[hashmymustache]

Not to mention boys have lower grade averages across the country and women make up almost 60% of college students. You don’t have to be a men’s activist to recognize that if those trends were reversed such a disparity would receive a lot of attention with social pressure to recalibrate the learning environment.

[uberman]

Yet somehow men make up the vast majority of senior positions in almost every field including college professors.

[smt88]

Again, I think you can separate these issues and care about both.

Men dominating leadership positions is a problem. Men getting degrees at a much lower rate than women is also a problem.

They have separate causes. It's not like every gendered trend is a tug-of-war with every other issue.

[uberman]

The article directly suggests altering teaching strategies to favor/accommodate boys that I believe will be at the expense of girls:

* Lessons that are structured as competitive games.

* Lessons requiring motor activity.

* Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.

So, I guess I don't really see these as separate issues.

I think it is also important to state that men don't just dominate leadership positions, we also typically dominate compensation as well and I'm not talking about equal pay in the context of women and men in different jobs. For example, men are the highest paid teachers and professors despite the reduced participation by men in higher ed.

So my opinion remains that men do perfectly well with traditional instruction and we don't need to make adjustments to it to favor them, particularly not the types of adjustments that would disadvantage women.

[jfengel]

Unfortunately, we need to fix both problems -- many boys don't do great with traditional instruction, and the problem of the many kinds of job and pay disparity. It's not really great to disadvantage them in school and then flip the disadvantage after graduation.

I agree that it's worse to fix the one disadvantage without the other, which is tempting because it seems like the less-intractable one. Wage and job disparity is deeply ingrained; "women's work" has long been poorly compensated because women are seen as wanting to do that work. We lump a huge amount of effort under "homemaker" and don't pay for it at all. We then heap even more effort on women working outside the home, for which we don't even have a single name -- cleaning, note-taking, emotional labor, etc. -- unpaid and often marking one as less valuable.

I don't have a good answer to this, and resist fixing the "easier" problem that puts girls at a disadvantage.

[LocalH]

It’s as if we made a mistake when we gave government control over education. It devolves into a lowest common denominator “one size fits all” approach that disadvantages heaps of people and prevents them from reaching their full potential