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A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

nytimes.com

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#11
This article was pretty all over the place, and had too many speculative, opinion based quotes. Shouldn't this problem be handed over to the CDC? The writer briefly alludes to the fact that gender inequity may be related to gender roles, which are a construct. Yes, the CDC should study gender roles.

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#13
Where to even begin,

Part of this issue I feel is, as mentioned in the article, is that boys are taught from the young age to take care of their problems, which leads to more isolation. Another important reason I feel is the rising amount of "girls-only" opportunities that systematically make boys feel inadequate and since they are not able to participate for whatever reason (e.g. "its only for girls") they continue to lag behind. I even have a perfect example of this, my city has a "Girls Learning Code" meetup / lecture series that while advertises being gender neutral is clearly not so, the question is how many meetups are there that are for boys, e.g. "Boys Learning Code" (creating these would be classified under men 's rights activism and therefore dismissed). My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds. There has also been a decline in male bonding occurring at the young age, which I (and some academics) believe is very important to male development over all. This is caused by the fact that traditionally boys-only facilities (in this specific example Scouts Canada) have been pressured into accepting girls, which prohibits boys from...essentially being boys. Girl Guides of Canada received no such pressure. Coming back to the issue of masculinity, even though many young adults might have good enough grades to get into university they might not be high enough to go into fields that wouldn't cause strange questions and don't have stigma around them if you're male (I'm talking about fields such as Medicine, Law, Engineering, Computer Science), they might have the grades to get into Arts, specifically psychology, nursing and things such as women studies, all of which have a very high female to male ratio (and are generally considered a "girls" field) making boys pursue other interests (such as not going to university) instead for the fears of unsexing themselves.

(Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America? I've immigrated from an Eastern-Block country as a teenager to NA and I've never seen these problems because communism required that all members of the society do essentially the same jobs, that is why would you sacrifice half of the working populace, so you have women in high power positions, police, factories, the military, a lot of girls even take mathematics and computational sciences, sure there were problems but not at this scale (my grandmother was a Chemist and my mother was a corporal in the Defense Ministry and also studied thermal physics in University); I've never even imagined it was an issue elsewhere in the world until after I moved to Canada)

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#14
What I notice on boys vs girls is that girls are more likely to get/accept help from their families and people around them. Specially financially for like the purpose of education.

I was there, I just pretended like more education doesn't worth it that much (not on US btw).

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#15

My guess is that most things---good and bad---have a disproportionate effect on boys.

Makes sense. Consistent with a greater prevalence of men than women at both of society's extremes. Evolutionary strategy suggests taking higher-risk paths for male phenotypes than female phenotypes.

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#16

Glad that there's a discussion. It would help humanity to also give enough focus on boy child development so that we could save their future, avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails.

I've always wondered how much of the gap comes from a near total lack of male teachers in K-5.

Probably quite a lot. I'm reminded of a study I read a year or two ago which looked at academic performance in high school; girls received considerably higher class marks on average. However, this effect vanished when they took standardized tests ... and it also vanished when they had male teachers.

Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something else, I don't know; but gender definitely makes a difference in teaching.

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#17

Okay, waaaaay off topic (but still from the article!): > Low-income families are often led by single mothers, which has been found to affect boys differently than girls. "Differently than"? This is the New York Times . I expect better. (For those who don't get it, the snooty among us prefer "differently from".) A quick search shows any number of occurrences of this jarring bit of word choice in the NY Times of late:…

I think "from" vs "than" is a common difference between American and British English. I don't know about "different" vs "differently".

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered how much of the gap comes from a near total lack of male teachers in K-5.

Probably quite a lot. I'm reminded of a study I read a year or two ago which looked at academic performance in high school; girls received considerably higher class marks on average. However, this effect vanished when they took standardized tests ... and it also vanished when they had male teachers. Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something else, I don't know; but gender definitely…

Would there be a suspicion that this was because of sexism, if the genders were reversed?

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#19
Boys have trouble being ready for kindergarten and having self discipline. But those that do make it, even though they are fewer, tend to do better than their female counterparts in later life.

Kindergarten activities and society's ideas of self discipline aren't really the conditions human life evolved under. Maybe fighting and looking for action/excitement are the same qualities that make boys successful later (if it doesn't kill or otherwise ruin them first).

Here is my theory (after hours of watching the discovery channel). You don't need many males biologically speaking. So for males, it's do or die from day one. Mostly it's die, but there are a few winners that pass their genes on. Women, as long as they are fertile, don't necessarily enter the same competition... they are the prizes.

Of course civilization doesn't work very well with all the males running around trying to kill each other and breed all the women, so we have laws and religions and kindergartens and diversity training classes. Which kind of puts males (and females maybe to an extent) in a biologically uncomfortable position. Those that succeed in this unnatural environment are those that channel their natural impulses into the pathways society has set up. The poor disadvantaged souls that aren't ready for kindergarten and wind up in prison for violent crimes? Well... they might have been leading the pack 20,000 years ago.

Re: A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably quite a lot. I'm reminded of a study I read a year or two ago which looked at academic performance in high school; girls received considerably higher class marks on average. However, this effect vanished when they took standardized tests ... and it also vanished when they had male teachers. Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something else, I don't know; but gender definitely…

Would there be a suspicion that this was because of sexism, if the genders were reversed?

It still could be sexism, it's a gender neutral term even though it is mostly applicable to women.
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