[majormajor]

> The education gap between men and women are growing. More women enroll and graduate from college then men. Many young men, mostly lower-middle class, (whether fairly or not) feel like the education system does not work for them.

So, like, isn't the question "why"?

Why do boys, particularly lower- or lower-middle class, not believe in the education system as much as their sisters?

School sucks, work sucks, then you die. But that's not new. And it's not stopping the girls/women. So why aren't the boys doing what previous generations did?

I don't know the answer, but just saying "they don't like it" is hard to action on. Are parents too indulgent with boys in a way they aren't with girls? Is boy-oriented media setting up more unrealistic expectations relative to girl-oriented stuff? Are there just that many boys who can't deal with a world where uncontrolled aggression is less tolerated? I haven't seen a really good thorough investigation of this. (I've seen lots of bad-faith "this is what happens when you leave the Bible behind and women don't have to serve their men" ones...)

I'm also not sure how much "we" as a society should care in the aggregate, vs having empathy for in the specific. Things never stay static, the system (institutions, culture, and individuals) will likely adjust. It's sad an overachieving woman reaches the top and can't find the ideal person she had built up in her head. It's sad a man doesn't apply himself in school or to building his social skills can't find dates. But it's also great that that woman was able to do all that. And there are still countless happy relationships and marriages happening - and many of them eventually separate, but overall, it seems like there is less violence and misery than in the past.

[blackbear_]

A possible explanation is that most teachers in primary school are female, which creates an environment and behavioral expectations that favor girls, e.g.:

- Teachers and the Gender Gaps in Student Achievement - https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XLII/3/528

- Gender differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ temperament, educational competence, and teachability - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.2010.02017.x

[majormajor]

That seems weird though, right? Cause in the US teachers, especially for early-childhood, have been predominantly female since before this gap.

[blackbear_]

The world is much larger than the US ;)

It could be that there were other external factors that used to counter-balance this effect, and are now being removed, such as, for example, the quest for increasing female participation in STEM no matter what, or general societal norms beyond school spurred by the rise of femminism.

In any case, the academinc literature on this topic is vast (and not so clear cut), so if you really have not seen thorough investigations on the topic beyond "boys don't like it" or something from the Bible you can start by reading papers citing those I mentioned above:

- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3048749496880924830...

- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8365905588440304050...

[majormajor]

Let me rephrase my complain about what I've seen. There is a lot of academic work on this stuff, but I'd characterize it as very "leaf node" oriented on certain aspects. E.g., grabbing a few at random:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652... - boys may not have or get given the right sort of motivations

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/016237371771405... - teacher demographic match affects student perceptions of abilities and confidence and such

https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12... - young kids tend to believe boys do worse at school

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/129/3/1409/181... - boys being more competitive pushes them towards more prestigious fields but the genders show overall similar levels of ability

That's just sort of how the modern academic system works. Specialization.

There's nothing wrong with that, but where I live it isn't turning into serious policy conversations that look at thing more broadly and with a longer view. It might in other places, but I can't speak to those.

I would love to see more of those serious conversations where I live. For instance, again specific to my experience in the US, it seems unlikely that "get more male teachers" would make a dent in a problem that started independently of primary teachers being overwhelmingly women.

[andromeduck]

I've read that even among female teachers theres a big difference in approach to misbehaving boys depending on if they had a male sibling or not. With declining fertility rates, you can imagine that being less and less common.

[alcover]

In France, the female teacher ratio is 80+% in primary school and ~60% in secondary.

[dahwolf]

"It's sad an overachieving woman reaches the top and can't find the ideal person she had built up in her head"

If you're at the top, and select for men higher than that top, that's not sad. It's delusional. A 1%-er selecting for a 0.1%-er is the least of society's problems.

[toomuchtodo]

Unhappiness is the natural conclusion of unrealistic expectations meeting realty.

[matrix_overload]

From what I can see, women are statistically more OK to accept and fit in. Men are more likely to become the challengers and want to have their share of the pie.

We didn't just create opportunities, we also stigmatized challenging the status quo and shifted the focus to complying and keeping the lights on. Many men would find this deal kinda empty, pointless and ultimately depressing.

[revelio]

It's because the education system is systematically biased against males and they pick up on this, correctly perceiving education as a system run by sexists that will penalize them for their gender and which doesn't really want them there.

Anti-male hiring bias in academia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762380

Grading biases in high school:

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school.

This is a problem with society but especially amongst liberals, who dominate the education system. Your own comments display very clear and strong anti-male bias, ascribing the issue to parents being indulgent (!), boys uncontrolled aggression being the problem, the media, that men don't apply themselves ... any explanation except the obvious one that teachers aren't treating people fairly.

[bsder]

> School sucks, work sucks, then you die. But that's not new. And it's not stopping the girls/women. So why aren't the boys doing what previous generations did?

Because schooling is now expensive and doesn't immediately translate to better economic outcomes nowadays for men. It generally does over time, but it takes a bit for the return, nowadays.

For women, as the article points out, school is also an economic investment for hunting for a partner. The fact that women won't "date down" like men will means that there is a difference in reciprocity in the investment.

[mensetmanusman]

Boys respond almost an order of magnitude worse to missing father figures than girls. This is understood to be one of the causes in aggregate. Fewer involved fathers these days.