[mycologos]

"Sports" may be hours per day for boys --- and even this is probably but organized sports definitely aren't, and that's where the coaches are. Unless he's playing AAU basketball or club soccer or something, I really don't think a boy is spending even a few hours per week under an "absolute authority figure" coach.

On reflection, the parent comment jibes with my experience growing up in the suburbs in the early 2000s. Literally all of my elementary school teachers were women. The only man I remember was a PE teacher, and I don't remember ascribing any authority to him at all.

[AussieWog93]

Same era, same experience here. I don't think it's fair to ascribe too much blame on women teachers, though.

The overwhelming majority of them genuinely care about their male students, acknowledge their different learning styles professionally and give them as good an opportunity as any competent male teacher would.

If you wanted to make a big difference, you wouldn't need to change gender ratios through social engineering. The small minority of female teachers that undermine boys' education are all known by the student body and other teachers.

[wearywanderer]

Competitive highschool sports often practice for several hours a day. It's not really a serious sport if you're only going to practice a few hours a week, is it? Maybe badminton club practices an hour on thursdays, but the swim team is going to be swimming for at least two hours every weekday for much of the year. Sometimes we had practice in the morning before school as well, two practice sessions in a day. There were days I spent almost as much time in the water as I did in a classroom.

But to the point raised in comments above, most boys were not participating in sports. Maybe 1 in 4 were at my school.

[mycologos]

I think we agree? I was responding to a comment claiming, I think, that the serious sport participation you describe is the norm among boys, and as you observe, it definitely isn't.