I don't think this is something to be concerned about, at least not directly. Our educational system is strongly weighted towards promoting students that will sit still, shut up, and obey orders. Do that, and you're almost guaranteed to pass high school even if you're dumb as a brick. For various reasons (mostly societal) girls tend to be more quiet and obedient than boys, therefore they do better in our current school system.
Since men still get better jobs and make more on average, it's apparently not a major problem to do slightly worse in school.
I really really reject Zimbardo's thesis about arousal addiction being the cause of underperforming males.
It is an incredibly spurious claim that not only stigmatizes video games and sex, it is based on a false dichotomy between "man" and "child". (This is also claimed by Hymowitz, and the response was handled better by @RiemannLives ).
I don't think educational reform "went too far" or any such nonsense either; I also reject Hymowitz's thesis that "the “rise of women” in the 80’s and 90’s is really a direct cause of the fall of man," mainly because I don't think there has been a fall of men.
That isn't to say I disagree with the data set- that young men are underperforming. I just think it is tied into the (oh noooo) current patriarchal* expectations imposed on men. Essentially, I am much more accepting of Tony Porter's thesis- that we do send very conflicting (or maybe, not so conflicting...I will get to this in a moment) messages to young boys. I think the message being sent to young boys is very different than the ones being sent to young girls.
Obviously what we have been doing with girls has been working, which is good! It is not perfect (lots of people mention STEM employment of women, which is still low) but it is good!
The thing is, the message we are sending to young boys about what they should "be" is, as Riemann said, the "Walt Cleaver". This is just ridiculous and outdated. To use a silly cultural example, generally society considers the "I'm a PC" guy as close to what a "Man" is, or at least an "Adult Male". Instead, most men are more like the "Mac" guy- they are leeching lessons from the women's rights movement. That is, they wear what they want, do what they want, and live their life fulfilling what they want to do and achieve- all the messages we sent to young girls when we noticed they were underperforming (mostly because the social expectations we had of them was to be Ms. Cleaver).
So, I am with Riemann here. I reject biological determinism in ability, and place the underperforming at the feet of the same culprit that kept women back- outdated expectations of gender roles.
This also applies to Japan's "Lost Generation".
Again the lessons here can be drawn from feminist thought- reject outdated gender roles, as they lead to underperformance in all areas of life.
I was just reading the other day some pop-sci rag about playing games might be part of what gives men such an advantage in programming and related fields (where they are still totally, overwhelmingly, disgustingly dominant). I don't think the article proved that case by any means but its no more crazy than the OP for this thread.
Them games might not help you become Mr. Cleaver but, then again, they might land you six figures and good healthcare.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
From the point of view of a rather successful 30-somthing in a highly-paid, high-demand field I have to say this quote annoys the crap out of me:
She uses the phrase “child-man” and describes how men become stuck in “preadulthood” and embrace, well, the pleasures and leisure’s of being a child over growing up. (Think of the man-children characters of Seth Rogan, Steve Corral, Will Ferrell, and Ben Stiller). Men retreat into this stage because in the “preadulthood” they receive mixed and conflicting signals about what it is to be a man; therefore, men retreat into their selves and become more passive [perhaps this is a link with the excessive Internet use?]. These mixed signals seem to be best summarized in her own words,
You want to know how to be successful in a job that is actually worth having? Where you don't just sell off slices of your time for tiny rashers of cash? Stay a "child-man".
The traditional 1950s Mr. Cleaver bullshit that this quack is holding up as what these "child men" fail to become is a lie. And in the US today it is self destructive. There are no more union-shop jobs where these idealized Real Men can mindlessly churn out steel and widgets from exactly 9-5 every day while fathering (in the loosest sense of the word) 2.5 children and supporting an undeducated, submissive Christian missus.
These days you absolutely need to retain a lot of the qualities of childhood your entire time in the workforce. Mental plasticity. The ability to take on an entirely new career at age 40 if need be. The ability and above all willingness to learn entirely new ways of life once you are into the age when Hymowitz's ideal man would have already surrendered all creative thought to the bottle.
I think the problem is that for the most part this is just a way of looking at men in a single moment, rather than over their entire development. Our cultures don't need us to be like we were in the past. I don't think there are really that many people "stuck" in this preadulthood thing, rather they're just taking their time more than they used to, and perhaps more than girls.
The thing that people like Hymowitz seem to forget is that men in previous times did what they did out of necessity. But the need to get a job straight out of highschool where you will stay forever is gone. As you mentioned, we now need the ability to switch to be able to switch careers at 40. And we got far more opportunities for paths that we want to take.
Right @Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud, there was a study that came out a few months back that showed that while employment of women in the Biological sciences was now equal to that of employment of men, the actual positions filled were vastly different.
I can try and dig it up but the gist of it was that men get more tenure-track positions, whereas women tend to be stuck as an associate or adjunct (mostly because they tend to be forced to choose between family and their career, a choice that is not generally as difficult or expected of men).
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
The rise of women has muddied the role of men. The culture says we all love fathers, but at the same time it says we don’t need fathers. In the same way, we’re saying men have to achieve and do well in school at the same time that we say we don’t need their income. Women’s independence plays a big, big role in male uncertainty. What is their role? Does anyone need them? And what do they need them for? It doesn’t seem to be money.
I found this quote disturbing for, I think, similar sorts of reasons that RiemannLives was objecting. It seems steeped in ideology, and ideology I find disagreeable: namely, the idea that it a great crises of conscience for a man when no woman need depend on him--and, implicitly, that we have unfairly pulled out the rug by changing social structures to allow for greater female independence. In short, this line of thought gives the creeps, and the creeps I get at passages like this is part of the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
I cannot speak to graduate programs across all disciplines, but in philosophy it is still definitely male-skewed even among the younger cohorts. I was born in 1986, which I take to put me solidly in the putatively failing generation of men, and my graduate class has 6 men and 2 women.
There are 3 times as many male philosophy majors as female philosophy majors?
Men are failing at life!
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don't think this is something to be concerned about, at least not directly. Our educational system is strongly weighted towards promoting students that will sit still, shut up, and obey orders. Do that, and you're almost guaranteed to pass high school even if you're dumb as a brick. For various reasons (mostly societal) girls tend to be more quiet and obedient than boys, therefore they do better in our current school system.
Since men still get better jobs and make more on average, it's apparently not a major problem to do slightly worse in school.
This is basically just what I was thinking.
An unfortunately large amount of academic success is based on conforming to teachers' and parents' expectations. Girls are better conformers than boys (we can have a whole great big, possibly banal but possibly interesting discussion about why) and now that they're legitimately encouraged to do well in school instead of discouraged they're doing better in school.
I think there are things peripheral to this that we should keep an eye on (why are girls better conformers, is that a good thing etc.) but I don't think this issue itself is worrying.
The rise of women has muddied the role of men. The culture says we all love fathers, but at the same time it says we don’t need fathers. In the same way, we’re saying men have to achieve and do well in school at the same time that we say we don’t need their income. Women’s independence plays a big, big role in male uncertainty. What is their role? Does anyone need them? And what do they need them for? It doesn’t seem to be money.
I found this quote disturbing for, I think, similar sorts of reasons that RiemannLives was objecting. It seems steeped in ideology, and ideology I find disagreeable: namely, the idea that it a great crises of conscience for a man when no woman need depend on him--and, implicitly, that we have unfairly pulled out the rug by changing social structures to allow for greater female independence. In short, this line of thought gives the creeps, and the creeps I get at passages like this is part of the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
Actually @MrMister , if you would permit me, I would actually use this bit of your post as my general argument against almost the entirety of the OP
...the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
I don't think I can put how I feel any more elegantly than was just done here.
Actually @MrMister , if you would permit me, I would actually use this bit of your post as my general argument against almost the entirety of the OP
...the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
I don't think I can put how I feel any more elegantly than was just done here.
I agree.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Actually @MrMister , if you would permit me, I would actually use this bit of your post as my general argument against almost the entirety of the OP
...the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
I don't think I can put how I feel any more elegantly than was just done here.
I agree.
What a jerk.
I believe in you Arch, I'm sure you can be more elegant than Mr. "Snooty-McTooty" Mister up there!
It seems steeped in ideology, and ideology I find disagreeable: namely, the idea that it a great crises of conscience for a man when no woman need depend on him--and, implicitly, that we have unfairly pulled out the rug by changing social structures to allow for greater female independence.
I think that there's some truth to that ideology. Not in a moral sense; I don't think that we've unfairly pulled out the rug on men. But more in an anthropological sense: I think there are still a lot of men who do feel in crisis when they don't have a woman depending on them. I think we've done a good job of telling women that they don't really need a man to be whole; I don't think we've done a good job of telling the converse to men. I think there are a lot of men who feel scared and threatened in that they're looking for women to validate them while simultaneously unsure of what value they offer.
BTW, this ideology - a sincere expression of it, rather than a deconstruction of it - is at play with some of the pop media articles I've read about Japan's 'lost generation'. I'd have to dig them up to identify them, but I've seen it expressed in a few articles that it's a sign of crisis when young men aren't dating or marrying.
It's only a sign of crisis when a man's value is defined by what he can offer a romantic partner.
I think we've done a good job of telling women that they don't really need a man to be whole; I don't think we've done a good job of telling the converse to men.
Right, yes. This is what I was getting at- that we were able to notice that "Hey, women are underperforming because they are stuck beholden to older expectations of what they should be and do!"
The feminist waves took this to heart and really incorporated it into the cultural zeitgeist (so to speak) very well.
But we just kind of rode on the idea that the male gender roles we had built up were fine and dandy, when really they are just as inapplicable to our modern society as the female gender roles we worked to abolish were.
I don't think this is something to be concerned about, at least not directly. Our educational system is strongly weighted towards promoting students that will sit still, shut up, and obey orders. Do that, and you're almost guaranteed to pass high school even if you're dumb as a brick. For various reasons (mostly societal) girls tend to be more quiet and obedient than boys, therefore they do better in our current school system.
Since men still get better jobs and make more on average, it's apparently not a major problem to do slightly worse in school.
Well currently young women do better than their male counterparts in jobs and making money. The whole thing about men earning more applies mostly to older men and women, given that someone who is 55 went to school in the 60s and 70s that's hardly surprising.
I don't think it's a big deal, but you can draw the connection between doing slightly worse in school and doing slightly worse in the jobmarket for people who've gone trough school as it currently is and grew up in a less traditional (here meaning guys work, women stay at home shit) environment.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
Actually @MrMister , if you would permit me, I would actually use this bit of your post as my general argument against almost the entirety of the OP
...the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
I don't think I can put how I feel any more elegantly than was just done here.
This actually ties into a post I wrote but deleted regarding whether or not it's offensive to purport "gender X is better at Y than gender Z"
The basic gist of my post was "facts aren't offensive, but the interpretation of them and how they're purported can not only be offensive but downright harmful. Also, wrong. Our lenses definitely color what we see."
Also in the post was "We suck at statistics and don't realize how little the average performance of two groups being slightly different between two groups means."
So, yeah. When you see "Men/Women outperform the other at X," be conscious of your cultural baggage (because there is a lot), be conscious of what differences mean to individuals, and be conscious of your biases.
But we just kind of rode on the idea that the male gender roles we had built up were fine and dandy, when really they are just as inapplicable to our modern society as the female gender roles we worked to abolish were.
Does this make sense?
It makes sense to me!
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The thing is, the message we are sending to young boys about what they should "be" is, as Riemann said, the "Walt Cleaver". This is just ridiculous and outdated. To use a silly cultural example, generally society considers the "I'm a PC" guy as close to what a "Man" is, or at least an "Adult Male". Instead, most men are more like the "Mac" guy- they are leeching lessons from the women's rights movement. That is, they wear what they want, do what they want, and live their life fulfilling what they want to do and achieve- all the messages we sent to young girls when we noticed they were underperforming (mostly because the social expectations we had of them was to be Ms. Cleaver).
So, I am with Riemann here. I reject biological determinism in ability, and place the underperforming at the feet of the same culprit that kept women back- outdated expectations of gender roles.
Again the lessons here can be drawn from feminist thought- reject outdated gender roles, as they lead to underperformance in all areas of life.
There is still extremely strong social pressure on young men (middle & high school aged especially) to meet certain expectations of "maleness" and in many cases these features of "maleness" are not academic endeavours.
I don't think this is something to be concerned about, at least not directly. Our educational system is strongly weighted towards promoting students that will sit still, shut up, and obey orders. Do that, and you're almost guaranteed to pass high school even if you're dumb as a brick. For various reasons (mostly societal) girls tend to be more quiet and obedient than boys, therefore they do better in our current school system.
Since men still get better jobs and make more on average, it's apparently not a major problem to do slightly worse in school.
I completely agree with your comment about the educational system, trying to please people is a surprisingly effective way to do well in much of high school and females tend to be quieter and have often developed "people-pleasing" skills more than boys.
In terms of your second comment I do think it is a problem. Men still make more on average, but with less well-educated males I believe this will change over time. I do agree that we need to encourage females in STEM fields. I was a math/physics major and was often one of two or three females in a class of 30 students in my 400 level classes. I also had a math professor who said during a friend's class that he thought females (compared to males) lacked the mental capacity to do math. He later apologized.
Perhaps the solution is to further dissolve gender roles, but I think there is danger in this. We have evolved with gender roles over time, there are physical differences that have evolved between men and women (besides just sex organs). It bothers me when people blanketly attack anyone who hypothesizes physical and/or neurological differences between males and females. It cuts down the ability to do research and genuine science to figure out how to best meet the needs of people/students. Obviously societal / environmental pressures play a huge role, but I don't think biology should be dismissed.
I actually agree--what bothered me about the quote was that she seemed to be endorsing the dilemma (really--how could you feel like a man with a purpose if no one needed you to stand between them and starvation?), not the idea that some men would find themselves in such a quandary by virtue of having absorbed bad cultural programming. I would also, though, still doubt the extent to which this is a primary factor in driving the social trends to which she alludes, and, indeed, to what extent the social trends to which she alludes are even real: are men unattached in their 20s because they are 'adrift' or because they have 'figured out that being single in your 20s is great?' And so on.
I would also, though, still doubt the extent to which this is a primary factor in driving the social trends to which she alludes, and, indeed, to what extent the social trends to which she alludes are even real: are men unattached in their 20s because they are 'adrift' or because they have 'figured out that being single in your 20s is great?' And so on.
Yeah, totally. I see that whole conversation as tangential to academic performance anyway.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
But we just kind of rode on the idea that the male gender roles we had built up were fine and dandy, when really they are just as inapplicable to our modern society as the female gender roles we worked to abolish were.
Does this make sense?
It makes sense to me!
Yeah, this is definitely something I agree with.
We've had a lot of "female gender roles are pretty terrible, we should let women be what they want," and while we haven't finished them off, they've been weakened much more than some of the male ones. Which are also shitty and something that need critical examination.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I would also, though, still doubt the extent to which this is a primary factor in driving the social trends to which she alludes, and, indeed, to what extent the social trends to which she alludes are even real: are men unattached in their 20s because they are 'adrift' or because they have 'figured out that being single in your 20s is great?' And so on.
Yeah, totally. I see that whole conversation as tangential to academic performance anyway.
We appear to be on not only the same page, but also the same paragraph and same word.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
I think we've done a good job of telling women that they don't really need a man to be whole; I don't think we've done a good job of telling the converse to men.
Right, yes. This is what I was getting at- that we were able to notice that "Hey, women are underperforming because they are stuck beholden to older expectations of what they should be and do!"
The feminist waves took this to heart and really incorporated it into the cultural zeitgeist (so to speak) very well.
But we just kind of rode on the idea that the male gender roles we had built up were fine and dandy, when really they are just as inapplicable to our modern society as the female gender roles we worked to abolish were.
Does this make sense?
I don't know if it makes sense but I totally agree with you. It's kinda crazy because when feminism challenged female gender roles we should've realized instantly that that necessarily affected male gender roles too. But we didn't, they haven't really changed at all which is why in some European countries the law is running ahead of culture.
Like, men suddenly got paternity leave while the culture didn't expect it of them. So they don't take it.
I think men are realizing this more and more though. There is just no movement for them so it looks rather more fragmented.
From the point of view of a rather successful 30-somthing in a highly-paid, high-demand field I have to say this quote annoys the crap out of me:
She uses the phrase “child-man” and describes how men become stuck in “preadulthood” and embrace, well, the pleasures and leisure’s of being a child over growing up. (Think of the man-children characters of Seth Rogan, Steve Corral, Will Ferrell, and Ben Stiller). Men retreat into this stage because in the “preadulthood” they receive mixed and conflicting signals about what it is to be a man; therefore, men retreat into their selves and become more passive [perhaps this is a link with the excessive Internet use?]. These mixed signals seem to be best summarized in her own words,
You want to know how to be successful in a job that is actually worth having? Where you don't just sell off slices of your time for tiny rashers of cash? Stay a "child-man".
The traditional 1950s Mr. Cleaver bullshit that this quack is holding up as what these "child men" fail to become is a lie. And in the US today it is self destructive. There are no more union-shop jobs where these idealized Real Men can mindlessly churn out steel and widgets from exactly 9-5 every day while fathering (in the loosest sense of the word) 2.5 children and supporting an undeducated, submissive Christian missus.
These days you absolutely need to retain a lot of the qualities of childhood your entire time in the workforce. Mental plasticity. The ability to take on an entirely new career at age 40 if need be. The ability and above all willingness to learn entirely new ways of life once you are into the age when Hymowitz's ideal man would have already surrendered all creative thought to the bottle.
You're too nice to her. The only fitting use for her book is as a substitute when you find out that someone forgot to replace the toilet paper. All she is doing is trying to reframe the absolutely gooseshit idea that men need a woman to "civilize" them. Which, as a man, I find incredibly fucking insulting and offensive.
From the point of view of a rather successful 30-somthing in a highly-paid, high-demand field I have to say this quote annoys the crap out of me:
She uses the phrase “child-man” and describes how men become stuck in “preadulthood” and embrace, well, the pleasures and leisure’s of being a child over growing up. (Think of the man-children characters of Seth Rogan, Steve Corral, Will Ferrell, and Ben Stiller). Men retreat into this stage because in the “preadulthood” they receive mixed and conflicting signals about what it is to be a man; therefore, men retreat into their selves and become more passive [perhaps this is a link with the excessive Internet use?]. These mixed signals seem to be best summarized in her own words,
You want to know how to be successful in a job that is actually worth having? Where you don't just sell off slices of your time for tiny rashers of cash? Stay a "child-man".
The traditional 1950s Mr. Cleaver bullshit that this quack is holding up as what these "child men" fail to become is a lie. And in the US today it is self destructive. There are no more union-shop jobs where these idealized Real Men can mindlessly churn out steel and widgets from exactly 9-5 every day while fathering (in the loosest sense of the word) 2.5 children and supporting an undeducated, submissive Christian missus.
These days you absolutely need to retain a lot of the qualities of childhood your entire time in the workforce. Mental plasticity. The ability to take on an entirely new career at age 40 if need be. The ability and above all willingness to learn entirely new ways of life once you are into the age when Hymowitz's ideal man would have already surrendered all creative thought to the bottle.
You're too nice to her. The only fitting use for her book is as a substitute when you find out that someone forgot to replace the toilet paper. All she is doing is trying to reframe the absolutely gooseshit idea that men need a woman to "civilize" them. Which, as a man, I find incredibly fucking insulting and offensive.
Oh, men totally need a woman to civilize the shit out of them. Except for gay men, who are burdened with the task of civilizing the shit out of each other.
This thread is specifically about younger men though. When you talk about "such and such field is still dominated by men" it makes me wonder whether everyone in that field is extremely young and retires super early, or are you skewing things by considering men who do not fall under the topic...
I cannot speak to graduate programs across all disciplines, but in philosophy it is still definitely male-skewed even among the younger cohorts. I was born in 1986, which I take to put me solidly in the putatively failing generation of men, and my graduate class has 6 men and 2 women. Other classes immediately below and above me have yet worse ratios. Granted this varies by program, and mine is especially bad for its caliber (places like NYU have more balanced classes), but I do not think the tides of change have yet come anywhere near effecting a majority-female incoming graduate population. Since we are starting the cut-off for this generational phenomenon at 1980, we should also expect women to constitute more incoming junior faculty, but this is also not so.
I suspect that some of these statistics are too broad to be useful. Women receive more graduate degrees: does this mean that men are struggling? Not if women are receiving those degrees by virtue of attending, in record numbers, 'female-valenced' programs in low-prestige disciplines which men are not in any case much interested in. Nor does it mean that men are struggling if they still get significantly more mileage out of the graduate degrees they do receive--for instance, by way of accruing significantly more tenure track job offers, or being fast tracked into higher-prestige programs, universities, and general academic roles. For instance, even without considering disciplinary boundaries, within philosophy there is a prestige ladder with male-dominated subdisciplines like epistemology, meta-ethics, and metaphysics sitting at the top and female-dominated subdisciplines like applied ethics, normative ethics, and feminist philosophy at the bottom. This ladder has significant consequences when it comes to who gets the the tenure-track jobs, which is, needless to say, a very big deal (most people do not understand how bad the non-tenure academic jobs are). But none of this will show up if you simply start counting graduate degrees awarded and comparing by gender.
In short, I am highly skeptical that men are outperformed by woman at all academic levels, and that this data is undeniable--I am tempted to deny it based on my narrow knowledge of my narrow slot in my narrow field. Perhaps the case can be made nonetheless, but not, I think, with the sort of low-resolution view provided by the statistics in the OP.
No offense to your major, but there isn't some sort of huge societal pressure to get more women into philosophy graduate programs.
The concern is about SETM programs, because not very many people can be an academic, and in the future it is pretty much going to be computer programmers, engineers, and walmart employees, and the concern is that women don't end up working at walmart because someone told them math is for boys when they were a kid.
Now, from what I'm reading the tide hasn't shifted in the hard science and engineering programs, but it is shifting.
Perhaps the solution is to further dissolve gender roles, but I think there is danger in this. We have evolved with gender roles over time, there are physical differences that have evolved between men and women (besides just sex organs). It bothers me when people blanketly attack anyone who hypothesizes physical and/or neurological differences between males and females. It cuts down the ability to do research and genuine science to figure out how to best meet the needs of people/students. Obviously societal / environmental pressures play a huge role, but I don't think biology should be dismissed.
If you start out looking for differences with the intent to figure out how to treat them differently, you're probably going to find differences. You need to look for the differences with a clear mind first, instead of looking for them with an intent to do something with them.
Importantly, though, an attempt to look for differences, which tend to be slight, and treat based on those, is doomed to failure for any bell curves that overlap more than slightly. This is a pretty big danger. If men perform on average slightly better with type A encouragement, and women with type B, and the curves are normal, then segregation based on this could actually be harming just under 50% of people.
The problem I'm having with this stuff (which admittedly I haven't looked into all that deeply beyond this thread) from a statistical standpoint is that there is not enough focus on the variance. Variance effects can provide some explanation for some of the anecdotal stuff that has been posted on both sides. If there is a much wider variance in performance (however you decide to quantify it) for males than females, then you are going to see a lot more males in the underperforming and remedial categories just as you'll see more males at the top levels, even if on average males and females have the same level of performance.
I took an econometrics course and one of the ultra simplified models was just dealing with the variables like salary, gender, and whether or not they had the degree. And one of the important things discussed and focused on in even that extremely simplified statistical model was that there was a much higher variance in salary for men than women in the dataset, and whether there was interaction between gender and the other variables.
Someone else can probably speak better to as why that sort of thing might arise, but it is important to focus on more than just how people are doing on average and look into other aspects of the distribution if what you care about is something like the proportion of underperformance.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
That's relevant to the point I was trying to make. Statistics is hard to deal with, and slight differences in averages are rarely what ends up being important even though they are focused on.
I don't think this is something to be concerned about, at least not directly. Our educational system is strongly weighted towards promoting students that will sit still, shut up, and obey orders. Do that, and you're almost guaranteed to pass high school even if you're dumb as a brick. For various reasons (mostly societal) girls tend to be more quiet and obedient than boys, therefore they do better in our current school system.
Since men still get better jobs and make more on average, it's apparently not a major problem to do slightly worse in school.
I think this is a very big part of it. My experience through middle and high school seems to agree. The students who did well were the "keeners" as I would call them. They were very obedient, they were quiet, they always did their homework, they always studied for tests. They were virtually always girls. I also did well in school (I am male), but was super lazy. I was quiet and relatively obedient, but the rest of the stuff I didn't do at all. The keeners would ask me for help on homework, though the best of them would out perform me on grades due to actually handing in all their assignments and studying for tests more than a few hours in advance. I had talent, but some of these girls would outwork me and do better, which is, after all, kinda the point of school. They certainly got better work habits than I did.
When I started this post, I was going to say that perhaps improved physical education would help. Have kids (or maybe just the males) run themselves to exhaustion, then start the school day. The idea being that this would get some of their energy out, and make them more inclined to sit still and listen.
When I saw what I was typing though, another thought occurred to me. What if it is about discipline? I wonder how males perform vs females in school environments of varying discipline. And if harsher, or somehow more effective discipline results in better grades amongst males?
Well, I don't know. But this is an issue that is of interest to me, because of how extremely evident the gap was while I was in school. I really feel like its in the school system somehow. Outside factors must play some role as well, but all my instincts tell me that our education system causes this result.
I was just reading the other day some pop-sci rag about playing games might be part of what gives men such an advantage in programming and related fields (where they are still totally, overwhelmingly, disgustingly dominant).
That's just normal misogyny.
Thankfully, the Brogrammer is like the Atheist Republican, a terrifying, clarifying figure that forces nerds to confront their darkest self.
I was just reading the other day some pop-sci rag about playing games might be part of what gives men such an advantage in programming and related fields (where they are still totally, overwhelmingly, disgustingly dominant).
That's just normal misogyny.
Thankfully, the Brogrammer is like the Atheist Republican, a terrifying, clarifying figure that forces nerds to confront their darkest self.
Oh, and here's a good question to ponder - if Zimbardo is right about his hypothesis, then why did the psychiatric community completely reject the idea of "arousal addiction", refusing to list it in the DSM-V?
I was just reading the other day some pop-sci rag about playing games might be part of what gives men such an advantage in programming and related fields (where they are still totally, overwhelmingly, disgustingly dominant).
That's just normal misogyny.
Thankfully, the Brogrammer is like the Atheist Republican, a terrifying, clarifying figure that forces nerds to confront their darkest self.
Wherever / whenever the shift away from engineering happens, its looong before working age. If you magic-pixie-dusted every person involved in the programming industry to elimate mysogyny (and I am totally not denying that it exists) and hired every single female applicant coming out of college it would still be absurdly male dominated.
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I cannot speak to graduate programs across all disciplines, but in philosophy it is still definitely male-skewed even among the younger cohorts. I was born in 1986, which I take to put me solidly in the putatively failing generation of men, and my graduate class has 6 men and 2 women.
There are 3 times as many male philosophy majors as female philosophy majors?
Men are failing at life!
I agree that the more important question is how are we categorising failure and success?
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Since men still get better jobs and make more on average, it's apparently not a major problem to do slightly worse in school.
It is an incredibly spurious claim that not only stigmatizes video games and sex, it is based on a false dichotomy between "man" and "child". (This is also claimed by Hymowitz, and the response was handled better by @RiemannLives ).
I don't think educational reform "went too far" or any such nonsense either; I also reject Hymowitz's thesis that "the “rise of women” in the 80’s and 90’s is really a direct cause of the fall of man," mainly because I don't think there has been a fall of men.
That isn't to say I disagree with the data set- that young men are underperforming. I just think it is tied into the (oh noooo) current patriarchal* expectations imposed on men. Essentially, I am much more accepting of Tony Porter's thesis- that we do send very conflicting (or maybe, not so conflicting...I will get to this in a moment) messages to young boys. I think the message being sent to young boys is very different than the ones being sent to young girls.
Obviously what we have been doing with girls has been working, which is good! It is not perfect (lots of people mention STEM employment of women, which is still low) but it is good!
The thing is, the message we are sending to young boys about what they should "be" is, as Riemann said, the "Walt Cleaver". This is just ridiculous and outdated. To use a silly cultural example, generally society considers the "I'm a PC" guy as close to what a "Man" is, or at least an "Adult Male". Instead, most men are more like the "Mac" guy- they are leeching lessons from the women's rights movement. That is, they wear what they want, do what they want, and live their life fulfilling what they want to do and achieve- all the messages we sent to young girls when we noticed they were underperforming (mostly because the social expectations we had of them was to be Ms. Cleaver).
So, I am with Riemann here. I reject biological determinism in ability, and place the underperforming at the feet of the same culprit that kept women back- outdated expectations of gender roles.
This also applies to Japan's "Lost Generation".
Again the lessons here can be drawn from feminist thought- reject outdated gender roles, as they lead to underperformance in all areas of life.
hehe.
I was just reading the other day some pop-sci rag about playing games might be part of what gives men such an advantage in programming and related fields (where they are still totally, overwhelmingly, disgustingly dominant). I don't think the article proved that case by any means but its no more crazy than the OP for this thread.
Them games might not help you become Mr. Cleaver but, then again, they might land you six figures and good healthcare.
I think the problem is that for the most part this is just a way of looking at men in a single moment, rather than over their entire development. Our cultures don't need us to be like we were in the past. I don't think there are really that many people "stuck" in this preadulthood thing, rather they're just taking their time more than they used to, and perhaps more than girls.
The thing that people like Hymowitz seem to forget is that men in previous times did what they did out of necessity. But the need to get a job straight out of highschool where you will stay forever is gone. As you mentioned, we now need the ability to switch to be able to switch careers at 40. And we got far more opportunities for paths that we want to take.
I can try and dig it up but the gist of it was that men get more tenure-track positions, whereas women tend to be stuck as an associate or adjunct (mostly because they tend to be forced to choose between family and their career, a choice that is not generally as difficult or expected of men).
I found this quote disturbing for, I think, similar sorts of reasons that RiemannLives was objecting. It seems steeped in ideology, and ideology I find disagreeable: namely, the idea that it a great crises of conscience for a man when no woman need depend on him--and, implicitly, that we have unfairly pulled out the rug by changing social structures to allow for greater female independence. In short, this line of thought gives the creeps, and the creeps I get at passages like this is part of the reason that I am by default skeptical of mass-market books about gender phenomena: namely, they very often seem to run together their data, such as it is, with a significant measure of unexamined cultural baggage, and that they do so in support of big, bold theses which are likely to sell books, but, unfortunately, are unlikely to be actually defensible in any but the loosest of scientific senses.
There are 3 times as many male philosophy majors as female philosophy majors?
Men are failing at life!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is basically just what I was thinking.
An unfortunately large amount of academic success is based on conforming to teachers' and parents' expectations. Girls are better conformers than boys (we can have a whole great big, possibly banal but possibly interesting discussion about why) and now that they're legitimately encouraged to do well in school instead of discouraged they're doing better in school.
I think there are things peripheral to this that we should keep an eye on (why are girls better conformers, is that a good thing etc.) but I don't think this issue itself is worrying.
--LeVar Burton
I love this post
I don't think I can put how I feel any more elegantly than was just done here.
I agree.
@Feral :bz
What a jerk.
I believe in you Arch, I'm sure you can be more elegant than Mr. "Snooty-McTooty" Mister up there!
--LeVar Burton
I think that there's some truth to that ideology. Not in a moral sense; I don't think that we've unfairly pulled out the rug on men. But more in an anthropological sense: I think there are still a lot of men who do feel in crisis when they don't have a woman depending on them. I think we've done a good job of telling women that they don't really need a man to be whole; I don't think we've done a good job of telling the converse to men. I think there are a lot of men who feel scared and threatened in that they're looking for women to validate them while simultaneously unsure of what value they offer.
BTW, this ideology - a sincere expression of it, rather than a deconstruction of it - is at play with some of the pop media articles I've read about Japan's 'lost generation'. I'd have to dig them up to identify them, but I've seen it expressed in a few articles that it's a sign of crisis when young men aren't dating or marrying.
It's only a sign of crisis when a man's value is defined by what he can offer a romantic partner.
I
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Right, yes. This is what I was getting at- that we were able to notice that "Hey, women are underperforming because they are stuck beholden to older expectations of what they should be and do!"
The feminist waves took this to heart and really incorporated it into the cultural zeitgeist (so to speak) very well.
But we just kind of rode on the idea that the male gender roles we had built up were fine and dandy, when really they are just as inapplicable to our modern society as the female gender roles we worked to abolish were.
Does this make sense?
Well currently young women do better than their male counterparts in jobs and making money. The whole thing about men earning more applies mostly to older men and women, given that someone who is 55 went to school in the 60s and 70s that's hardly surprising.
I don't think it's a big deal, but you can draw the connection between doing slightly worse in school and doing slightly worse in the jobmarket for people who've gone trough school as it currently is and grew up in a less traditional (here meaning guys work, women stay at home shit) environment.
This actually ties into a post I wrote but deleted regarding whether or not it's offensive to purport "gender X is better at Y than gender Z"
The basic gist of my post was "facts aren't offensive, but the interpretation of them and how they're purported can not only be offensive but downright harmful. Also, wrong. Our lenses definitely color what we see."
Also in the post was "We suck at statistics and don't realize how little the average performance of two groups being slightly different between two groups means."
So, yeah. When you see "Men/Women outperform the other at X," be conscious of your cultural baggage (because there is a lot), be conscious of what differences mean to individuals, and be conscious of your biases.
It makes sense to me!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
There is still extremely strong social pressure on young men (middle & high school aged especially) to meet certain expectations of "maleness" and in many cases these features of "maleness" are not academic endeavours.
I completely agree with your comment about the educational system, trying to please people is a surprisingly effective way to do well in much of high school and females tend to be quieter and have often developed "people-pleasing" skills more than boys.
In terms of your second comment I do think it is a problem. Men still make more on average, but with less well-educated males I believe this will change over time. I do agree that we need to encourage females in STEM fields. I was a math/physics major and was often one of two or three females in a class of 30 students in my 400 level classes. I also had a math professor who said during a friend's class that he thought females (compared to males) lacked the mental capacity to do math. He later apologized.
Perhaps the solution is to further dissolve gender roles, but I think there is danger in this. We have evolved with gender roles over time, there are physical differences that have evolved between men and women (besides just sex organs). It bothers me when people blanketly attack anyone who hypothesizes physical and/or neurological differences between males and females. It cuts down the ability to do research and genuine science to figure out how to best meet the needs of people/students. Obviously societal / environmental pressures play a huge role, but I don't think biology should be dismissed.
I actually agree--what bothered me about the quote was that she seemed to be endorsing the dilemma (really--how could you feel like a man with a purpose if no one needed you to stand between them and starvation?), not the idea that some men would find themselves in such a quandary by virtue of having absorbed bad cultural programming. I would also, though, still doubt the extent to which this is a primary factor in driving the social trends to which she alludes, and, indeed, to what extent the social trends to which she alludes are even real: are men unattached in their 20s because they are 'adrift' or because they have 'figured out that being single in your 20s is great?' And so on.
Yeah, totally. I see that whole conversation as tangential to academic performance anyway.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, this is definitely something I agree with.
We've had a lot of "female gender roles are pretty terrible, we should let women be what they want," and while we haven't finished them off, they've been weakened much more than some of the male ones. Which are also shitty and something that need critical examination.
We appear to be on not only the same page, but also the same paragraph and same word.
I don't know if it makes sense but I totally agree with you. It's kinda crazy because when feminism challenged female gender roles we should've realized instantly that that necessarily affected male gender roles too. But we didn't, they haven't really changed at all which is why in some European countries the law is running ahead of culture.
Like, men suddenly got paternity leave while the culture didn't expect it of them. So they don't take it.
I think men are realizing this more and more though. There is just no movement for them so it looks rather more fragmented.
You're too nice to her. The only fitting use for her book is as a substitute when you find out that someone forgot to replace the toilet paper. All she is doing is trying to reframe the absolutely gooseshit idea that men need a woman to "civilize" them. Which, as a man, I find incredibly fucking insulting and offensive.
Oh, men totally need a woman to civilize the shit out of them. Except for gay men, who are burdened with the task of civilizing the shit out of each other.
--LeVar Burton
No offense to your major, but there isn't some sort of huge societal pressure to get more women into philosophy graduate programs.
The concern is about SETM programs, because not very many people can be an academic, and in the future it is pretty much going to be computer programmers, engineers, and walmart employees, and the concern is that women don't end up working at walmart because someone told them math is for boys when they were a kid.
Now, from what I'm reading the tide hasn't shifted in the hard science and engineering programs, but it is shifting.
If you start out looking for differences with the intent to figure out how to treat them differently, you're probably going to find differences. You need to look for the differences with a clear mind first, instead of looking for them with an intent to do something with them.
Importantly, though, an attempt to look for differences, which tend to be slight, and treat based on those, is doomed to failure for any bell curves that overlap more than slightly. This is a pretty big danger. If men perform on average slightly better with type A encouragement, and women with type B, and the curves are normal, then segregation based on this could actually be harming just under 50% of people.
I took an econometrics course and one of the ultra simplified models was just dealing with the variables like salary, gender, and whether or not they had the degree. And one of the important things discussed and focused on in even that extremely simplified statistical model was that there was a much higher variance in salary for men than women in the dataset, and whether there was interaction between gender and the other variables.
Someone else can probably speak better to as why that sort of thing might arise, but it is important to focus on more than just how people are doing on average and look into other aspects of the distribution if what you care about is something like the proportion of underperformance.
I think this is a very big part of it. My experience through middle and high school seems to agree. The students who did well were the "keeners" as I would call them. They were very obedient, they were quiet, they always did their homework, they always studied for tests. They were virtually always girls. I also did well in school (I am male), but was super lazy. I was quiet and relatively obedient, but the rest of the stuff I didn't do at all. The keeners would ask me for help on homework, though the best of them would out perform me on grades due to actually handing in all their assignments and studying for tests more than a few hours in advance. I had talent, but some of these girls would outwork me and do better, which is, after all, kinda the point of school. They certainly got better work habits than I did.
When I started this post, I was going to say that perhaps improved physical education would help. Have kids (or maybe just the males) run themselves to exhaustion, then start the school day. The idea being that this would get some of their energy out, and make them more inclined to sit still and listen.
When I saw what I was typing though, another thought occurred to me. What if it is about discipline? I wonder how males perform vs females in school environments of varying discipline. And if harsher, or somehow more effective discipline results in better grades amongst males?
Well, I don't know. But this is an issue that is of interest to me, because of how extremely evident the gap was while I was in school. I really feel like its in the school system somehow. Outside factors must play some role as well, but all my instincts tell me that our education system causes this result.
That's just normal misogyny.
Thankfully, the Brogrammer is like the Atheist Republican, a terrifying, clarifying figure that forces nerds to confront their darkest self.
The brogrammer at my job is a Ron Paul man.
Wherever / whenever the shift away from engineering happens, its looong before working age. If you magic-pixie-dusted every person involved in the programming industry to elimate mysogyny (and I am totally not denying that it exists) and hired every single female applicant coming out of college it would still be absurdly male dominated.
I agree that the more important question is how are we categorising failure and success?