ratio for elementary level teachers is 89:11.
Plugging these numbers into R shows that it's not exactly a surprising result:
> prop.test(1,21,p=11/100)
1-sample proportions test with continuity correction
data: 1 out of 21, null probability 11/100
X-squared = 0.31913, df = 1, p-value = 0.5721
alternative hypothesis: true p is not equal to 0.11
Yep - my mistake, I only looked at the LAUSD data for elementary schools, and then at total numbers instead for the following data sets.
This makes the "principals are 1:1" data even more interesting. It also lends a good chunk more weight to the idea that at least elementary schools are an environment with outsizedly more female role models.
I still think the "build a system" argument doesn't hold - see the 1:1 data - but I'm certainly more convinced on "the effects of the system-as-is result in this", even without the conscious build step.
> the former were more likely to skip classes, study things that were not in the syllabus (which helps sometimes), not maintain notes as well, etc. whereas the latter would typically follow the syllabus, teachers' instructions etc. more closely and maintain very thorough notes.
Mmm, that's interesting, I have the same observation. I'm not in the US, if that holds any value.
I also completely agree with throwaway53086 & with aviraldg about why the girls always perform better academically, especially in the primary school, because what they said matches perfectly my experience.
I grew in Europe and, until I was about 10 years old, I firmly believed that the girls must be much smarter than the boys, precisely because they always received much better grades at school.
Alas, eventually I was disappointed and I lost this belief, when I understood that the good grades received by the girls were determined only partially by their knowledge of the subjects on which they were graded and that a large part of the grades was caused exactly as throwaway53086 said, because the girls were "much more likely to obey rules and instructions".
Looking back to the previous years, it became obvious for me that every time when a girl and a boy proved to have identical knowledge about mathematics or biology or whatever else was tested, the disciplined girl received a high grade, while the naughty boy received a low grade.
The girls always did whatever the teacher asked, while the boys failed to do homework, did not pay attention to what the teacher taught and so on.
At that time I was reading a huge amount of books, so even when I was nine-year old there were some fields, e.g. biology, about which I knew far more than my teacher.
Obviously, pointing to errors in what the teacher taught was also a recipe for low grades, in comparison to those who did not question her wisdom.
In primary school, everybody that I knew had the same experience, with the grades that were influenced by the discipline and obedience demonstrated, which favored a lot the girls.
In high school and university, I have no longer seen such cases, the grades received by everybody were mostly correct, but the girls continued to be on average much more disciplined and obedient, which resulted in good grades across the curriculum.
On the other hand, many boys liked only some subjects at which they obtained good grades, while neglecting the others, at which they obtained low grades, resulting in a low average.
In high school and university there was also the same problem that I had first encountered in the primary school, that with the exception of the best teachers, the teachers who were not so good themselves gave good grades only to the mediocre students, while both the bad students and the very good students (who knew more than the teacher about what was taught) received low grades.
The girls were usually not affected by this, because even when they knew that the teacher was wrong, they would not confront him or her about the errors.
This has a lot to it, and I believe this is one of the thing that holds women back later on in their careers -- if you are rewarded as a girl for going along/allowing people to save face, you have practiced skills that don't serve you as well in business and academia. I have had to practice telling people they're wrong in an effective way. Other factors are at play, of course, but this is an important component.
I've always heard this as a kid/young adult but as I've grown older, I've noticed that most people don't ever mature (well, at least not until 35-ish) so I've started doubting all claims and folk-wisdom about maturity pretty much wholesale...
If by mature we mean respecting tasks and duties, why don't we count duties to your own psyche and body into it?
Being an adult is sometimes finding some occupancy that with minimum amount of time will give us the psychological comfort to do the maximum amount of paid work through the rest of the week (or day). Why don't we teach kids that being mature is caring for our needs too, instead of pushing them into the square hole of just duties that are demanded of them by everyone else.
I see a lot of people in this thread speaking in generalities or correlations around gender.
Is this OK, or not? I thought it wasn't OK, so I tend to avoid it, even if I think some of it may be true, but isn't stereotyping anyone based on attributes something we are trying NOT to do?
I'd have to see hard data, not anecdotes. My daughter is a wild child, actively flouts damn near every rule I create, refuses to follow instructions, and has a lot of trouble in school because she thinks it's stupid.
My son is far more compliant. Like night & day different from his sister. And they've been like this since they were old enough to start showing real personality.
Do you think it has anything to do with girls having better handwriting.
I couldn't improve my handwriting for the life of me when i was in school and got really poor grades from teachers not being able to read what i was writing.
Today, it's typing. I've seen the difference in kids. I think readability may be one issue, but perhaps even more important is that if writing is physically awkward and painful, it leads to writing fewer words and doing fewer edits.
My own experience was that learning to type, thanks to getting interested in programming, was game changing. All I can say is that I could write lengthy essays and reports in a jiffy. Still can.
Not for math, at least not for my kids. I was helping my son with his high school physics homework a few days ago, and IMO his poor handwriting was a genuine impediment to his mathematical problem-solving.
That's true. My college freshman physics teacher took me aside after the first couple of assignments and said: "You'd make fewer mistakes if you could read your own handwriting."
poorly written 7's can look like 1's, and 5's like 6's. I lost a lot of points in high school math because I couldn't read what I had just written on the previous line!
More suggestions that I learnt: Put a line at the base of your 1, otherwise it looks like a lowercase l. Plus it helps distinguish it from 7's that aren't crossed out.
Same goes for 4's. A lot of people don't make the top into a closed triangle shape. Instead they write it like an unfinished or upside-down h.
I had a similar issue, made worse by the fact that I was left handed and writing from left to right. So aside from smudges, I’d visually cover what I had just written. Plenty of opportunities to lose train of thought or misread something
I hated writing and editing way back when. What I should have done looking back is use scissors and tape to patch different paragraphs together, rather than writing down the side of the page in the margins to fit in the edited text
Schools have largely (and probably wisely) abandoned looped cursive handwriting, a fiendishly difficult sort of writing with variant letter forms and complicated joins, but I tend to think that teaching cursive italic, a simple and beautiful form of cursive writing (think William Shakespeare rather than Thomas Jefferson) that uses the same letter forms as printed italic with simple joins, would make it easier for boys and girls to develop better handwriting overall, both printed and cursive.
That being said, handwritten long-form text seems like a rarity in the age of computers, though I still feel that I express things differently in handwriting.
I've had a terrible handwriting, and we had 'calligraphy' in like 3rd-4th grade or so, where I consistently received 1s and 0s, sometimes 2s (of 12), switched few schools, and the only person who cared enough about teaching me writing, instead of "grading" it, was my math teacher in high school, maybe it didn't become perfect, but it became readable, and for that I'm grateful to her.
Even though I'm mostly typing now, it helped me in university and it helps me sometimes when solving problems on paper is easier than with computers.
In the US, there's a significant gender gap in administration, especially above the school leader level. Also, larger schools (middle, high) are more likely to be run by men than woman.
"run by" is a common phrase used to mean the person or persons who make decisions. Normally the manager, or owner. You could say "That pizza place is run by someone from my neighborhood."
In the context of the school it would mean the administration, the school board, and if its a private school the owners or trustees.
in the US most middle, high schools have a top down organizational hierarchy (in my experience, no data on this point but willing to bet on it), therefore the parent poster is asserting that in the US most middle, high school top administrative officials are men (no data on if this is true, not willing to bet on it)
Or perhaps we are stricter when raising girls, so they become more compliant.
"don't be so loud, that's not lady-like"
"don't play in the dirt, you'll ruin your dress"
"it's uncomfortable, I know, but you have to look pretty"
"girls don't like sports, here, sit down and play with your dolls"
It's subtle things, but a million of them may make a difference. There's a lot more rules for girls than boys, they are used to spend their time in quieter activities, etc.
> It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.
Public School Education in the US is not a hotbed of innovation – we are largely riding on the coattails of a system constructed by men, no? Women may have filled these positions, but the system was largely constructed circa the Industrial revolution (and the tertiary education system with its initial origins in monasteries).
Another thing I've noticed is that girls are generally much better at taking exams than boys. I don't have any numbers, just from observation - from my own school days, from observing my niece/nephew. It is super painful to get my nephew to do the homework vs my niece, for example.
>>Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better.
This hypothesis fails when applied to militaries. Throughout history men have near 100% representation in militaries and wars. Where discipline and following rules is more seriously enforced.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means, because it's the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal to intuition
> girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions
So is that difference a problem, then? Or not? Or neither? You can't force people to take a risk they aren't comfortable with, and if boys (for whatever reason) are a little less risk-averse, what is there to do? Punish boys for taking risks as we praise girls for doing the same?
I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women compared to men?
Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
In my working life every time I brazenly break the rules and ignore instructions I end up getting a raise, or promotion. This is across 5 or 6 jobs stretched out over 23 years in small businesses, and fortune 100 companies. This is because I always back it up with results
In school, any deviation, regardless of intention or outcome, was perceived by my teachers as being disrepectful to their authority, and was quickly punished. To be fair, I went to catholic school in the 80s/early 90s, so following rules was probably a bigger emphasis than most people's experiences.
I agree totally - if you brazenly break the rules, you tend to get punished.. unless you back it up with real results. Disrupters tend to be the innovators in society. School does not value disrupters in the same way as a business might.
In a school setting, someone who listens, follows the rules, and does not challenge the structure of the institution is highly likely to receive excellent grades. In a business setting, this person may be an employee who contributes to the team by doing their job, and doing it accurately and consistently.
A disrupter may work in the same job, and challenge the way things are done - they may fail in doing so, and be repremanded or fired, or they may succeed in their disruption, and allow for a change in the process or job, resulting in greater efficiency.
Women started breaking the rules as well now, as that’s what’s coming from the media. The problem is of course when somebody does it without providing results / breaking rules that they shouldn’t (some of the firings from Google happened because of this). I expect this to normalize though.
Your anecdote is interesting, but without knowing how often women also break the same rules and ignore the same instructions and get results it's pretty meaningless.
In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.)
At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
>At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
Exactly this. Doing something simply because "it's a rule" and doing something where you see actual impact/results is world of a difference.
The word for the former is "authoritarian." Relationships are defined by power imbalances, hierarchy, and superficial displays of conformity, not by outcomes.
None of this explains why women are capable of following these rules and men are not. Are you saying men are biologically predisposed to not follow such simple rules?
When the rules are to "sit still" and "be quiet", yes, probably so. Boys are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate of 12.9% vs 5.6% for girls [1]. I've heard many counselors and psychologists (in my counseling program) suggest that many cases are misdiagnosed.
Sit in any classroom or ask any teacher who their problem children are, and they're almost always boys. They're louder, more violent, more likely to disobey, and have a harder time sitting still.
Are all boys a problem? No, of course not. I imagine a lot has to do with home balance, the involvement of two parents, etc. Are all girls good? No, of course not. But statistically there is a difference. This is true until they settle down in their mid to late twenties...just look at insurance rates.
Maybe it's not biological and is cultural, but it's true from a very young age through young adult that boys are less able to sit still, be quiet, and listen. And school is structured in a way that punishes those traits, and we as a culture medicate boys to make them calm down.
And it should be noted -- it's not the boys that are the problem it is the schools.
Raise young boys in a way that is completely stifling and unnatural compared to how boys were raised for tens of thousands years based on our evolution, and then diagnose these boys as having a mental problem. No, it is society that has the mental problem.
Agreed entirely. The goals of our factory system education are not in the best interest of the individuals participating. We home school largely for that reason...I want my children, both our boy and girls, to have individual creative thought, to explore the world, to rough-house, and to not just be a "good citizen" of society. Good citizens rarely make the world a better place.
I want them to challenge, think, be introduced to the complexity and darkness of history, be able to creatively write and imagine, and to not fall in line with whatever the societal expectations and agendas are for the week.
Careful though. Go too far in the opposite direction from “rule following good citizen” and you get conspiracy believers, YouTube Do-Your-Researchers, and Anti-Maskers. There needs to be a middle ground.
Sure, but to me that's on a different spectrum/axis from being independent thinkers. Both extremes on the axis of being a good citizen or being a conspiracy theorist are still following group think. But that is a concern as well, honestly if my kids are anything like me though they'll be skeptical of anything, particularly anything suddenly popular or extreme.
Honestly, as an educator and a parent, I find the "sit still and conform" nature of school quite frustrating even though I did fine with it. I'm female, and I do think that part of my doing fine with it is that I quietly went off to break the rules and because I was a "good kid" (white, female, high grades) no one even bothered to check on me to discover my extracurricular sins. But I want better for my kid than quietly and efficiently producing the answers the teacher wants to hear. That approach does not lead to excellence in science, mathematics, or the arts. It doesn't even serve those who do well in the system. What, after all, are the benefits to these girls who do well in school? All that education just to get jobs that pay worse? It's a racket.
I don't disagree with any of your assertions, but it remains a mystery how women then are excluded from top jobs if they do better in middle school through college and are less likely to be diagnosed with something that would impair their job performance.
I don't think it's simple enough to give a single answer to or to be able to answer entirely (and I'm not an expert at all), but I think there's a lot of factors...sexism, the competition at the top level and the natural aggressiveness of men, rewarding aggression in business, the negative view of babies and women with families in culture (again, sexism).
Honestly though...I think one of the biggest factors is that success in school does not predict success in a job. The traits rewarded in school do not correlate to the traits rewarded in high-competition jobs. Being quiet, listening, doing your work on time, not challenging the status quo, parroting things that teachers want you to, not challenging others...none of those things are traits you think of when you think of CEOs. Not that I think that aggressiveness necessarily SHOULD be what we're rewarding as a culture, but when the only goal is profits...it's hard to think that those things make a top company.
I'll probably get down-voted for mentioning him (and that's fine, I don't care), but Jordan Peterson has some really fascinating talks about personality traits between men and women and why personality traits in men lend toward more aggressiveness which is rewarded in competitive business.
Landing a "top job" is a zero sum game: on top of skill and intellect, you've also got to put in more labor and hours than anyone else to get there. For a large constellation of reasons, women are more likely to choose to put extra hours into childcare, and men are more likely to choose to put extra hours into the kind of market labor that lends itself to reaching those top tier jobs.
Young women now earn more than young men on average. Most high paying jobs go to people near the end of their career who are part of a different generation. I think it’s too early to know if young women are still discriminated against in the workplace.
It's not a mystery to me. If I want to excel at my job, I have to be willing to tell my boss he's full of shit and then elbow someone else out of line to get my idea implemented. This is not what I practiced in school for all that time and it's not what I get rewarded for in the rest of my life.
Men get the "benefit" of bimodal outcomes, in that they're disproportionately represented in the highest-paying jobs and in prison. Women get the steady middle, doing what needs to be done but less big risk/big reward. I'm dissatisfied with it on both sides. A system in which 'overactive' boys (or kids more generally) are not served well is not good, and a system that optimizes for the wrong outcome for 'good' girls is not good. It's clearly not doing that well for America given our susceptibility to mis- and disinformation and our need to import skills rather than effectively developing talent here.
It is pretty well established in psychology that women score higher in agreeableness (in the sense of the Big 5 trait). This difference is pretty small, the distributions overlap a lot, but I think, the fact, that women are more agreeable in general is pretty indisputable.
As far as I know, whether the difference has biological or cultural reasons is not equally well established. But it seems somewhat stable across cultures, which seems to me to suggest that it’s indeed biological, see e.g. Costa et al (2001), Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11825676_Gender_Dif...
“In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude, consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across cultures. Substantively, most of the gender differences we found can be grouped in four categories: Women tend to be higher in negative affect, submissiveness, and nurturance, and more concerned with feelings than with ideas.“
> How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
In particular, the differences aren't "stable accross cultures" but more pronounced in more gender-equal societies, so the difference are either (likely) biological, or else caused by society but in a counter-intuitive way.
No, it sounds like female teachers make rules that are easy for female students to follow. Meanwhile some boys simply don't like the rules and thus don't follow them.
Yes I've seen this comment many, many times. Where's the proof? Women crush men in college (see link below) yet most professors are men. People are just spouting unsupported nonsense. Heck my link understates the difference as it is old.
There is at least the "women are wonderful" effect covering both why female as well as male teachers may favor girls over boys, including subjective grading methods. That seems enough of a point to counter this being "unsupported nonsense".
Additionally, pointing out most professors are men does not counter the argument. Merely the transition of going from a highly cooperation- and rule-following-favored environment to an extremely competitive environment should give some indication as to how multifaceted this problem can truly be.
That just seems like a convenient excuse. Do you have any actual data to support your claim? I notice that no one ever posts any peer-reviewed research, just a bunch of anecdotes.
Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
Your claimed "women are wonderful" effect seems to stop conveniently at the career stage of life.
The "women are wonderful" effect doesn't stop. I would ask you actually search around a little and read my point again, as well as the many other comments, before dragging down the conversation with phrases such as "convenient excuse".
As other comments have pointed out, the reason can easily be explained by a paradigm shift. One which shifts from a cooperation-favored environment, to a competition-favored environment. Though there is an absence of evidence, the absence of evidence doesn't prove the opposite, it merely puts into question the hypothesis.
> Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
The GP stated this goes for women. Clearly, that doesn't claim the same goes for men. In fact, this is entirely in-line with the "women are wonderful" phenomenon, though I would personally believe other factors are at play beyond this.
> The "women are wonderful" effect doesn't stop. I would ask you actually search around a little and read my point again, as well as the many other comments, before dragging down the conversation with phrases such as "convenient excuse".
How do you reconcile this with discrimination towards women?
Also the whole trope that women somehow cannot compete and can only collaborate, as if the two things are at odds, is also exhausting.
There are multiple possible explanations as to why they won't compete. One of them is incapability through biological inferiority, which I highly doubt is the case. Another is systematic bias. Another is really as simple as not wanting to. Again, please read what is actually written, not what you want to answer to.
Frankly, this "discrimination towards women" may as well be turned around with one simple trick. Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their ambition and achievements? Last time I checked, women are a lot more judgmental of their partner's ambition, earning capabilities, career, and similar traits than men are, frequently to the point of wanting a guy who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to all those things, which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine men respond by being more competitive.
Now imagine your worth isn't as tied to this, you have all these men with a very clear incentive to compete keep trying to one-up another. It isn't a secret people give up easier when the challenge is too difficult compared to the reward, and assuming above, women clearly have less of a reward at the end of this.
Convenient excuses? Probably. Frankly, the entire "oppression" narrative is awfully convenient when put under the right angle. So instead of knee-jerking towards all this, let's stop this "trope" as well and address the problem for the multifaceted issue it truly is.
Edit: as replying to the below is no longer an option and apparently my "competition" claim is "unsubstantiated", it seems I have to point out the obvious. Women still largely go for men outearning them rather than equals, let alone lower.(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12372)
Additionally, money helps men more than women when it comes to cushioning traits of lower value (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...)
Though I guess one peer-reviewed study tracking diaries says more than entire countries filled with anecdotal data of women more willing to work part time even when not caring for kids.
If you think women aren't competing and being judged, simply with another set of criteria, you've... not talked to a lot of women.
Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their [looks, and maybe second emotional support]? Last time I checked, [men] are a lot more judgmental of their partner's [looks] than [women] are, frequently to the point of wanting a [gal] who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to [this one primary thing, and then the emotional support bit], which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine [women] respond by ... well, what am I supposed to fill in here? But if you think carefully about this, being agreeable (what's optimized for in this school stuff) is other than appearance probably the single most important currency a woman has.
One thing I'm always surprised with is how people are so confident in their own baseless, unsubstantiated claims.
Your entire comment basically is based off your own bias. Research can and already has been done on this issue, showing that you're probably wrong. I implore you to read this paper which already puts to rest your outdated notions that men are somehow more competitive than women. I'd like to emphasize the following with respect to competition and finances:
> The same line of reasoning might lead to the
expectation that men should compete more about financial
success than women do, since this would make them more
attractive to women. The data, however, do not support
this: there was no sex difference in the strength of
competitive feeling about attaining financial success,
nor were there consistent differences in the fraction of
diary entries concerned with things that might be
thought to lead to financial success, such as success at
school; in fact, in Study 1 women had a
larger fraction of diary entries about success at work
than men did.
I was answering your question about why this difference exists. I don't know about the reason, but if I had to guess I'd say it's not biology, but culture/upbringing. I think girls are culturally expected to follow rules, and boys encouraged to break them.
I'd suspect it's biological, since boys in (almost?) all human societies are more prone to challenging authority. It's the same story in elephants, chimps and wolves too. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case in all species of social mammals.
* Lots of sitting still. My local school canceled recess several years ago to make sure the kids had more studying time.
* Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often explicitly as part of the grade.
* Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks students to write and make a presentation about their math answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as long as the presentation is professional and impressive.
Perhaps, presuming OP's assumption that women have an easier time to follow the rules and there are more women in education than men is correct, that school has a lot of rules and not enough freedom.
I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school was a really strict place compared to real life and work. There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher had intended you to.
As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.
> As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.
Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to the sheer amount of time it took and the constant, overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines. College was a vacation. Work is easy.
High school did little to prepare me for "how the real world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and requirements and such in school) but did harm me psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get over—and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that), and crazy workload.
>Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
That might be true if you ignored development, but we're talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the same as a 23 year old man.
Throwaway because this is one of the data points you are required to ignore in polite society.
Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers. Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their behavior is better. The effect of biased grading is enormous and a huge disadvantage to our boys.
> Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. [1]
Serious question, why is this a data point we are required to ignore? There's been a lot of discourse about bias lately, so I feel like this is a data point people will welcome hearing. Thanks for sharing it.
Because if you don't characterize women as an oppressed people in every possible instance then you're sexist. The truth is that women benefit a great deal from the general goodwill that society grants them. From legal sentencing, to taking your kids to the park, to mentorship opportunities, to simply crossing the road. The list goes on, but western society generally goes out of its way to accommodate the needs of women, particularly in areas such as the job market, where men pave the way with increased risk taking.
> Because if you don't characterize women as an oppressed people in every possible instance then you're sexist.
Do people really say this? I've seen mens rights issues being raised carefully in the last few years, and I've never seen any backlash when done right. Like when you see articles written about women abusing men, or mens rights regarding children. Even women write about these issues. Feels like it's being accepted, just not being taken seriously enough yet. Maybe it's different in northern europe, but I haven't seen any backlash from international/US websites either.
I think part of the problem is that men are afraid of defending these issues. In part because of projection about how others will react. Either if it's from womens right activists going against it, or other macho men saying men shouldn't care about child custody or equality for male in women-dominated workspaces and such.
And there ARE also mens rights activist who are just using the issue to fight against womens rights, through whataboutisms and such. But don't let arguments against those people deter you from talking about reasonable mens rights issues.
Try mentioning men's day at mens day on company slack or twitter to raise awareness of the abuse that young boys suffer in early school. Try to raise awareness of why men are sentenced harder for comparable offenses, graded more harshly (unless anonymous) etc.
Count how many people immediately jump in to try to ridicule you, typically with something like: there are already 364 mens days in the year, why aren't you happy already?
Discourse about bias usually makes strong distinctions between groups that are known have relative positions of power in their society (because this discourse is mostly held in Western culture, that usually boils down to "white heterosexual christian-adjacent men") and minority/disenfranchised groups (women, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc).
Progressive groups are perceived to get extremely testy when it's suggested that minority groups might benefit from / majority groups might suffer from systemic effects in some ways.
Women are neither a minority nor disenfranchised. And before someone points to male over-representation in government, maybe think for a moment: whose votes put those men there?
This failure to think critically leads to some very silly arguments, for example abortion control being "male politicians controlling women's bodies", when in reality men's and women's opinions on abortions are extremely similar (in the US, at least).
Not only is this toxic, it's also counter-productive when we're supposed to pretend that women aren't half of society and thus perfectly capable of contributing to gender roles, e.g. [1]
> Not only is this toxic, it's also counter-productive when we're supposed to pretend that women aren't half of society and thus perfectly capable of contributing to gender roles
I never said or implied that.
The fact that members of oppressed groups can be bigoted (including against their own group) isn't a novel concept.
Yes, women can be sexist against women, and yes, women can be sexist against men. That doesn't mean patriarchy doesn't exist.
> And before someone points to male over-representation in government, maybe think for a moment: whose votes put those men there?
That's not really convincing.
Rich people and families with old money are over-represented in government. And yet we must presume that poor people voted to get them in place too. There are explanations for that (eg maybe rich people can afford expensive schools where they learn to be competent politicians), but overall any system that can select against poor people can select against women too, even if that system is mostly democratic.
> The fact that members of oppressed groups can be bigoted (including against their own group) isn't a novel concept.
If women are being sexist against men, then men are also an oppressed group. This isn't a novel concept.
You're classifying one side as oppressed and the other as oppressor on the basis of a single data point - looking at the very top of society. This would be valid if gender roles were handed down from the top of society, but that's simply not the world you and I live in.
Modern gender roles are a much more grass-roots affair and women are perfectly positioned to influence them. Every complaint about gendered toys, for example, implicates women more so than men.
When mothers push gender roles on their sons that fathers do not, it is absurd to suggest that there is some self-sustaining system called "patriarchy" (literally "the rule of fathers") at fault. You may deny it, but it is a transparent attempt at denying women's agency and placing the blame on men instead.
Frankly, it's boring and at this point I'm comfortable discarding the opinions of anyone who uses the word "patriarchy" outside discussions on religion (i.e. the only context in which gender roles are still top-down).
> Rich people and families with old money are over-represented in government. And yet we must presume that poor people voted to get them in place too
While wealthier people have advantages in terms of getting into politics, they still have to conform to popular opinion to get elected. Most European countries have strong labour movements that reflect this. I don't deny that men have an advantage getting into politics. I do deny that this single data point is sufficient to prove an oppressor/oppressed relationship between men/women. Gender roles are a trade, and women are active participants.
If the poster works at a big tech company, there’s a reasonable chance they could get fired for bringing up a point like that. That’s the world we live in now.
Right, I wish there could be a place where these sort of things could be discussed without the stigmas of "discrimination".
My wife and I talk about these sort of things sometimes: We believe there are differences between man and woman (and between different human descents, like people from the mayan descent [from where I am from] are shorter, while people from Germanic descent are taller, among others). That does not have to mean that one is better/worse than the other. But if society accepted and understood those differences, we could make better use of each feature for good.
If you raise a point that shows a slice of society discriminates against men more than women you'll face criticisms that range from "what about the men" to being called an incel to being let known you are not welcome in a community. It is worse online than off but it happens in both. I've personally had it happen numerous times when bringing up statistics concerning gender bias in prison sentencing.
Doesn’t that mean that 79% of the difference is not due to bias? So boys would still be behind girls even if the bias didn’t exist. Or am I misunderstanding this?
I wonder how this plays with the experiments that found that that girls tended to score much closer to boys on math tests when primed with the idea that they would do better and worse when primed with the idea that they would do worse.
>>Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers. Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their behavior is better.
In my country(India) we have board exams, where people evaluating and candidates are both anonymous to each other. People don't write their names, but use a number.
Still Girls do better. Let's just agree girls are better at academic work.
On top of that there was also patriarchy that favored boys over girls. The teachers were more receptive and attentive to boys' well being. The resounding success of girls in India (and the subcontinent) in academics is a great indicator that teachers are biased in favor of girls.
You are citing a study that isn't peer reviewed as a "data point" but when you summarize it like that looks like a factual claim when no factual conclusion should be drawn.
It would be an interesting data point if there was any particularly reason to believe the document you cited would hold up to further study.
Terrier, C., 2020. Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 77, p.101981.
"Economics of Education Review is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering education economics. It was established in 1981 and is published by Elsevier."
I've noticed throughout my life that negative outcomes that primarily affect females (math test scores, wage gap, etc) are Huge Problems That Demand Immediate Action, and negative outcomes that primarily affect males (language test scores, life expectancy gap) are just kind of how it is. I'm not bitching about it or pushing an agenda, but it's not subtle.
As long as males have to compete to woo females, the natural order will persist.
Every species on earth shows us this: "males are disposable, females matter". A 1M:100F ratio can revive an extinct species. A 1F:100M ratio is a blood bath. There are zero incentives for powerful men to help underperforming men, while women have neither natural nor sociological pressures stopping them from helping other women.
For better or for worse, we are barreling towards a point where male underachievement won't be ignorable. More than 50% of women will have to 'settle' for a man with worse career prospects. Scarily enough, if women choose to continue acting oblivious while wielding their primary evolutionary bargaining chip (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) to their fullest, then at least a couple of generations of men will waste away before a proper equilibrium is reached.
Ofc, this is a hypothesis that leans too heavily into our animalistic tendencies and their stranglehold over all societal developments. I also don't want this to come off as an MRA rant. Just a few ideas I wanted to put out there.
The population ratio is irrelevant. The relevant ratio is ‘actively seeking reproduction in the same age and social class’. Nearly all men in the progressive career class are actively seeking reproduction, and very few women. This is because, in this social class, the opportunity cost of reproduction is low for men and high for women. It is massively the opposite in low social class. I think you might be shocked to experience gender dynamics in largely poor and uneducated communities. The desperation for suitable male mates is palpable.
the wage gap has clear reasons (mens' jobs are better paid, women get promoted less) and thus clear solutions (stop discriminating against women at hiring/promotion time, or improve women's retention thus allowing them to stick in a job for longer, improving their chances at a promotion), even if these solutions are easier said than done.
the life expectancy gap instead... what are the reasons? I suspect that in some cultures it can be because of gender-specific abuse of alcohol... but if that's the reason ( or even if otherwise if the reason is biological) I'm not sure that we have an obvious solution to the problem.
Also, I presume that language test score could be as concerning as math test scores... but the latter will help students pursue a STEM career, which is better remunerated than a career that makes use of knowledge of languages. From that point of view, to improve opportunities later in life, fixing math scores can have priority.
New political currents hate ambiguity and nuance. If you're trying to motivate people to rise up against the Empire, the last thing you want to hear is people saying "Okay, but some imperial officers are actually good people, and this Saw Guerrera is a sadistic monster", even though both are true.
Eventually, once the Rebellion becomes widespread enough, people start saying "Okay, the Empire was awful and we're glad it's gone, but maybe we should cut back on the whole hunt-down-every-single-ex-stormtrooper-and-murder-them-and-their-family thing".
I agree, which is why I'm not bitching about it. But it's also kind of sad. I have a young son, and even at 5yo he has seen enough "yay girls!" messages in books and cartoons to deduce that there's something wrong with being a boy.
It's also a good example of the societal construction of concepts like "oppression". The idea that women earning less for the same work is a huge problem, and that men doing more dangerous jobs and dying younger isn't, is a subjective choice we've made. And the problem isn't so much that it's wrong, but that we don't have to choose. We could decide that they're both problems, but we don't. And I think the reason has a lot to do with the heavily-downvoted sibling comment saying, "Well, we worry about the oppressed people, and men aren't oppressed."
I think what happens in real life is the rebellion quickly becomes an empire, with it's own set of horrible things. Then you need a new rebellion... And so on...
Saying "the Rebellion becomes an Empire" implies that the side that fought against the bad things starts to do equally bad things once it gets into power.
Homosexuality was punishable by death in England up until 1861. Women didn't have the right to vote in France until 1945. Progressive extremists get people fired, and can even commit violent crimes sometimes, but they're nowhere near as bad as the state-approved violence that the minorities they defend were historically subject to (and still are in some countries).
Writing a transphobic tweet can get you fired, and I agree that's bad. Being transgender can get you killed. Saying "the rebellion becomes an empire, we need a new rebellion against them" is incredibly dismissive of the abuse marginalized groups go through.
Generally speaking, the clearly oppressed and disadvantaged group is the one we focus on in terms of equity. Men are not, nor have they ever been, that group.
This is the problem with making it about sex or gender.
‘Men’ as a category may not be that group with respect to ‘Women’ as a category.
But there are a huge number of men who are in fact, just as disadvantaged as a huge number of women even if that number is marginally smaller.
There is no reason at all why those men’s problems should not be receiving the same attention that women’s problems are receiving, other than the framing as a response to oppression of groups.
Being coerced into fighting wars that have nothing to do with you is clearly oppressive. Maintaining a society which accepts this, is oppressive. Violence for entertainment is male-focused, and oppressive.
Men are very, very oppressed. A few who have escaped into financial independence does not make a trend.
You know that the article is about a study demonstrating that women are outachieving men academically, right? It's outright suggesting that there is some as-of-yet-identified disadvantage there.
So while you say "no, not ever", I say "are you even having the same conversation we are?"
It may be true that men have historically dominated the top of most institutions—that most "oppressors" are men—but it doesn't follow that the majority of men are privileged or that most women are oppressed and disadvantaged, especially in modern western societies.
One thing I’d really like to see less of on this board, is argumentation by labeling an idea with some obscure field-dependent term, with no other logical support presented. Admittedly we allow this in mathematically rigorous fields, and there is, perhaps, some discussion to be had about what is rigorously proven as an inviolable natural law in the social sciences. It seems to me that such terms are admissible in the natural sciences only when based on clear parameters of disproof, and evidence, broadly sought, has never been shown to refute it. But in progressive social sciences, and nearly all denominations of politics and religion, these terms are used to deny the admissibility of any evidence against an assertion. This is a fundamental disagreement of the mechanisms of reasoning and communication, and I’m not sure how the two can exist together, but for some reason they always have. For academics, the required canon has simply shifted from Catholicism to social justice. I wonder if there would be some fatal flaw within any gathering of the purely rational such that they must be balanced by the irrational. Or perhaps it is a mutual exchange of the long-term respect and value creation due to risk and rigor, for the short-term financial support of those that would rather pay tuition to pretend.
Fortunately, I was not arguing against the parent to whom I replied by simply vomiting out a little term. I was saying, "Hey, there is a common name for this idea you just mentioned, you may find it useful going forward."
I realize that this isn't terribly PC, but isn't it possible that testosterone is negatively correlated with attention span and compliance and positively correlated with risk taking? You certainly see it in other species. Without any value judgment at all, I would expect this would manifest in different outcomes in academic settings versus competitive markets. That is, it seems likely to me that some of this is due to innate differences between men and women.
Doesn't say it in the article, but Hartmann's main book on ADHD discusses how he tested an African tribe for ADHD. 100% of those tested were "positive" for ADHD.
I believe we're looking at evolutionary aftereffects of generations of family-based societies where men hunt and women run the family.
I don’t have any background is psychology. This information you provided increases my skepticism of ADHD as being a thing at all. In short, I’ve felt since becoming an adult that ADHD is simply the result of forcing people into situations that are poorly suited to their brains, implemented by people who happened to fair well in those situations. That is, the humans themselves aren’t broken, just a different neuro-variant.
>That is, the humans themselves aren’t broken, just a different neuro-variant.
I have also come to this conclusion though personal experience.
A well-intentioned person for whom I hold the utmost respect said I exhibited hallmark symptoms of ADHD. I realized the shoe really did fit, so I decided to get tested.
In the end, I was "diagnosed" with ADHD, allowing me access to a variety of drugs to "treat" it. They don't help. I have a stash of Adderall XR I don't use because it makes me feel...wrong. I've realized I need to change my approach to how I work. Systematic breaks to clear the mind helps tremendously. Coffee has a calming, stabilizing effect. Meditation of various types (Koru is an excellent system) has also helped understand my mind better to know when I'm getting off track.
I am fully convinced people "with" ADHD are supposed to be living as bold risk-takers because their bodies are literally wired for it. More men than women are wired like this, but both can "have" ADHD. Pencil-pushing desk jobs are not for these people, unless they're doing off-the-wall research and analysis.
I think testosterone increases self-confidence, which in turn is incredibly helpful when it comes to things like negotiation, interviews, and just selling oneself.
This is anecdotal but I'm sure many people are seen this increasingly. In the past 10 years on the job, I'm seeing more guys make jokes about how stupid they are. Every time they make a single mistake they say "oh my God, if my head wasn't attached to my shoulders..."
Then it becomes a competition of who has done the dumbest thing. I know it's just being playful, but you rarely see the opposite.
Turn the tables, I was in a meeting with a male and female coworker. The guy was saying how stupid he was, and the female stopped him and said: You shouldn't say that about yourself, in a serious tone.
I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.
That's even a common trope in sitcoms. The husband is a loveable but bumbling idiot, while his wife is the voice of reason who frequently needs to save him from his own bad decisions. I wonder if the shows are imitating life, or the other way around. My wife did her master's thesis on discrimination based on communication, and in her research she found a study showing that the constant depiction of people with a southern accent as being stupid leads the majority of southern children, as young as 10 years old, to view themselves as inferior to people without the accent. Maybe the same is true with TV shows and movies frequently showing males as stupid.
I spent some serious time as teenager training myself out of my southern accent for this reason. You could have a PHD in Astrophysics, but if you speak with a southern accent people will assume you're an idiot.
The only downside, is that I have a slight speech impediment, but it's mild enough that most people don't notice.
And for some reason I still (25 years later) tend to pronounce hill as "heel".
After doing something stupid at work, I once said, out loud, "AnimalMuppet, if brains were leather, you couldn't saddle a flea." And 30 seconds later I was over it and back to work. I didn't say that because I think I'm stupid. No, I was able to say it because I'm sure that I'm smart. The security of being sure made me able to say that.
I wonder if the females don't feel secure enough to say such things, or if they're just wired differently. (So that saying derogatory things about themselves, which they don't actually believe, is an alien concept. It sounds rather weird when I put it that way...)
It's the new status contest among men in technical circles.
Who can self-deprecate, feign uncertainty and fake modesty in the most sophisticated way. Everyone is competing for the "nice guy" designation - or perhaps they're frightened of the "asshole" designation - and they're using deception as the means.
It's reminiscent of stale scientific writing where every statement is hedged with
endless caveats just so they can't get singled out for overstepping slightly.
Right, it's a mating strategy probably. I'm not sure it works (we tend to select towards strong men in whatever capacity is relevant, in this case actual intelligence) but a desperate man will gladly debase himself tactically if their other wells are dried up.
People would rather be liked than respected I guess but I also think that many today can't tell the difference.
I've had a significantly different experience with this. I know a few men who self-deprecate when they make a mistake, but I know more women who do. I haven't seen it turn into a competition on who's done the dumbest thing because I'm seldom in groups where self-deprecation is widely encouraged. I've been the person encouraging people not to self-deprecate in this way, so I don't think it's really a gendered thing. I'm curious if this is trending differently in different age groups I'm almost 40.
Haha this is likely some sort of selection bias effect because I need constant validation and I have a group of friends who are all like that and a group of friends who are all not like that.
If I were in one group, I reckon I'd form one opinion and if I were in the other I'd form the other opinion.
I'd be wary of making population generalizations when one uses sample populations highly susceptible to selection bias: one's friends and one's coworkers - both of whom are usually selected for agreeableness with the group, either directly for friends or indirectly through culture fit for coworkers.
Women avoid saying such self-deprecating things because they already have a tougher time than men being listened to, taken seriously, promoted, etc. Not that there aren't exceptions, but most women are acutely aware of how they act and are perceived at work because they start off at a disadvantage. I imagine few men ever think "will my gender get in the way of my ideas, or my work relationships or my career trajectory?".
I don't fully agree with you, at least not in the European tech world. According to my experience, women in technical jobs have a higher chance of getting hired, winning a presentation award, and being promoted to team or project manager.
On the other hand, I also think that they have a harder time taken serious on highly techical topics, and earn less on average for the same job.
It comes with benefits and drawbacks. I honestly don't know which outweighs which, but putting it all in a negative perspective is unfair and not accurate.
Don't know why the pretty obvious explanation for why this sort of thing is common is downvoted.
Even if you're some weirdo who thinks there is no gender discrimination in the workplace, you can't deny that many women at least perceive there to be gender discrimination, and one of the tips passed around is to stop self-deprecating yourself in front of your colleagues.
I don't know for a fact either, but would guess the reason is a childhood of girls telling each other nasty things would make them weary of harsh language even when directed at the self.
With that part unmentioned, the GP seems to assign dubious priorities to human motivations.
> Even if you're some weirdo who thinks there is no gender discrimination in the workplace, you can't deny that many women at least perceive there to be gender discrimination,
Sample size of one, but if my company has the option to hire a male or a female engineer which are known to have the exact same skillset and experience I expect them to choose the female one 10/10 times:
- hiring the man gets the job done
- hiring the woman gets the job done equally well and gets you a pat on the back (both immediately and also whenever the statistics are brought up)
You are very close to getting it, but you're missing one crucial detail.
> which are known to have the exact same skillset and experience
Sure if there was an objective way to evaluate this, then you're right.
But there isn't. We THINK that there is, but there is a ton of subjective bias along the way from who recruiters contact, the resume screen, all the way through the interview.
And the whole point of gender discrimination is that "on average" women's technical skills and experience are undervalued.
That's the premise people are making when they discuss discriminations. Now, you might disagree, and then we can get into the details of why this happens, which parts are conscious and which parts are unconscious. But what's happening is not how you're describing it.
> And the whole point of gender discrimination is that "on average" women's technical skills and experience are undervalued.
As have been pointed out before: most of us live in somewhat capitalist societies. Capitalists are AFAIK primarily greedy not primarily evil.
I don't believe for a second that Facebook wouldn't take the opportunity straight away if they could get the same work done for less money by hiring women instead.
IBM too. That should cause a feedback loop that increases salaries for female engineers until balance is reached.
Anything other would imply a lack of information somewhere or that capitalists were more evil than greedy.
Now that I think of it: Lack of information one or more places is actually an interesting hypothesis in its own right.
I have to disagree with this. While there are plenty of confident people who will mock themselves in humor, I've also known many people whose self mocking hides a very negative self image that needs serious if not professional help that they often don't get.
This could be a consequence of the variability hypothesis[1] interacting with the way grades are distributed.
If grades tend to have a lot of negative skewness, that means that it pays to be in a group that has the least number of extreme underperformers, since your group's outperformers are handicapped due to the upper bound existing near the mean.
That means we expect men to underperform in domains that have lots of negative skewness in the outcome distribution, assuming [1] holds.
In domains where there's a lot of positive skewness in the outcomes distribution, we would expect the opposite result.
As a first step, we would want to check how grades are actually distributed in the raw data, and whether there is an inter-country correlation between its grades' skewness and its male-to-female differences.
Variability hypothesis seems to downplay the cultural aspects a lot. Males were generally thought to have better visual sense of an object but the advantage was nullified when females were tested with objects that they are most familiar with.
And you are right that we should check for inter-country data. It will provide a more accurate view.
This example pertains to mean skill level which doesn't seem relevant to the variability hypothesis (which pertains instead to variance of traits/skills/interests).
If your point is that the empirical findings underpinning the variability hypothesis may have some cultural causes instead of being only genetic, then we don't disagree. But I wouldn't agree that the culture-over-genes perspective is undersubscribed, that's the most fashionable and socially acceptable perspective to take.
Meta comment, a lot of comments here are not as measured, accurate, or carefully worded as the Damore "memo".
Damore was sacked for his memo. Well, arguably he was sacked for people (at his workplace, using company resources and time) making disingenuous and vicious attacks on him (often misrepresented what he actually said), far less accurate or polite or measured than anything Damore said, creating enough of an internal activist movement that the boss had to cancel his trip to the Maldives IIRC.
There was an article/study saying girl grades were shifted due to teacher appreciating their answers as better. I'm not sure how solid the study is (I still fail to understand how grades can shift for a whole group of pupill) but yeah grades can be fickle.
"A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material."
In reality, boys may well be learning more than girls in school, maybe even substantially more.
Not really. I'd argue that standardized tests are much better than grades. Particularly for any grade level below university.
At university level, the grades are more accurate (but still flawed) because the grade is typically 70-80% test and quiz based.
My experience in the US with grades for middle school and high school is that it's 85-90% non-examination based-- Meaning it's essentially a measure for how well you can complete and turn in the busy work on time.
That's a great measure for conscientiousness, but the standardized tests will show who actually learned the material.
Depends on the exam. If we're using something like the SAT or ACT, I can agree with that statement to an extent, but if it's a state exam, those are frequently flawed[1]. I think it's the best we can do though, since while people frequently bemoan any exam as testing one's ability to take exams, I've never seen a better alternative proposed.
Yes, this. Not to say that fitness for test and fitness for reality aren't correlated. They just aren't the same. All in all I just wonder if we don't overvalue competition (the reason I we probably have grades) and undervalue passion.
What about the classroom has anything to do with reality? If anything, the extent of the failure of any adult organization is perhaps the extent to which it has borrowed ideas from social programming in the classroom.
The problem is what those questions are. Are you expected to memorize a formula or are you expected to solve a real problem, possibly with the formulas available in a cheat sheet?
My wife grew up with a lot of testing in asia. Now working as a teacher in northern europe she finds the approach here way better for actually learning, where there's less focus on memorizing things, and more on problem solving. The thing is, it's harder to make tests for problem solving, so tests tend to favor memorizing, especially when there's a lot of it. It's not just about making the questions, it's about grading them and making a judgement about whether the student took the right approach despite getting the wrong answer. How do you standardize that?
I'm not sure what's standard, but at my university we often had exams with either formula books and/or a cheat sheet we could prepare ourselves. Yet the math tests were way more challenging for me than the simpler tests without access to material we had in high school.
I’m not sure about that. The goal is to make something. I’ve come to appreciate Joe Gebbia’s description of art school as likely superior to my STEM education.
I recognize that my experience is probably not average - but at my high school (2004-2008 US public school) the advanced/AP classes were 80%-90% female. This was true for all subjects, the student government, and the academic after school activities.
Also anecdotal - but I've seen a lot of the boys who were academically behind seem to get their shit together ~3-5 years after graduating and ended up going to college, grad school, getting white collar jobs, etc.
It appears that if you have the resources and privilege its not too hard to overcome having dicked around in your primary education - but I'm willing to bet most people who aren't in that position never catch up.
Raising animals has made me think a lot about maturation. Our babies are helpless and incompetent longer than any other species on earth. Compare a human to a dog at 3 months and clearly the dog is smarter and more capable. Slower maturation often ends up as better total cognitive adaptation as an adult. For some reason, boys are hormonally behind by about 4 years now, also with significant differences between haplotypes. But I see same thing over and over, the fast ones stall and the slow ones just keep growing in their area of interest. This is true even in college students. If I had to bet on one of my students for the Turing award, it would be my worst at the time, already quite famous. It’s a little upsetting for me because I was more on the precocious side, and this observation has greatly humbled me. Specifically because I think you’re right; catching up is probably rare for institutional reasons, and maybe half the people turning wrenches would be much better than me at whatever I’m feeling challenged by. Maybe we have it all wrong, and we should be looking for the slowest learners, as in, the ones that have to take in everything and won’t accept anything until it’s 100%.
Any research on gender past infancy has a problem in that it's hard to untangle what is "innate" and what is a result of differentiated socialization based on gender.
There's a lot of speculation in this forum about whether this is because of different distributions of IQ, effects of testosterone, etc., but how can we possibly determine if these are true differences or the result of parents, teachers, and other people in society treating young children differently based on their gender?
Modern progressivism has apparently solved that issue already.
I'll demonstrate:
Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka "the patriarchy".
On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance that benefits women, such as sentencing/incarceration rates, suicide rates, or academic performance, it seems that often people are satisfied with an explanation that says the disparity is due to some innate behavioral difference in men. Occasionally, in the case of poor academics or crime rates among men you'll hear justifications along the lines of "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them", which in my opinion is a statement that subtly implies that these men's misfortune is their own fault.
Also in some cases you see outright deflection; bring up how women generally make better grades than men, and how they outnumber men by nontrivial amounts at universities? The response it "well, better education doesn't necessarily translate into better employment for women". Bring up the substantially higher male suicide rate? You'll often hear "well actually women attempt suicide more often, but use less effective methods" - and that's supposed to be the end of the conversation, as though attempting suicide with a bottle of pills (where you could still wake up in the hospital surrounded by family and friends) has the same sort of finality as shooting yourself in the head or jumping in front of a train.
I'm not sure what your point is. I agree that all of your examples are just further cases where being sloppy about innate vs. learned differences results in bad policy.
The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune; this seems to misunderstand how society affects its members. In the context of violent crime, an example hypothesis would be that boys are taught by their families, movies, etc. that violence is a valuable part of being male, and because of this social norm, more men end up committing violent crimes. It seems crazy to suggest that a man affected by these cultural norms could have chosen to be brought up in a different environment; I don't know that people are suggesting this when they claim that patriarchal social norms are a problem.
> I'm not sure what your point is. I agree that all of your examples are just further cases where being sloppy about innate vs. learned differences results in bad policy.
My point is that there is a pretty clear tendency for people to attribute sex/gender discrepancies to societal factors when it benefits men, but less so when it benefits women. The reasons for this are likely varied, but you can draw your own conclusions on that.
> The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune
I think it does in some cases, but I suppose it depends on the speaker's definition and characterization of this nebulous term, "the patriarchy". I think some people do indeed feel that all men are complicit in "the patriarchy" and so if the system ends up hurting them, they are at least partially responsible.
Perhaps that's all the more reason that characterizing all gender issues as "our society is a patriarchy unconditionally, in which women are always oppressed and men are always the oppressors" is not all that great.
This title seems click baity we should be asking the question as to why our system allows one gender to outperform the other. Not blanket statements of correlation == causation.
Something is clearly wrong with our system which is resulting in one gender receiving more support. The distribution curve should mostly be equal, yes we are different gender wise. But for large majority of people our brains function mostly the same (it’s not like girls are a different species than boys).
Either you can ignore the data that suggests there are differences between girls and boys, or it might be worth considering some problem solving.
E.g. at any point do we think about optimizing some learning environments for boys? When college graduation rates in the US are 70/30 girl/boy, is that okay? I know it feels weird asking the question since those ratios were flipped a few years ago, and we fixed it...
What's the metric? Average GPA? Average graduation rate? It seems so.
It is well documented that men drop out at higher rates and are in general more prone to failing. Having a few extra "zeros" in the GPA rankings would skew the mean down for males.
It's tempting to say that "Girls are better than boys in academic things", but if you look at the performance of a cohort of graduates, I'd expect you'd see we're all about equal.
After graduation, there's a couple other well documented attrition filters for women, unfortunately.
There was this old essay about it, which is now quite old and probably cancelled, called "Is there anything good about men" that discussed various life tradeoffs that affected the genders differently.
On a random individual basis men and women perform equally well at college. On the aggregate there are now 3 to 4 million more female than male college graduates in the US.[0] And now that more women than men are enrolled in college we might expect this trend to continue.[1]
It'd be interesting to see a time when people study why men fail at school, and are a minority of successful graduates.
I find it fun to share that my boss is a woman, her boss is a woman, and _her_ boss is too. And they're all at or past mid career and highly successful managers at a world-class technology company. JPL is a wonderful place though.
As always we don't measure what matters, but what is measurable. There are actually very good arguments against giving grades at all, but it's sadly way out of the mainstream ...
This has historically been true in India, but mostly because only smarter, more upper-class girls (so those actually interested in education) were allowed to study beyond the primary school level. Boys need a college degree no matter the circumstance, and thus drag the average down.
There's a budding problem for gender equality growing, and it's not the usual story.
We're not quite ready to talk about it openly though, without the stated cause being toxic masculinity or something - as if that's a problem that has been getting worse, not better, and is somehow only now taking its biggest toll on boys under 15 (and even under 5).
Alas, the answer must be doubling-down on that narrative and pumping the boys who can't function like girls full of ADHD meds - I was on Ritalin before age 12, and it does "solve the problem" to a workable enough degree for everyone to keep on keeping on.
Anyone who has ever taught young boys and girls has almost certainly experienced a marked difference in behavior.
Schooling as a whole needs to be overhauled to better accommodate young boys. Until then, we're going to see wider and wider gaps at highschool and university levels.
Regardless of gender, schooling as a whole needs to move away from this factory-like system with underpaid teachers and an emphasis on test scores. It would be nice if there were an easy solution...
It's definitely influenced how we raise our kids - boys in general really seem to need to be active, exploring, and heavily engaged in physical activity otherwise they turn that energy towards destructive activities.
This is one of those cases where you get the outcome you design for....they don't know they designed a system that is better suited for women. biology affects men's and women differently. that's why if you notice. most of the difference shows up during and after puberty. small children are not very different (when controlled for environmental bias)
Interesting, I wonder how skewed my perspective of high school was by finding a community college high school hybrid program that gave me freedom and access to better electives. It didn’t hurt that community college tutoring was a huge bonus: provided hours of free tutoring per course and then rewarded with opportunities to get paid tutoring the subject if I did well. Meeting older community college students through tutoring was also very formative. Tutoring money as a 15/16 year old helped my independence and motivation.
Meanwhile, I could have easily dropped out, parents even suggested I could given the strain of me getting me to school freshman year similar male peers did at 13/14, so just I lived with friends and couch surfed through all of HS. As a youngster though I did not show much academic connection and was suspended each week in a charter school, failing 2nd grade, but never going to 4th grade after switching schools. After a parent teacher conference where my mom embarrassingly tried to fight my teacher I realized things might go easier if I took time after school or during lunch to just wrap up my homework. Through middle school the boys and girls club created an atmosphere where I could continue that behavior and get access to computers and printers for written assignments. It was still a hassle though. Without a few key teachers in middle school I probably also wouldn’t have kicked a bad habit of ditching school.
This is just my experience but these days I read 50ish books year - back in school I would do everything possible to avoid assigned reading. None of them spoke to me, I wasn't particularly interested in figuring out a books underlying theme.
Out of my friends, none of us enjoyed this. All my teachers were always women and I have to wonder if the curriculum was designed by someone more like us would we have gotten more from it? I honestly don't know.
Girls on average are more likely to be competent due to the lower variance in their intellectual ability. Boys on average have a greater variance so you have fewer overall that will perform because there's more that are on the lower end and more that are on the higher end.
It has nothing to do with superiority. More girls are "average" than boys. More boys are "brilliant" than girls but also more are "dumb". It's about variance and distribution of intellect among each sex. A boy is more likely to be a genius or a dolt than a girl and a girl is more likely to be competent than a boy overall.
I find your sentiment interesting, but we can't ignore a fact in favor of not hurting people's feelings. Of course, more research is always being done, so I'm sure in a few years a new research paper will come out and we will hear a different facts about a certain gender's academic performance. Then next big paper comes out and the cycle repeats.
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Do we want equality in this area? Should we change schooling to make it easier for boys than girls until we get to 50/50 achievement? Or should we retain the status quo to boost the chances of women succeeding later in their lives when they do not achieve in their careers at the same level as men?
I often considered that... in particular, because I (as a white male) am more bothered by the girl-boy discrepancy than by the black-white-Asian discrepancy (in the US).
Why? Is it just self-serving prioritization?
Reflecting more, I don't think it is. I'm naively assuming that the girl-boy difference is likely biological (either female brains are different than male brains, or the differences in sex & reproduction result in equivalent human brains pursuing different life strategies in different bodies), while black-white-Asian difference is likely social, probably related to culture and poverty level (i.e. no brain differences).
It follows that in order to optimize for social good & progress, we should adapt the education system so that both female-ish and male-ish types of brains flourish (note that there is likely significant overlap) yet we should help people out of poverty (which might involve changing education, but also probably other, much more significant efforts) and change culture (make schooling & achievement more important and popular) to reduce white-black-Asian gap.
I think the best situation would be to mostly separate boys and girls in classes. We could then do things for boys that are generally better for boys and do things for girls that are generally better for girls. There probably should be co-ed schools so boys and girls can still socialize during lunch and other breaks, just not during classes.
No matter what we do some people will not have an ideal education. I think this will maximize the education that works for the most kids. The only way we can actually have an ideal education would be to have 1 teacher per student. That is not really practical.
There are non-coed schools (not sure about coed schools but segregated classes like I am advocating for?) in the US. Not sure if only private schools are allowed to do that?
This won't sound very PC, but despite all the bullshit about equality, men need to be better than women.
Women demand that men are better than women.
If we are going to end up with a situation where women have higher income potentials than men, nobody will be happy.
Women will feel like they cannot find anyone suitable and men will feel like they are inadequate.
You're right on this one, and I hope you don't see mass downvotes for this.
Men are physically stronger and more athletic on average, and it's so extreme that hilarious stories like this [1] come out when top-tier female athletes try to compete against men in some sports. Woman simply do not want to be working the same kind of manual labor jobs at the rate that that men have for this reason, and it would be extremely bad for society if we attempted to fix this "inequality".
But it's even more pronounced in dating/sexual patterns. Most women do not want to be "dominant" and this lack of "dominant" women is a huge problem for men who consider themselves to be "submissive". It's a very talked about issue for men in BDSM communities. And it's even more well known how a majority of women find it very hot to be "dominated" e.g. lightly choked [2]. Women simply will not prefer a society where men on average are not the "dominant" gender, at least in key aspects of society such as the bedroom or in labor intensive work.
It is also true of incomes which is mostly what I was talking about. Women strongly prefer men with higher earning potential than themselves, and this preference increases as financial incomes of women increase.[1]
A society where women cannot find husbands with higher earning potentials would create a marriage crisis.
Don't disadvantage young men for the troubles older generations have caused. They did not want to be the scapegoat of women of older generations being held back by society in any form.
Frankly, all the quotas and other artificial constructions to help women should already tip people off that disadvantaging young men further will only cause more and more resentment.
We have known what the problem is and what the solution is for a long time. - Standard curriculum for non-standard children, and finding out what makes a child special and encouraging that at the expense of other things.
In some countries, various (college/uni) majors/programs have their own quotas or bonus "entrance points" for gender, if the majors are very unbalanced. If/when over time this balance gets closer to 50/50, those quotas/points are removed.
In Norway, girls outperform boys in every subject - but the opposite is true when tests are anonymized. It turns out teachers give boys lower grades because can't sit still during class.
From a personal perspective (Indian here), it feels odd that this would make news. I've been a fairly good "performer" at high school and have always had a hard time getting the better of my girl classmates. The acad stuff just seemed too easy for them. They'd remember and recall things so well and that would make me curse under my breath. Their language and general maturity was also much better that I could hope for at that point.
I find it very curious that at high school level, it seems females outperform males in grades, and there is higher female participation/caring about the content (participation is rarely voluntary in high school); but as soon as you go to university level (STEM in particular), participation rates do a complete switch in that a lot of STEM fields have a huge over representation of males.
It seems most commenters here think that the results can be explained by bias (e.g. on the part of teachers), or cultural factors / environment (e.g. schools are set up for women to do better), or personality differences (e.g. girls are more obedient etc), and so on. But isn't the most straightforward explanation that women are simpler smarter than men on average?
Well yeah, I have a daughter who finished high school and I've observed:
- when I was in school I only cared about results for the subjects that interested me; otherwise i did just enough to pass
- when she was in school she cared about high grades for all subjects
That's a good explanation. Another one, I think, is that men often like to take the role of "problem solver", even when it doesn't make sense (e.g. in relational problems). So IQ might not be the only reason, but also intrinsic motivation.
Just think of any random invention, then look up on Wikipedia who was the inventor. Repeat a bunch of times, and you get the idea. (And please don't respond with cherry-picked examples.)
I am sure that if men were had been subjugated by women for all of civilization the outcomes might have been a little different. We'll never know, since the only civilization we know is one that has oppressed women for its entirety.
Off topic, but why is this thread (207 points | 5 hours ago | 474 comments) on page 2, rank 37, and the thread about Italo Calvino (62 points | 7 hours ago | 19 comments) on page 1, rank 23?
The HackerNews algorithm uses velocity (I don't know the exact equation) to rank posts so a post with 20 points acquired in a 5 minutes span will generally outperform a 400 points post for which the points are only trickling in.
Who could have guessed that having a majority of female teachers while constantly telling boys that they were born the wrong sex and should shut their mouths would have an impact?!
so many sexists on HN, it's surprising. whenever there is a thread about some differences in genders, it gets bombarded with "men are actually the ones being oppressed" comments.
just look at this thread. 400 comments in 3 hours. it's because of the title. the idea that girls are doing better than boys triggered a whole mob. pretty worrying.
How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent then you’d think. I suppose all three could be true.
Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues.
There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.
Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.
> Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.
Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.
You're completely missing the point of the person's comment...
The top comment is asking why girl's perform better, and yet and under-represented in top tier jobs. The comment you replied to responds that they think it's because of having child and choosing not to go back to work.
At no point are they taking a stance on whether or not raising a child is as important as working a job...
I think YOU'RE missing the point. Childcare is still considered a less important and honorable occupation than pretty much everything else you can do. If you're "just" a parent, you're not considered qualified for really anything else.
That means most men won't do it, because they'll lose status. Meanwhile women will always place lower importance on status than on childcare, and so they will do childcare because no one is available to do it for them.
The disparity won't ever disappear until it's just as valid and socially supported for a man to stay home and raise children, as for a woman.
You're making a straw man argument about the importance of work that wasn't in the original commenter's post at all. Seems like you are bringing bias or an agenda into your comment.
Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do, even if they have no financial incentive. Most people don't like having to go to the office 8 hours a day, and very few probably would if money wasn't in the equation.
> Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do,
I don't know that is true of most men. Have children? Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men wanting to have more children is inversely proportional to the amount of work the mother expects them to contribute.
Men and women contribute to child rearing in different ways.
Women tend to be more nurturing so their role is disproportionately more important during a child's earlier formative years. They also tend to have a stronger orientation toward domestic affairs. Men, on the other hand, tend to be more strongly oriented toward the public sphere. The home is the focal point. Thus women are at the center of the action, as it were, when it comes to the amount of time they spend with children, while men tend to be more strongly motivated to take care of affairs for the sake of their families outside of the home. The home is also associated with greater safety and comfort, which is something women tend to prefer (we also see this reflected in occupational preferences), while the public sphere contains more risk and discomfort, something men prefer to face esp. when the reward is sufficiently high (this is also reflected in occupational preferences; men tend to prefer taking on more dangerous and higher stress jobs and longer hours in exchange for more pay).
I have used the word "tend" for a reason. These are not two sealed off magisteria. Proportion is probably good way to frame things, though to a point. So men also participate in child rearing, esp. where discipline is concerned (the complement of maternal nurturing is the need for paternal authority which serves the child later in other ways like the ability to relate to authority elsewhere in a healthy way). Women also operate in the public sphere and often also work. Conditions and circumstances can also constrain how male and female roles are expressed.
I think their point can be expressed in another way: in the earlier formative years when, as you say, a mother's role is more important, do you think a father would want to have more children if he's expected to be as suited to the mother's role as what a mother is?
If you took a bunch of women that weren't expected to be the primary caregiver, and gave them the same variety of expected hours per day spent on children, I would expect to see a similar correlation.
Which is exactly why many women drop out of the work force to do this important work, and many men would, too, if it was more socially acceptable for them?
When your "customers" or "boss" are people you love vs. a boss or corporation that is more prone to be an asshole than not, and the work of having kids has genetically encoded feel good chemicals while many find work a pure slog, it's not surprising if given the choice people would chose to be mothers vs. workers for a while.
It's not a formal debate, but I think it's rude to misinterpret someone in this way. It's not even a tangential point, because it's not actually connected - it's parallel.
And sure, people do that all the time. People do all sorts of things. It doesn't mean they are communicating effectively, getting any kind of point across or coming to any conclusion at all.
I could start into semantics too, for example saying that people don't bring up tangential points because tangents aren't points they are lines. It wouldn't be a good idea, because it wouldn't further the discussion at all. That's basically what I see happened here.
Pointing out unintended implications of what someone said isn't misinterpreting them. It's connected to the claim parenting is a socially acceptable way for women to avoid work. Their point was clear. The verbal meanings of tangent and point don't disrespect geometry.
That comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what "framing" means. Framing pertains to different ways of expressing the same facts, for example the glass is half empty vs. the glas is half full. Whether you consider work to require being hired and paid for it by an employer or understand it in a broader sense as including any activity that is important for society is not a matter of framing. These are fundamentally different concepts of work that also have different extensions.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse and uncharitable to the argument being presented. Any reasonable and charitable reading clearly interprets it as talking about "job for pay" rather than saying "childcare is not work".
..Just have to say that these are terrible reasons to have children.
You produce a small version of yourself and you are emotionally satisfied that something you did will mean something in the end. If you get to raise the child yourself then you get to perpetuate your mental life as well.
Still selfish reasons, but at least much better than producing... laborers.
No one disagrees. We literally have a day to celebrate that and societies for millennia have cherished that. Many wars have been fought in essence so the mothers of their group would have better conditions to be a mother in as it gives their offspring the best chance to thrive.
Most everyone loves their mom more than anything else.
Frankly, I would make the stronger point: it's more important than your job (raising children can be difficult, to be sure, but it's not quite "work" in the sense that work by and large tends to be servile while raising children is a higher end for which work is done). The reason people work is overwhelmingly so that they can support their children and their families.
In the United States in the last 30 years, the percentage of women working in computing fields has decreased significantly. In that same time period, births per women has decreased and the age of first-time mothers has increased.
>Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues.
There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.
Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?
You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?
I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.
How about increasing the tax credit that goes to all parent, regardless of they choose to do childcare? Maybe for some parents that would be enough that one parent could quit their job and finally have the joy of spending more of their time with their own kid. I don't see why we should subsidize institutional childcare over other forms of caring for the very young.
I'm mostly with you on this, but there's a larger percentage of guys than you think. If you worked in corporate America long enough, especially in tech, you've encountered lots of guys that clearly enjoy being at work more than home.
People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.
I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What if it really is better to have less money, and not have to deal with any of this work stuff?
Before women were allowed to work the few women that did pursue higher education were basically expected to marry immediately after graduation. There was absolutely zero expectation that you would work a job relevant to your education because you were supposed to be a housewife who is busy with her kids. The biological aspect is probably the biggest driving force.
I'm sorry but why are you so sure they're trying to avoid work? From my experience most women would love to have careers and be financially independent and successful. But babies indeed make it a lot harder -- both from a time/energy perspective and from a discrimination perspective.
In Canada and the US, the state will take children away from parents in poverty rather than hand out money. But then it gets really weird; they then place the children in foster homes, which get significant handouts.
Yeah, probably most? IDK, I don't have the stats at hand, but in plenty of places you're alone agains't what it comes to you, no matter your gender.
The personal and societal reasoning about parenthood changes, but they still do have babies, despite being on their own. For many people, children is their retirement plan.
Anyway, it's not the same to have a nice monthly stipend than a small cheque far in between. Spain, for example, is considerably worse financially-wise for raising a kid than countries more up north. Not only because the country job market is shit (which is important even if you don't work, because your partner has to bring money home), but because the state really doesn't do much about it.
Now imagine living in a place where there isn't really a functional state to look for.
It's not avoiding work, but it is making a choice to pursue one type of work (child rearing) over another (market labor in shitty, unfulfilling, but well-paid jobs). That's a choice women have substantially more ability to make than men.
Some replies might be missing the point that it may well be reasonable to pay people raising children. OP implies it's a handout. I would argue it's an unpaid service to society and those of you relying on a crop of well-educated non-criminals to be your employees and peers are freeloading.
I don't think that the parent comment meant that raising children isn't work. It absolutely is, and an extremely massive one too. What they most likely meant by "avoiding work" is "avoiding a paycheck job".
Even if this were true it still wouldn't explain the difference. This could only be the explanation of two conditions are met:
1. Your cited article is correct.
2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top tier" level intelligence. This second point would require some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy persists.
> What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been shown to favour male underlings. In a few places sexism is enshrined in law: Singapore still canes boys, while sparing girls the rod.
I think the answer lies in the fact that in countries like Tunisia for example, women represent over 60% of people working in STEM. Why? Because STEM jobs are the highest paying jobs. So from my perspective, the lack of women in STEM in the U.S. is not an issue but a symptom of a strong economy, as in you don't have to decipher someone's spaghetti code for a living, you can pay the bills doing other things that you are more passionate about.
Indeed. The number of women in STEM fields is also low in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries compared to in-development ones. And, nobody in his/her right mind will accuse the Scandinavian countries of being patriarchal sexists societies.
There are couple more explanations which haven't been mentioned:
1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men.
2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce correlates with academic success, one would expect it to correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on homework but only very slightly on exams.
Performing well academically usually means that the student is good at at completing assignments in a way that aligns with the teachers grading rubric. I think boys have a certain contempt for that for a variety of reasons (at least mine do) so they focus their attention on how to work around the system, which probably yields an advantage later in the workplace.
Because teacher on previous lesson tried to teach the class e.g about using derivatives to find extremas, and now he's testing whether you managed to learn it.
his job is mainly to teach you stuff.
Of course there are also tests where you can use anything you want as long as it is formally correct e.g leaving school exams, end of semester exams and many more...
It's not the greatest approach but I guess it scales?
I see the role of a teacher as someone who helps you learn, rather than someone who only teaches you things.
If a student finds a particular method or approach easier to comprehend, shouldn't the teacher adapt to that rather than forcing you to use the "correct" method?
If a teacher is dogmatic in their approach, I would call that poor teaching.
>If a student finds a particular method or approach easier to comprehend, shouldn't the teacher adapt to that rather than forcing you to use the "correct" method?
your school leaving exams or next school will probably not care
and they will test whatever they want, so why take a risk?
you can be challenged by a task which is doable in both methods, but "recommened" approach needs 3min in order to get this done,
meanwhile your's solution needs 15min. I mean here that standarized tests aren't some kind of trickery, they just tend to test how many various approaches do you know.
___________
also how many times can it be done? (deciding that it's ok to use other/easier method instead of "state of art" solution) once? twice? thrice? very often?
Someone commented that it's about "babies" and that's so incredibly right. But I think it's more benign than it may sound.
We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff.
I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father.
There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of it can be read as systemic imbalance.
How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs?
I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2).
Here is my model:
1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1.
2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do some bit of work only because they see some advantage to themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude, who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic.
When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl does more homework than the median boy.
The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork. But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that get the top positions.
On top of that, in my experience, women do make different choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-actualization", while more men still have the expectation that they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed, obviously, many exceptions exist).
And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track" job than take a high-powered career path.
A great deal of teaching is built around the idea of students sitting still in one place for a long period of time, listening intently and working quietly. Boys seem to have a lot more difficulty with this (on average) than girls do.
That's one example but there are plenty of others.
yes I would agree that boys have trouble with this, as that's what the featured article effectively states. however, saying that the methods themselves somehow are predisposed to benefit women is one that I'd like to see research on.
You're stating that there exists teaching methods that somehow benefit women, and not men as a function of their gender. That's an extraordinary claim and requires evidence. You can't assert your claim is true and look at the article to justify the original claim that you're asserting to begin with.
Sorry, what? I gave an example of a teaching method which creates difficulties for boys relative to girls. You agreed boys have trouble with it. What is left to discuss?
Boys having trouble with a teaching method does not mean said teaching method is inherently discriminatory towards boys nor does it mean that its favorable towards girls. Do you not understand? I'm sorry if I'm not being clear. Nothing you have said has illustrated things being somehow favorable to girls.
One group of individual doing better at something does not mean the thing is favorable towards the group.
The article is about girls outperforming relative to boys. In that context anything which penalises boys benefits girls, by definition. This is basic logic. I'm not sure what else can be said here, so let's leave it at that.
This is just my gumption, but I don’t think kids are blind to gender growing up. I’m curious if the attentiveness of boys would change if they had more frequent male teachers in earlier grades.
In many subfields of biology, women have achieved numerical parity at all levels (IE, there are roughly 50% women in entry and leadership positions). It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination. It's unclear what the full set of contributing factors are.
This is often forgotten. In aggregate, for every woman persuaded to become a bricklayer instead of a kindergarten teacher, a man must be persuaded to do the reverse. This is just never going to happen across all industries.
I think the training environment at the undergraduate level is still toxic for women. I graduated 4 years ago, and while I wasn't in the CS program I had a female friend who was and she often lamented how isolating that program could be. This was a huge program at a huge school (50k undergrad), yet she was often one of only a few women in the program, and as she progressed she became even more of a minority as others switched majors. Of course there were hardly any women professors or role models as well.
Engineering is a field that selects for a certain personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class, and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men, especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic, maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for cheap laughs among their male friends.
In majors with more representation among women, you are less likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as you, and are more likely to see through the major without switching to another one.
I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem like the first reasonable target: all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.
I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed like the expected amount.
Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how you are going to persuade a huge number of women who wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men to do the reverse. That is what your target requires (across many occupations). It will never happen.
I'm not trying to push people into roles they don't want (I think I've made clear that the approach I described is a simple one to start at, not a good policy). My model in this case (which doesn't really map to reality) is "gender preference for roles is unbiased uniform random".
I don't really think job preferences are that strongly encoded in gender, I think far more men could be kindergarten teachers and more women carpenters, although men who try to become teachers face a huge amount of extra work because people don't trust men with kids as much.
Funnily proponent of the theory 'make everything 50%'
tendd to think of an individuals free will as the most feeble thing that can be broken oh so easily by almost anything.
I don't know if they actually perceive this, but, the fact that some people can automatically assume bias without deeper investigation when their whole fight is, trying to fight preconceived notions, its sort of ironic.
Sure, study WHY certain fields are underrepresented and try to fix systematic problems. But if your blind go to answer is, 'certain group of people are to blame' - just maybe you're exibiting behaviors that you are try to reduce in others and it may not lead to real solutions..
that is one of the reasons I said my approach was a good start.
It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".
I agree! I think trying to apply a high level value will result in more discrimination, however. i.e, if we see X group of society under/overrepresented by Y%, we do not have enough understanding to draw any meaningful conclusions from this. Large enough discrepancies should be investigated as possibly a canary for discrimination, but in some cases there may not be any (NFL lineman will likely always be men).
I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.
> A simple first order approximation is "no preference".
That's a reasonable first-order approximation, but it seems not to be reflected in the data, which show that as societies become more equal, gender disparities in field choice increase.
> all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society.
> It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination
Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".
About 20% of people in CS are women. Ordinary male variability, difference in median aptitude, and employer selectivity could explain some of the disparity. But 20% is extraordinary. And people rationalized the disparity in biology the same ways people rationalize the disparity in CS.
Maybe linguistics vs. philosophy is a good example. They are not too different from each other and I've studied both of them. My impression has always been that male vs. female linguistics professors were roughly 50:50, whereas at least in the past there were way more male than female philosophy professors. It seems to be getting better now in philosophy, though.
However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never bothered to check the figures.
I don’t know how true this is, but one thing I’ve seen referenced a few times is that students perform better under teachers of their gender, especially at younger ages. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the same applies for employee performance in the workplace.
If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, then you would expect females to do better in school. Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces.
Again I don’t have a study handy so I’m not sure how empirical that is, it may just be conjecture.
There's also the major factor of children. Women get a lot of scolding from society if they prioritize their career over children. Men generally aren't shamed to such a degree, and workaholic dads are even lauded as being "diligent bread winners."
Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an option. They have to leave the office before day care closes. Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically more likely to impact moms.)
Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high paying, high power careers.
Another reason people don't often take into account is that men have an extra incentive for earning more money as their worth as a person is judged more upon what they make than it is for a woman (women have other things they are judged more upon). So each dollar, beyond the utility of having an extra dollar, also makes them 'more of a man' to use a phrase that tries to condense all of complexities of society's judgements down into 10 letters. Many of the explanations commonly given, like men being willing to take on more dangerous jobs, can be partly explained by their judgment as a person (and as a parent) being derived from what they make to a stronger extent than for a woman.
>women have no interest in money
Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and less interest, and also a difference between interest in money and interest in the status associated with a certain level of salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.
My graduating class was remarked on through multiple schools as an exceptionally smart class. We had lots of very bright boys and girls. Maybe our class was unusual in other ways so this isn't part of a broader trend or tendency, but practically all the smart girls did all their homework and maintained a 3.5GPA or higher (most more like 3.8+), while probably half or more of the smart boys skipped lots of it and pulled Cs and Bs (with the occasional A in classes that had little homework). Meanwhile, those same boys who skipped much of their homework scored in the top percentile or two when it came time for ACTs and SATs and achieved excellent marks on annual state testing (not that the latter matters whatsoever for students), were often in gifted programs or active on "smart kid" extracurriculars, et c.
So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.
I would agree with this. However Ive seen very assertive women take advantage of that as much as men or even more, and where I work its probably <10% of my co workers of either sex take active roles in “managing” their career as opposed to just showing up and hoping their work gets noticed, or just coasting and enjoying the paycheck they have (while still grumbling about fading benefits, of course)
Now consider the fact that there is a limit on the top grade and much more more at the bottom of the grading scale. If you assume the variability hypothesis is true, it seems inevitable that the average for girls would be higher.
Many of the above are true. Especially, academic skill is one of the most overrated abilities out there. You're better off with zero skill or being actively harmful, if you know how to play the game and have the right face (I don't mean literally, though sometimes that too. Do you say the right things and have the correct manners?)
I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay" for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to do is be devastating for my social status.
It's actually interesting to talk about because technically these things are true for women too, but we have a whole industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say in anything.
We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood) that are harmful to their career, because their career is all they have.
I'd like to see data on academic performance in specialties. Most well-paying first world countries employ specialists (eg, doctors, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc). Recall Simpson's paradox in statistics, where a general distribution doesn't have to apply to the individual sub-sets.
FTA:
> 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.
This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing.
> academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
I highly doubt that there is no correlation, but I doubt that education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the other direction.
No interest in money is an extreme position to take. Small differences in interest can lead to big differences in outcome. There is also some time lag with this data, studies have shown boys doing worse academically over time (relative to girls) so the age group in 2015 is largely in school, university, or just entering the workforce. Women in their 20's already outperform men in their 20's in earnings and we don't yet know if that trend is going to carry on into later years given new ability gaps. It hasn't carried on historically due to a wide variety of reasons including the adverse affects of maternity leave on careers but we haven't seen an academic gap of this magnitude between the genders either before so that may be changing. It's also worth noting that a lot of top earning careers are looking at a slice of top performers academically, and the distribution of academic performance for males tends to be higher variance so even with a lower average we may see similar numbers of top performers in both genders.
I guess it also has to do with the fact that this is a relatively recent change. Probably we'll see the effects of this in future generations of industry demographics, for now though the research and statistics are pretty clear in that women are underrepresented in STEM across the board; but this is something changing rapidly, especially in tech.
Top tier jobs need to use top tier statistics. The top 10% of male test-takers and top 6% of female test-takers score at least 700 on the math SAT. Over twice as many boys as girls get 800 on the math SAT. The ratio gets even higher beyond that. This is despite the systemic bias in the school system against boys.
Isn't this the standard bimodal distribution we expect? Boys make up the majority of CEOs but they also make up the vast majority of criminals. Median girls are smarter than median boys, but the distribution is less wide on a population level.
The first is from a table of percentiles published by the College Board, I remembered that statistic off-hand, I think you find it by googling, or on their website. The second is something you can find somewhere, I know I've seen the raw data at some point. Some googling will at least find articles referring to that ratio, like this one: https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598
Interestingly enough, that has a graph of the AMC math contest breakdown by sex. Check out page 7 (page number 115). When you start getting in the upper percentiles there I think that culture might magnify the male/female ratio a bit (this is based on personal experience), but at least in my high school the center mass of the scores up to 100+ or so was filled out by teachers just signing up a bunch of good students with no particular involvement in mathematical extracurriculars.
Tournament theory - top tier jobs (particularly executive ones) are a competition where rank-ordering contestants is relatively easy, but quantifying performance is hard. So one solution is to give the winner a big prize, the losers a smaller consolation prize, and if you ignore risk-aversion this is as economically efficient in terms of incentives as paying for piece-work.
The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.
Women have different incentives. Having a career is not really necessary and the reasons to have one are different.
Us men need to compete with each other to be the best providers. Women just need to pick one of us, and then their goal is to retain that man in their lives. Having a career does not factor much into that. Especially having a high stress career would maybe even hurt such goals.
Some men and some women get so caught up spinning the hamster wheel, that they loose track of why they are spinning the wheel in the first place. But most of us in general are aware of the reasons.
Lags in real time systems. To get into high paying jobs in most fields requires a 20-30 year apprenticeship.
So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so. Just as with universal education, it starts to be available from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start making it into the skilled workforce.
Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on eternity.
>academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs
This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills" means specifically in the US:
- you perform well on standardized tests
- you perform well on rubric-graded essays
- you do all of your homework, and you get As on every assignment
this leads to:
- you get into a good university
- you (presumably) perform adequately or well at said university
Every student who performs well academically has a similar path to this point, but then there's divergency.
Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career. It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and medicine.
Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not see a link between academic performance and engineering competency.
I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo) for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation between academic performance and representation in the top tier of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the other big industries.
Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction association) it was asked for the people in the room to send proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a few things we could do but we have a problem because there is not a single lady in the list'.
We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic, no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining). My only idea so far is that women and men have different instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.
Academic grades measure skills that are only applicable at entry level jobs that are about following simple known rules. I knew many female students in school and college that got top marks on every subject, and yet they were mediocre in real life and never achieved much 10 years after graduation. I think that's precisely because their patience to follow silly rules didn't help them to compete in the world where there are no rules. On the other hand, I also knew many guys from the same classes who absolutely sucked at every subject except one or two where they shined and they have made impressive careers.
I decided to underrepresent myself in the top tier of jobs because I do not want to live a life of a workaholic. You won't get into the top tier by doing 40 hours of work weekly.
Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.
Or, people pursue their passions as young people without much regard for what a professional career would look like.
I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy stories all the time, because that was her interest.
20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.
I think Jordan Peterson is correct on that one: the real question isn't why women don't go after those kinds of jobs, but why anybody is willing to work so hard and to give up so much for incomes that allow a marginally better life (e.g going from 40k a year to 100k a year is a huge improvement, going from 200k to 300k?).
Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.
A lot of literature seems to focus around the gap being mostly that girls
- Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in school)
- Are better at following instructions
These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no instructions to follow when you are building the next Google: nobody did it before you.
There are other familial factors that are often at play. For example, many choose to delay their careers in lieu of raising children. Not all women make this decision, but a sizable number do.
That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity, there are likely many factors at play at the same time.
This shouldn't be a controversial take. It is Occam's razor
after all.
We know that before the tech industry became popular and a way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better academically outside of the US.
> women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds
When did this change? I either missed it or this was always an exaggeration in media.
I think attitudes changed a lot in the late 90s/early 00s.
The Internet suddenly became a big thing, PCs massively growing in popularity, and the image of gaming was changing, becoming a less nerdy pastime with the arrival of the Playstation.
Not really sure if it encouraged a more diverse set of youngsters to develop a serious interest in computing though, as by then we'd already got to the point where 'learning to use a computer' now meant Word+Excel rather than BASIC or LOGO
I'm not denying it's true, but I have little patience for this argument because we can't actually do anything about it. Injustice today? Yes, we should absolutely stop that where ever we find it, but what am I supposed to do today about the fact that women could not vote in 1920? Words are cheap, actions matter. I'd much rather focus on current discrimination than dig up injustices from the past.
This is the right answer, certainly a larger factor than anything else being discussed here. In the US, women were only granted the right to vote a century ago, and a time when it was considered improper for well-to-do women to work is within the memory of many living Americans.
I doubt it's "expectations of being a good mother". Countries with the most liberal attitudes toward gender have some of the most extreme occupational gender disparities and vice versa.
I don't think those are what the parent was referring to as 'top tier'. Those pay well, but in both cases they are highly paid because of risk and life disruption (having to spend extended time away from home on rigs). It's my understanding that men are naturally less risk-averse, so the gender differences there seem natural to me.
I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and high ranking corporate officers.
Meaning on average, most women list towards them. There are large differences between genders in terms of career motivations, interests etc. Proven in many studies repeatedly.
> There are large differences between genders in terms of career motivations, interests etc.
I think this would be the case for the hypothetical “party if you're a man, standing outside in the rain if you're a woman” job, too. How do you know you're describing something about the people you're measuring, as opposed to the people around them?
>Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less,
Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women gravitate towards are paid less.
The fact that daycare workers (a job dominated 97% by females) earn $35k a year while carpenters, welders, and electricians (jobs dominated 98% by males) earn $80k is not a fact that I think is attributable to bigoted sexism.
I don't know if this is a good faith question, but the big obvious reason you've omitted is that women frequently drop out of the work force (or shift to part-time work) because they want to be directly involved in raising their children.
In part, because salary has to do with agreeableness and many cultures have stupid expectations for women such as them expected to be more agreeable.
Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.
Imagine reading that men perform better in their careers, and saying to women:
"The amount of insecurity in the thread is a little embarrassing ladies. Let's be open minded and entertain the possibility that men are indeed more capable and that societal constructs drag down their educational opportunities."
To do so, you would first have to imagine a world where women were not an oppressed and disadvantaged group throughout all of history. Congrats to anyone who has such a vivid imagination.
This is not the smart comment you thought it was? Men do perform better, you don't have to imagine it. And it's clearly not because men are any more capable.
Indeed, the logical conclusion for a man who has the misfortune to end up on the complaining side of one of these conversations is simply: just shut up! Thankfully you had the courage and security to remind us of this, before we further breach the code of conduct and embarrass the male gender! /s
Yet, being a minority male in tech industry, I am regarded as more privileged than white women just because people of my skin color are more successful in tech industry. It reminds me of the quote from The Office "Andy Bernard does not lose contests. He wins them. Or he quits them because they are unfair." If there's evidence that supports my ideology then it's fair, otherwise, there's oppression.
I dislike this line of reasoning. Gender equality is important because equality is important in and of it self.
When people point to studies that show "teams with women perform better" as the reason to push for diverse hiring, I think it subtly implies that if this were not true then we would not need to worry about it, and creates an opening for people to quibble over research methodology.
I tend to agree that females can be better. But in different ways and there's a caveat. Here goes my n=1.
I have the privilege to work with a female developer and she's amazing. By far the most productive among our team of devs in terms of feature output.
Her concentration is unmatched as if she was on adderall all day but she doesn't take any drug.
However her peak in terms of technical excellence is not as high as some of the male developers. Her code is good but not the best. And that's fine.
Once during lunch I asked if she knew any other female dev so we could bring to the team. She smiled and promptly replied: "No way I'm working with other girls. They are too chatty, dishonest and tend to pull the carpet from under you. I say that because I'm a girl and I would rather work with guys."
Needless to say I was not expecting that response.
One thing I noticed is she can multitask much better than us male developers on the team. My context switching cost is quite high to the point I get annoyed when I have too much on my plate while her limit for juggling simultaneous tasks seems to be much higher.
I guess what I wanted to say is that, from my experience, both females and males often excel in different things. And I'd wager that's related to hormones like my parent wrote.
The point is that status is low and working conditions poor and you're not respected - see the lack of American STEM grad students who realize they are basically pawns of the profs and administration who just listen to the lawyers and undergrads who pay the bills (outside of top research institutions)
All my groupmates were and most of my doctoral committee are from Russia/Ukraine (the remaining member will be from China) but only one has non-North American (USSR) PhD
Stop being so pedantic about this and take it from an American perspective. The amount of grad students in my school's department from Europe is very low, and the amount of American grad students is also very low. That's what he's trying to get at here.
> “IT’S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York.
Which is it? Their brains/bodies/chemicals? Or the social pressure?
Testosterone doesn't really kick in until high school, and the article (at least the part outside of the paywall) seems to suggest the problem exists in adolescents, not young children, so that would suggest that it's the former not the latter.
The next question is... what has changed in the last 30 years? The answer to that is most likely going to be social, and not chemical, unless you mean less lead in the air. Maybe the answer is more complicated.
Finally, what has changed in the last 30 years that might be linked to both? Well, easier access to pornography could be a factor. It's a social change that lines up with male adolescence that could be related.
In any case, the 'answer' is to try to combat the change, and wait for statisticians and scientists to study the problem to understand the root causes.
Male and female brains while similar have some significant differences that goes beyond the androgen proportion differences.
This has nothing to do with the gender identity as someone else pointed out.
I wonder if a reason behind it is the fact that girls become hormonally mature earlier than boys. Hormone supplementation on boys could be tested to assess the hypothesis.
Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.