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.
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.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html