[techblueberry]

The problem is that we treat men and women differently because we don't respect that there's a difference between men and women?

I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think within group differences are much greater than between group differences, and "We need to respect the difference between the genders" is culture war nonsense that gets the prescription wrong.

In fact, couldn't you argue that the problem is too much of a focus on the difference between men and women leading us to help women get to college and not men? Shouldn't we treat them more the same?

[cultofmetatron]

> "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects.

describing my points as "word salad" seems a bit dismissive and unnecessarily pejorative - but I digress. I'll ignore your obvious ideological axe to grind and see if we can at least reach common ground.

Watch any group of boys and girls at play. sure you have outliers but by and large they do tend to conform to one of two specific behavioral groups that historically we associated as ways boys and girls act. And I say this as someone who is fairy noncompetitive which itself made me somewhat of an outlier among boys when I was a kid. it doesn't change that the vast majority of boys found motivation in being competitive and historically pedagogy used that fact in order to motivate boys in their matriculation.

In my own experience, I tried to get my nieces more into tech and programming. trying to motivate them from a "hey isn't systems based thinking about how these things interact is cool" did absolutely nothing. Showing them how they can make a cool website design to show their friends (with a bit of vibe coding) absolutely got them more motivated.

But if you want to go further, lets start with the entire generation of boys who were told to sit still and listen and got medicated when they couldn't. We expected them to behave like girls and because we changed pedagogy to favor girls, we didn't notice when boys fell behind.

consider the two statements

- boys and girls exhibit dimorphism in behavior, motivations and interests.

- two boys can be more different from each other than between a boy and a girl.

These are only contradictory on a 2 dimensional graph. at 3 or higher, you can definitely have groupings of traits heavily skewed towards one group or another while having a different distribution on other traits.

I don't think the issue is us focusing on getting women into higher education. We changed the way we pick our educators and tuned our methodology primarily to benefit women. Its only a problem because we expect boys to excel in that system. its no more fair than what we had before when women were excluded at every level. treating them the same means shifting our methodology will inevitably benefit one at the expense of the other.

[techblueberry]

I don’t necessarily have a problem with talking about gender differences but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the focus of your argument.

Historically teaching has always been “women’s work”. It’s skewed a bit more female in recent years, but that’s because it skewed male temp rotation before then. it’s always seemed like an odd retcon to say that we turned education female, combining that with the low pay of education which will turn away more men.

I also feel like school has only gotten more flexible over time, my parents generation talked about how easy we have it and school was more about sitting still for them, as it was for me twenty years ago.

I’m not saying the education system is great, or that there aren’t ways to improve it, or that we couldn’t improve it based on gender differences, or that there aren’t more “college prep for girls” programs than “college prep for boys programs” just that your specific description of concerns I don’t think is quite historically accurate. I think it’s weird to complain that we need to treat men and women differently when most people’s problem seems to be that we treat women differently; we’ve had 60 or so years of women’s studies and feminist theories playing out. Should we start caning boys? Is that the solution to all our problems?

As with most things, it’s probably just the end of postwar American Economic domination. Go before World War 2 and the high school graduation rates aren’t high enough to describe anything about the way things “used to be”.