The way education used to be
Back in 1960, more than twice as many men as women between the ages of 26-28 were college graduates. As late as 1970, only 14 percent of young women between the ages of 26 and 28 had finished college, compared to 20 percent of men. But then a dramatic change occurred. While men’s college completion rates slowed, women’s skyrocketed.
Between 1970 and 2010, men’s rate of B.A. completion grew by just 7 percent, rising from 20 to 27 percent in those 40 years. In contrast, women’s rates almost tripled, rising from 14 percent to 36 percent. Today women also earn 60 percent of all master’s degrees and more than half of all doctoral and professional degrees. The only significant area of education in which women still lag behind men is in their representation in science and engineering programs. But even in some science fields they have made progress; only 25 percent of advanced engineering degrees go to women, but they earn 52 percent of master’s and doctoral degrees in the life sciences.
The rise of women in the educational realm has not wiped out the gender wage gap — even women with a college degree continue to earn less on average than men with a college degree. But the rapid rise of women with college degrees has certainly narrowed the gender wage gap. In 1978 full-time working women earned 62 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned. By 2011 this had increased to 82 cents. And unlike the past, when less-educated men typically out-earned more educated women, the fact that more women are now earning B.A.s means that growing numbers of women do out-earn men in the same age group. If men had as much education as today’s women do, their personal income would be nearly 4 percent higher and their unemployment rate a half percentage point lower than it is today.Girls have outperformed boys in school grades for more than 100 years. But a century ago, women commonly had to choose between getting an education and having a family. According to economist Claudia Goldin, women who graduated from college in the first two decades of the 20th century were four times less likely to have married by age 50 than their counterparts who did not attend college. And among the college-educated women who married, about 30 percent never had children.
Even when education became more compatible with family life in the 1950s, most Americans believed that the point of an education was simply to make women better wives and mothers, and that a woman’s place was in the home. As a result, even though more women entered college in that era, their drop-out rates were much higher, with many quitting college as soon as they got engaged or married.
How education changed
These norms began to erode in the 1960s and 70s, as the civil rights and women’s movements promoted equal opportunity in education and employment for women and minorities. These changes, along with advances in contraception, created an environment that was more supportive of women getting more education and using their degrees to find work outside the home. And the increasing wage advantage of college-educated workers has given them a powerful incentive to do so. Three decades ago full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree earned 40 percent more than those with only a high school diploma; today, they earn about 80 percent more.
In the 1970s, boys led girls in their college preparatory coursework, but today more girls than boys take these advanced classes. For example, 43 percent of girls complete both Algebra 2 and Chemistry in high school; only 38 percent of boys do. Moreover, among students taking these advanced courses, girls earn grades that are on average .20 GPA points higher than boys.
The puzzling gender achievement gap and what “they” say
But why do boys get lower grades than girls, and why have they responded so much more slowly and partially to changes in the job market that have increased the rewards for academic achievement? Researchers agree that it is not because girls are smarter. In fact, while boys score slightly higher in math tests and girls score slightly higher in reading tests, overall the cognitive abilities of boys and girls are very similar. The difference in grades lies in effort and engagement. On average, girls are more likely than boys to report that they like school and that good grades are very important to them. Girls also spend more time studying than boys.
Many observers believe that boys’ lower engagement with school is a result of biological differences between males and females. They say that boys need to engage in rough and tumble play, get their hands dirty, build things, and read books about war, espionage and sports if they are supposed to learn. Boys fail, they claim, because schools do not give boys enough opportunities to do “boy” stuff.
What we say
We do not agree. Our research shows that boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure. In fact, boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama, and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these cultural activities are often denigrated as un-masculine by pre-adolescent and adolescent boys — especially those from working- or lower-class backgrounds. Sociologists C.J. Pascoe and Edward Morris relate numerous examples of boys who strive for good grades as being labeled “pussies” or “fags” by their peers.
Commentators who emphasize boys’ special needs usually propose that we make schools more “boy-friendly” by offering single-sex classrooms where “boys can be boys,” by recruiting more male teachers and by providing more rough and tumble activities. Our research shows that, contrary to what is rapidly becoming “conventional wisdom,” this is precisely the wrong strategy. Most boys and girls learn more in classrooms where girls are present. In classrooms with more girls, both boys and girls score higher on math and reading tests. And several recent studies refute the claim that teacher gender matters for boys’ or girls’ achievement.Two key findings for the way forward
Our research yields two important findings. First, boys have less understanding than girls about how their future success in college and work is directly linked to their academic effort in middle and high school. In part, this may be due to many Americans still hearkening back to a time when job success for many men was linked more to physical strength and hard manual labor than to getting good grades in school. Young men as well as women will be further motivated to do well in school when our education system provides a clearer link between educational programs and workplace opportunities in our changing labor market.
Second, the most important predictor of boys’ achievement is the extent to which the school culture expects, values, and rewards academic effort. We need schools that set high expectations, treat each student as an individual (as opposed to a gender stereotype), and motivate all students to invest in their education so they can reap the big returns to a college degree that exist in today’s labor market.
The win-win news is that the same reforms that help more boys achieve college success help girls as well. For example, schools with strong science curricula not only promote male achievement but increase girls’ plans to major in science and engineering. Schools that promote strong academic climates reduce gender gaps in grades and promote healthy, multi-faceted gender identities for both boys and girls. In education, as in the rest of society, it’s time to discard the zero-sum game of the “gender wars” mentality and start helping males and females to work together for success.
Originally released March 2013.
Comments 1
lynn oliver — November 6, 2016
lynn oliver
233 Collins RD N.W.
Milledgeville, GA 31061
478-387-6586
mayfieldga@gmail.com
http://learningtheory.homestead.com
In Regard To The Growing Male Crisis
The Male Crisis is growing due to much differential treatment beginning in infancy. We need to remove our genetic models and see how differential treatment from infancy is creating the Male Crisis. The genetics models greatly favor individuals in higher socioeconomic environments who then falsely justify the plight of less affluent persons as not as intelligent or simply not working hard enough. They do not say how Female students in their areas are doing better collectively than their Male peers from their same socioeconomic environments. The myth of genetics sheer effort is greatly hurting students in lower socioeconomic areas who have also been told the myth of genetics and hard work. They are totally ignoring how their individual environments greatly affect their thinking, learning, motivation to learn and their mental health.
The Male Crisis has not been looked at in terms of much differential treatment, which increases greatly as we go down the socioeconomic ladder and more time in those environments. If we look in different socioeconomic areas we cannot help but see how the numbers of Male problems diminish greatly as we go up the socioeconomic ladder. Even in higher socioeconomic areas, those Male students are also falling behind their Female peers. As we go down the socioeconomic ladder, the number of Males failing and turning to many harmful escapes greatly increases. We need to look at much differential treatment of boys and girls beginning from infancy through adulthood. It is amazing to me that such differential treatment has not been looked at by the researchers. There are two reasons:
1. The false belief in genetics has blinded the researchers to the great social, environmental causes of learning and motivation in academics. 2. There is the present, very improper view of average stress, which sees stress as only occurring from some immediate situation, event, or work. We need to see how our average stress is made up of many layers of past, present, future – experiences, fears, preparations for defense; needs, values of self and others (also corrupted by our false genetics models); and host of other mental conflicts, which remain with us, taking away real mental energy from thinking, learning, motivation, and mental health. We can see this by drawing an upright rectangle representing our full mental energy, then drawing in from the bottom and upward, many innumerable, layer of unresolved mental work, all of us are acclimated to – to some degree – and to places all of us at some environmental disadvantage from others. So all of us suffer from some amount or layers of maintained, unresolved mental work, which limits our leftover mental energy for thinking, learning, reflection time, and mental health.
As we can see the problem involving differential treatment and learning is much more complex than school curriculum or boy chemistry. We need to stop looking at where boys are in life, character, and behavior and begin seeing how boys are treated, very differently from us as girls, from infancy by parents, teachers, peers, and society all to make them tough. This is creating the activity, less maturity, more learning problems, and more fear and dislike for authority figures.
The belief boys should be strong allows increasingly more aggressive treatment as early as one year of age, designed to create more anger, fear, and tension, so they will be prepared to fight, defend, and be tough. This is coupled with “much less” kind, stable, (very little kind verbal interaction), and much less mental/emotional support, knowledge, and skills for fear of coddling. It is the more aggressive, less supportive treatment, which creates the toughness or extra maintained layers of average stress: anger, fear, preparation for defense, and anxiety. These layers remain in the mind and take away real mental energy from academics, so those boys will have to work two or three times as hard to receive the same mental reward for work expended.
This more aggressive, less supportive treatment creates more social/emotional distance/distrust of others – parents, teachers, peers, and others in society. It creates lags in social vocabulary, less knowledge of syntax and other communication we as girls are given on a more continuous basis. It creates higher average stress, which creates more activity for stress relief (not genetics but environmentally created). The higher average stress also creates higher muscle tension, which hurts handwriting: more pressure on the pencil and a much tighter grip, hurting handwriting and motivation to write (too much pressure tighter grip causing early fatigue).
The total effect including less care and support creates much more failure and a feeling of hopelessness, especially with our false genetic models firmly in place. Also to make it even tougher for boys is the granting of love and honor (feelings of self-worth) only on some condition of achievement, status, or image. This was designed to keep Male esteem and feelings of self-worth low to keep them striving and even be willing to give their lives in time of war for small measures of love and honor from society. Males not achieving in school are other areas are given more ridicule and discipline to make them try harder. Support is not given boys for fear of coddling. Many boys (as you would expect) thus falling behind in school then turn their attention to sports and video games to gleam small measures of love and honor not received in the classroom. The belief boys should be strong and the false belief in genetics creates a blatant mental denial of the differential treatment, which is creating the lower academics, lower esteem, and other problems many boys are facing today. So strong is the belief boys should be strong there is an almost emotional cannibalism allowed upon boys and men who appear weak in some way by society: parents, teachers, others, even from many girls and women, especially in the media.
Note, this is not about showing feelings or openness from boys and men, it is about support, care, and respect for boys even when appearing weak in some way. Remember aggressive treatment is increased for any sign of weakness and the much wariness boys feel for parent and teachers who feel it necessary and more freely allowed to use more aggressiveness for any sign of weakness or vulnerability. This is condoned by many in society today.
As for reading, we need high social vocabulary, much social interaction - experience with sentence structure and “lower average stress” to perform and enjoy the abstract skill of reading: decoding, visualizing, organizing, reaching into their social vocabulary/knowledge of words to learn new words in print, and enjoy the process. Boys are deprived in these areas due to much less care, verbal interaction, and much more aggressive treatment. As for writing, we also need much social vocabulary to understand, plan, and to put words into print. We also need lower average stress to create more ease of writing. The higher average stress creates significant higher muscle tension, which then creates a much tighter grip and much more pressure on their pen or pencil. This creates both poor handwriting and early fatigue. This kills off their motivation to write, hence more two and three word sentences from boys with and less motivation to write.
I feel the shows of masculinity and misbehavior are pretty much copouts to both show separation from failure and also to generate small measures of love and honor from their peers. Their defensiveness from authority is really pretty straight forward, especially in lower socioeconomic areas where strength, power, and status hold very real currency in those areas. For those students it is not just misbehavior but a real tug of war or fight for minimum feelings of self-worth from a continual fight they feel outside the classroom as well as in.
The suicide epidemic is the result of Males being deprived sufficiently from essential feelings of self-worth and so being denied love and honor from others. The more aggressive, less supportive treatment boys are given from an early age is creating much more failure and hopelessness in school, preventing many boys, later men from competing in the information age thus losing the means to secure legally, income, status, and power to earn love and honor from society. This then creates many more instances of more aggressive, less respectful treatment, which slowly wears down their feelings of self-worth or desire to live right on to the point of suicide. I feel long before this point is reach many many more boys and men are already escaping in various harmful ways with games and drug/alcohol abuse in an attempt to live despite the low feelings of self-worth they are feeling.
As girls we are treated much better and so enjoy more hope and care from society. Since we as girls are given by differential treatment, much more continual, positive – mental, social/emotional support, verbal interaction and care from an early age onward, this creates quite the opposite outcome for girls when compared with boys. We enjoy much more care and support and care from society from infancy through adulthood and receive love and honor simply for being girls. This creates all of the good things. We enjoy lower average stress for more ease of learning. We enjoy much more freedom of expression from much protection that makes us look more unstable at times. Of course we can also use that same freedom of expression to give verbal, silent abuse, and hollow kindness/patronization to our Male peers with impunity knowing we are protected. We enjoy much lower muscle tension for more ease and ability in handwriting and motivation to write. We enjoy much more positive, trust/communication from parents, teachers, peers, and more support for perceived weaknesses. We are reaping a bonanza in the information age. The lower the socioeconomic bracket the much more amplified the differential treatment from infancy and more differentiated over time through adulthood. Now with girls and women taking over many areas of society, we are enjoying even more lavishing of love and honor from society, while the boys and men are now failing more so and are now given even more ridicule and abuse by society. Mind you, this is also now coming from many girls and women using our still protected freedoms of expression and more so with false feelings of superiority. My learning theory will go to all on request and provides tools all of us can use to continually change and improve our lives.