I just got done watching [this ‘sunday morning segment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1GxuNceLj4) and I thought it was an interesting highlight into how society has shifted since I grew up.
TLDW: Men are doing worse in school and going to college at 15% lower rates than women. Given education is directly tied to earnings, women are increasingly [out earning men](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-women-are-out-earning-young-men-in-several-u-s-cities/)
Most of us were also raised with the message that our main value to society is as a provider. I don’t think it’s fair to raise boys with that expectation, and I think both men and women have a part to play in changing our gender roles.
What do y’all think of this? What was your experience in school like? Personally, I was a problem student simply because I had difficulties sitting through lectures for 8 hours a day. When my math classes were after P.E. my grades markedly improved simply because I could focus better. What do you guys think the end result of this will be? Do you think increased focus on this will improve things or will it continue to get worse before it gets better? Do you think the disparity will change the relationship between men and women?
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I think that stats are crystal clear: women have become the dominant gender and will stay so for the foreseeable future. We now need positive discrimination programs for men.
I think there are many contributing factors to young men not going to college, one primary reason being I think young men fall trap to “hustle culture” far more than women, also I think a generational shift is happening where the younger generation is going for non traditional jobs which don’t require a college degree so many don’t pursue a degree in the belief it won’t benefit them later in life. Also, I think many are starting to realize the need for the trades which also don’t have a traditional degree.
The link between education and income is also being irrelevant with the introduction of so many wide variations of studies, many that don’t offer or lead to fruitful employment options. There are many with Master’s or Doctoral degrees making subpar to average income because the field of study is over saturated or not practical.
It’s pretty obvious that many of the advantages women believe men have are just not true. Men face discrimination from their teachers largely since birth, just go on r/teachers and see for yourself how differently they talk about their girl students vs their boy students.
These educational disparities are a reflection on the fact that both grading and the actual logistics and method of education favor girls over boys. It isn’t just the fact that teachers are overwhelmingly women, it is also the fact that boys learn quicker through practical demonstration than rehearsed descriptions and explanations.
Boys also have more severe and longer lasting problems with inattention and hyperactivity. Expecting them to sit still at a desk for 8 hours a day is setting them up for failure at the physiological level, their bodies and metabolisms are not suited for that treatment.
What’s the solution to all this? Idk, but certainly far more flexibility in teaching methodology and far more diversity in teachers are both glaringly obvious first steps to any real progress on this.
Secondarily, it needs to be admitted that women in general and feminism specifically are *fully incapable of advocating for the needs of men and boys* and cannot be relied on to do so for us. Men and boys need their own movement composed of our own selves where we can learn to self actualize and form healthy relationships with our masculinity without defining ourselves based on the attention or relationships we get from women. Hopefully that will create the foundations required for an educational institution which defines its success on the success of its students and not on how many progressive checklist lines it can cross off.
It’s a major problem, and it should be noted that it’s not just that boys do worse in school, [they get lower](https://mitili.mit.edu/research/boys-lag-behind-how-teachers-gender-biases-affect-student-achievement) grades for the [same work](https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672.)
It’s good that we’re finally seeing some media attention on it, but what’s the solution? In all honesty, I’m not sure.
Just because more women are attending college doesn’t mean they’re becoming high income breadwinners. The professional fields — medicine, law, business, engineering, etc —are still overwhelingly dominated by men, and I don’t see that changing so long as heterosexual instincts exist.
In regards to your question, I think it’s a serious issue with multiple causes and multiple solutions.
I think part of the problem is that too many young men believe being smart isn’t “cool”, and there’s a lot of cultural pressure causing that. Being successful at studies is largely a function of personal motivation and discipline, and I think many men are deficient in these qualities.
There needs to be much more societal normalization of men being both warriors *and* scholars.
This comes up frequently on this sub. The general reason is that women are more college going in large part bc they don’t have other good options. Men have many many options in the trades that pay well that don’t require a college education. Similarly waged jobs that are dominated by women, such as nursing and elementary teaching, all require a college degree. At universities, women generally enroll in majors with more grade inflation, psych, education, etc.
Secretarial jobs mostly require a bachelors. Basically it’s waitress and sex work. Other jobs that women can typically do well in, such as bartending or flight attendants, you have to be 21.
So the differences aren’t really a problem and ever escalating tuition and debt make going to college even more precarious.
It might be true that *on average* someone with a degree earns more but there are plenty of people with useless degrees basically entering the work force qualified for things nobody really needs. Those people probably don’t earn too kuch then.
Additionally, last I ready of the 1,6 ***trillion dollars in student loan debt*** 1 trillion is held by the women. I’m no financial expert but something tells me that it is unlikely that incomes grew at the same pace as the costs (and debt) for those degrees, not to mention that with yields rising the yield payment alone on a 100-200k loan is nothing to scoff at either.
Lastly, because everyone seems to overly obessed with degrees instead of seriously looking at the labor force, I think there is a case to be made that learning certain trades these days can earn you a salary just as high as someone with a degree, offer you more stability in regards to employment without the mountain of debt – been there myself.
Suffice to say: I think it is nothing to be concerned about on a broad level because the current development is not sustainable and will soon change drastically again – in which direction remains to be seen.
The article you linked about woman out earning men is such a clickbait, the first sentence of the article literally starts by saying that woman earns significantly Less on average, and the remainder of the article shows that only in rare circumstances are women barely out earning men by a few percentage points.
Is it a problem that women are attending college more? I’m not really sure it is. Woman are much more likely to enroll in humanities/social sciences, which men don’t really enroll in anyway, so they’re not really displacing men.
I don’t think anything will happen or change.
There are many things in life where women have passed men and nobody cares.
In my personal experiences, university campuses are often hostile to men. I was a male student in a field largely dominated by women. I found myself in huge conflicts with both classmates and professors as I felt that I was being deliberately held back. Much to their chagrin, by the time I graduated I finished with the highest average by a significant margin in the department and won major awards and scholarships. The department apologized to me but I accused them of trying to prop up white female students they liked personally even though they were weak academically. They were not able to deny that.
Boys need more physical activity and are not getting it.
You can make the kids failing the 40 minute math class sit through 4 hours of math, but if they’re only paying attention to 5 minutes of the class anyway, it doesn’t do anything.
More PE, more recess, more walkability during the day…
All of that is extremely important.
Sitting still is the problem.
I don’t think about all that nonsense because i got my own life and problems to deal with..ain’t nobody got time for that
I know a lot of women with a lot of education but low earning history. Women with graduate or professional degrees working in retail jobs at minimum wage. I also know a lot of men with not a lot of education and substantial earning history. Once you get your foot in the door in many professions, you can get jobs that typically pay a good living even without education. Sales, technology, management, etc all care more about experience than education.
I think it’s amazing that a lot of men get how this is a result of a systemic disadvantage that is the result of a bunch of indicidual expectations and attitudes.
But then at the same time manage to completely switch that understanding off when it comes to racism, women in tech and other forms of the exact same type of systemic discrimination.
My employer is trying to push an idiotic 40% gender balance in hiring, in tech, an area where theres between 4 and 12% university intake of female candidates. Unless they plan on stacking areas like accounting, HR and marketing with women, which then makes those areas oddly unbalanced, I don’t know how they think this will improve culture.
Listen if this were happening to any other group, the first answer everyone would be looking into is systemic discrimination. Why is that not been studied here?
Primary school education especially which makes up the majority of our formative years is dominated by women. I dunno if that’s the cause of it but it certainly can’t be irrelevant either.
In reviewing these stats and others think of Black men compared to other racial groups and genders. Black women are even more educated than Black men and there are fewer available ones, i.e. those who are heterosexual, not in prison or those without a prison record.
I think the worse performance of male students has nothing to do with cognitive ability, or memory encoding and retrieval, but with grading standards that are biased against things boys have a tendency to be bad at, which is to sit down on their ass and do diligent work.
I personally think there are other things more valuable than sitting down on your ass and doing diligent work.
But I also don’t really care. For the longest time, girls were also subject to biased grading. While I don’t think current boys should suffer for past injustices that happened to favor people that had the same style of genitals as they do, I also think everyone is, to a large degree, victim of their own particular biological and biographical makeup, and we do not think that everyone deserves a personalized grading system to compensate for that. Just because certain insufficiencies appear a lot, statistically, and correlate, statistically, with having a penis, I still don’t see why the grading system would have to be tailored to accomodate them. In other words, boys as much need to stop being boys, as stupid students need to stop being stupid students. If they don’t, well, tough luck. We can’t give some nitwits a free pass just because being a nitwit is a statistically significant phenomenon. What’s next? Stupid people are a statistical phenomenon also, should they all also get free college degrees to compensate?
And the same for this provider crap, and for women pulling their hair out and going in sackcloth and ashes because they are running out of people to hypergamize – well, either overcome your need to hypergamize, or be single and childless. Even though your need to hypergamize is a statistical phenomenon, and therefore appears as a spookily deterministic power that we think you need “saving” from, rather than free choice, that’s an illusion: a mass phenomenon is no more biologically and biographically determined than an individual one, but just by more widespread/common factors. We don’t think people need tailored rules for “saving them” from individual problematic choices, so they shouldn’t have them for statically significant/common ones either. It’s your choice. Just because 50 million other women make the same one, it’s still your choice. Deal with it yourself. Tough. Luck.
To a degree, I’m just sitting at the sidelines of this growing trainwreck, laughing. Because – except for one key point – it arises out of behaviors we have always thought of as self-determined, and as valid criteria for evaluation.
That one key point, to me, is that, like I said, what boys get negatively evaluated for doesn’t, afaik. actually have a lot to do with cognitive ability, or performance at what education is supposed to prepare for. That’s the only debatable point for me. But this goes into the question of what scores (should) represent (absolute attainment vs. relative grading), and what the purpose of education is (“classic humanistic” vs just preparing you for a job), and what part education, in an age where expanded technological possibilities of intervention in development, make it seem increasingly as a primitive, and the insistence to limiting yourself to it an outdated, toolkit.
edit: I have ADHD. I’m in my mid 30s now, it’s not as relevant anymore, but school was extremely difficult for me. Not once did I feel that applying rules that disadvantaged me as an ADHD person was any more unfair than school itself disadvantaging stupid students. It’s what school *does*. Why would it only bias against (biologically or biographically induced) stupidity? If you can’t sit on your ass, you get bad grades, just like someone who can’t learn.
Women are outperforming men at every level in education, yet get special incentives and privileges that no man ever gets. Girls in STEM activities, special girls only coding sessions. It’s crazy. There are less men in college as a percentage now than there were women back in the 60’s when all of the title IX laws were put in place. If we changed laws to favor women back then why are we not changing laws to favor men now.
At the end of the day society as a whole loses when the achievement of higher ED is so lopsided. Woman hate it because they can’t find a suitable mate. And it certainly isn’t doing any favors for men
https://youtu.be/fXsOlAYvgh0?si=8bQUbh5dVj_XXR2z
Richard Reeves wrote a book on this. I’m definitely thinking about this as I look for schools for my toodler son, trying to avoid a traditional school.
Girls and boys learn [differently](https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/how-boys-and-girls-learn-differently). In an effort to catch girls up to boys in education, we’ve catered our approaches to teaching in favor of the girls. This has been a tremendous advantage for our young women. The results are obvious. Unfortunately, our boys have suffered. The only way forward is to separate the genders and teach them in same-gender environments. This would allow the girls to maintain their high level of achievement while we customize a learning environment that benefits our boys. For social reasons, I don’t necessarily mean that boys and girls should go to different schools, but the programs they matriculate through should be one gendered.
Experience in school as a student, pupil and now >4 years of working at schools ?
Blatant favoritism for women by how the school system is set up.
Blatant favoritism from a few teachers for women individually too.
Men have it worse by so many metrics in so many different parts of life. (Suicide, drugs, violence, dating, homelessness, support places, family law, amount of friends ….. )
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One of the problems is… Social Work is totally dominated by women. Women that are not evil but they simply can not relate to the hardships of being a guy. Their focus is different.
As a social work student… we will talk 15 min in our class about how utterly horrific and horrible the pay gap (cleaned up – 6% in Western Germany) is and how we must do everything to change that and support women.
Then in the same lecture we spent … 10 seconds on a power point slide that shows that men kill themselves at +300% the rate of women in our society. Nobody says a word. Skip to the next slide.
In my experience, and I started attending primary school in 2001, girls have always been treated better in schools. This is not a new problem.
More lenient approach altogether thanks to women being the vast majority of teachers.
I think it’s probably a lot of things, like the way we structure lessons and assignments but I’m not a teacher and I don’t really know that for sure.
What I do know, is that I absolutely saw discrimination by teachers when educating and grading boys when compared to girls. Hell, even just the treatment of boys was worse. In high school, most of us boys would regularly have to contest marks and would find a girl we were friends with to have there as a comparison. If a boy was disengaged in class, a teacher would usually ignore them or punish them but if it was a girl teachers would often go the extra mile and try to appeal to them directly.
One thing I do know is that it is not that boys aren’t learning or are just less intelligent; our big standardised tests that gave us our scores to get into university were an absolute eye opener:
In our grade of about 80, there were about 15ish girls who you’d consider to be storage A students and of the boys there were 2. When we got our scores, we found out (partly through managing a teacher who liked us to tell us something they probably shouldn’t have) that of the 13 students who got an A on that standardised test, 10 of them were boys.
That’s just my anecdotal experience but I’m not alone in that, and I’m certainly not alone in feeling disadvantaged at school just because of my gender. It’s issues like this that progressives are failing men on; I understand men historically have had it better but we have to be able to see the problems for how severe they are and something is severely wrong with the way boys are being educated.
In a less serious note but I think still interesting to talk about, even when women earn more and more they tend not to date down in income.
When you have men increasingly being failed by the education system this is going to lead to a drop in income; it’ll be interesting to see what effect this will have on people dating and whether we’ll end up with lonelier, single men and women.
We’ve had men adjust to having women move away, in some respects, from the traditional housewife role and into the career role but if women are beginning to adjust to a poorer class of men they’re broadly not showing a trend of it. Perhaps it’s because women tend to be happier single when compared to single men but it feels like something has to give, and by the looks of what issues are getting attention, the make education crisis is here to stay.
It’s a real problem. If we were discussing inequality in any other institution, say the gender wage gap, the immediate reaction is to look into why men and women are paid differently and to do everything we can to eliminate this bias. If it’s men dropping out or failing school, the same level of concern and addressing the systematic reasons behind this should be just as important. Anyone concerned with a social equality issue (like the gender pay gap) but not with the gender gap in education isn’t really trying to be egalitarian.
[Sydney University under fire for vet scholarship giving preference to males.](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/08/sydney-university-under-fire-for-vet-scholarship-giving-preference-to-males)
Gee I wonder why?
I don’t think it’s as bad for boys as you think. For one, trade schools tend to lead to well-paying jobs, things like electricians and plumbers. Along the same lines, most of the men going to college are going for STEM, whereas women are more likely to go for a humanities degree that doesn’t offer nearly as much money.
Honestly when you factor in the debt that these women are running up, who cares who earns more? We’re stuck on the debt treadmill.
We’ll see the gender pay gap swing to the other side.
I’m just wondering what we are going to do about this then. …if anything at all
The overwhelming majority of teachers are women so it’s not hard to see the correlation. Although the blame is usually shifted towards men for not doing enough rather than the system failing them.
Society has a hard time letting men be the victim because of a weird desire for cultural revenge.
Back when we noticed this for women, we introduced so many programs and help for women to get into college and be able to excel.
It is my understanding that the tables have turned, and the amount of men going to college and earning more has a gap bigger to women than it was when women were trailing men. We need to provide the same support and help to our young men we did with women. Full stop.
I have nothing to contribute other than,
wow, this is a really interesting and invigorating discussion about a topic previous unknown to me.
Thanks guys, keep it up.
Part of the education gap is men still dominate the trades. There’s plenty of chatter on Millennial subs that “I went 80k in debt and I make less than a construction worker”
The linked article actually was great news; in a lot of metros the wage gap between men and women has been eliminated for younger workers. The old “77 cents on the dollar” meme has been outdated for a while.
The performance of men in school is an issue. But not everyone should get a college degree and arguably women are spending a lot of money for degrees that may no longer be worth it.
Bigger problem is needing a 4 year degree for a job that really doesn’t require it. Many high schools are horrible. Any many non-college trade jobs pay better without the debt.
Were it girls falling behind, something would be done about it.
Huh, you tell men they’re dumber and less able in school than women and they suddenly stop going…..
Considering that even feminist women want men earning higher than them, this is going to be a problem.
I can’t imagine a world where people are treated equally, equitably, or fairly.
Tradies get the ladies. No value in being educated these days. Going to uni only gets you debt.
The educational system is a scam at all levels. Nothing short of going scorched earth will fix it. Women are only outperforming men because the system is now designed to punish males for being themselves. My experience in school was awful from 4th grade through university, so perhaps that colors my attitude. But I don’t see any way to improve the situation with incremental steps.
I generally don’t think about it, on a day to day basis, if I’m being totally honest. I suppose I should, but there’s not much to be done about it from where I am.
Aside from my usual “everyone should have a fair chance in life to express their talents” position, I have only a few comments:
-I will say that I’ve sometimes encountered programs to help some of my fellow students presumed they were counterbalancing things that weren’t really there any more. Like, self-defense/safety training that presumed that I (as a guy) had already been taught how to defend myself and so mainly was there to help out the women. (I *like* to help, but… I hadn’t. I’m larger, but my experience with violence tells me that “instinct” and “being big” don’t cut it in heavy traffic.)
Or “how to handle your finances and invest” seminars that assumed that my demographic all knew that already. (Presumably from tutoring from my rich uncle who doesn’t exist.)
Or developmental-leadership programs that presume the existence of an “old boys” network that, if it’s there, might as well be on the moon from where I am.
(So much so that a state employment counselor- one of the rare, actually truly helpful people I met working in that field- recommended a book on office politics written in the 70s *for women* in order to help me in a career upgrade/transfer. *Games Mother Never Taught You* by Betty Lehan Harragan ,if you want to know. Great book. *Everyone* not raised to do that kind of work, and heading into it, should check it out, imo.)
Anyway, this isn’t to suggest any sort of intentional bias or ‘conspiracy theorize’, but just that educational systems are (the way we run them) bureaucracies, and bureaucracies are slow to react to changes in situation by nature.
(Also, nobody wants to be the one to adjust “anti-sexist” policies that unintentionally achieved sex-based bias, any more than politicians want to be the one to legalize drugs during an ineffective “war on drugs” or modify sentencing guidelines during a harsher-than-results-demand “war on crime”.)
-I don’t see this as really a “feminism” issue, except that the correctives I described above would have been thumbs-upped at the time by most feminists (I presume).
Where I do get a bit irked is when women succeeding more than men in things like graduation rates and earning is pitched by some academic types, not as a victory or a “win” or even a milestone to be celebrated, but *still* as somehow the result of Patriarchal misogyny.
(For instance the idea that fewer boys leaving high school are going to college, is somehow the result of the idea that ‘college is for girls’, rather than a success for programs encouraging women. If your goal was advocating and promoting women, and women are pulling ahead, own it.)
Aside from that, if the playing field is even and people are given fair opportunities, I’m set. There might be unintended consequences later- all policies have those, nothing’s perfect. I don’t know enough to propose solutions to them besides “ask someone smarter”.
(Like, the traditional assumption that a prospective mate should be earning more than you could eventually hit a wall, if you outearn most of your dating pool. My answer to that would simply be to say “nobody promises you that”, and be done with it. I’m sure that’s not a satisfactory answer.)
PS: While I think there’s a lot of work to be done on the US educational system, I also think there’s a lot that’s improved a lot since I was in school, too.
(Like, anyone who was there when “ADD” was first ‘discovered’ knows how people actually reacted to it. Now, we’d more or less treat it like you found out your kid’s left leg was an inch shorter than their right leg- you can get prosthetics that correct for that, you’re good. Back then, it was mostly reacted to as something like mild mental insanity)
Along those lines, I think we’ve come a long way in figuring out ways to accommodate different learning styles and paces. I have hope that this process will continue.
Read The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers
“Despite popular belief, American boys tag behind girls in reading and writing ability, and they are less likely to go to college. Our young men are greatly at risk, yet the best-known studies and experts insist that it’s girls who are in need of our attention. The highly publicized “girl crisis” has led to many changes in American schools, politics, and parenting…but at what cost? In this provocative book, Christina Hoff Sommers argues that our society has continued to overemphasize the troubles of girls while our boys suffer from the same self-esteem and academic problems. Boys need help, but not the sort of help they’ve been getting.”
Women tend to study the easiest majors. When I was in college the hottest sororities had nearly all non stem majors whereas the frats were like 60 percent hard majors. It’s an illusion that women are better educated. Men basically have overrepresentation in high and low IQ subgroups. Motivated by two distinctly different reproductive psychologies.
I don’t give a fuck about education disparities between anybody. Schools have become shittier all over.
Ooof, I was there when the feminists and MRA were arguing about this. One argument I somewhat believe in is that school is much more centered towards how girls learn rather than how boys learn. Girls are more agreeable and are less likely to make a fuss during class because they aren’t as bored as the boys are.
But alas, such a view was considered sexist back in the days. I assume it stilk is.
I was really counting on endless iterations of “Men should just rise to the occasion and tough it out” but instead suddenly culture really can disadvantage an entire gender? I’m shook.