OT: Any other parents worried about young men struggling?
Noticed my son's honor section at school was overwhelmingly girls. Poked around on google and learned gender achievement gap is a modern phenom - gen Y and Z girls take tougher advanced courses, higher GPAs, majority of top 10% of their graduating class, complete undergrad on time (boys taking 5 and 6 years, if they finish), 60/40 girls to boys earning bachelors, masters, professional degrees, and young women are dominating a lot of industries.
Gen y and z boys seem to glorify immaturity and slacking, e.g. Barstool. Video game addiction has gone mainstream, even popular boys are obsessed, e.g. Fortnite. Don't read for leisure. Lots of apathy, disengagement, aren't as focused on academics and career – don't seem to be adapting to the demands to succeed in modern hyper-competitive economy.
What is going on?
February 26th, 2018 at 5:13 PM ^
Is it truly bad? My kid has done nothing but play it the last few weeks (boy, 11). Maybe I should make him stop???
February 26th, 2018 at 5:44 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 8:32 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 9:43 PM ^
It's basically a free version of one of the most popular games of the last year Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. That's the main reason it's popularity has exploded is the lack of barrier to try it.
February 26th, 2018 at 9:48 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 4:57 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:05 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 9:54 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 4:58 PM ^
"and young women are dominating a lot of industries"
Come off a little odd to me that this is framed as a reason to worrry instead of celebrating women finally breaking through and suceeding in these industries.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:13 PM ^
Yeah, maybe I'm biased because I have a little girl and a little boy, but I'm incredibly excited about the prospect that both of them might be able to succeed without a bunch of biases working against them.
February 26th, 2018 at 6:01 PM ^
I agree. But "dominating" isn't synonymous with "breaking through" or parity. 107 million American adults are out of the workforce – vast majority are prime working age men. I have two sons and two daughters – I want all to be successful and I'd prefer it if my daughters also had eligible, lettered, and gainfully employed men to court them. The data moving forward doesn't favor that to be the case.
February 26th, 2018 at 10:16 PM ^
February 27th, 2018 at 7:56 AM ^
While it's certainly okay, it's not often the reality. Men "marry down," women typically don't. A male physician marrying a waitress is more common than a female lawyer marrying a janitor. While that's something that could change and one could argue it should, what's more likely to happen is a glut of sucessful women who are single at 40 asking "where are all the good men?"
February 26th, 2018 at 7:37 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 8:51 PM ^
Hey. From one Kansan to another, behave yourself there.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:02 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:09 PM ^
I don't know if this was true of other foreign languages, but I remember in my French classes at U-M, if there were 20 people in the class, there'd be like me and two other guys, and 17 girls.
(Not that I had a problem with that...)
February 26th, 2018 at 5:19 PM ^
I remember my EE classes at UofM. There were 100 people in the class. Me and 97 other guys, and 2 girls. I had a problem with that...
February 26th, 2018 at 6:52 PM ^
fantastique, no?
February 26th, 2018 at 7:41 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:03 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:07 PM ^
Eh -- once you get past gradeschool everyone can figure out what success and hapiness means for themselves. It's not a race. So what if somebody plays a little too much fortnite / goes out a little too much and adds a year to his college? It's still a long-ass life and that guy can still do anything he wants provided he has a good education in general.
February 26th, 2018 at 6:01 PM ^
UM-Ann Arbor's in-state cost of attendance is now $30,000 per year. Other public U's aren't much cheaper. I think most parents outside of the obscenely wealthy care if their sons take an extra year or two to finish.
February 27th, 2018 at 2:36 PM ^
with the incessant fortnite (and yes, my 14 year-old boy has played a bunch of it- after Parkland I told him to lay off of it for a while) isn't the year extra it might take him to finish school (although if I'm paying an extra 30 grand for him to go to UM, it will definitely matter!). My issue with the game is that it's all about killing people non-stop. Psych research has shown that repeated exposure to this kind of stuff can affect kids' minds - their ability to distinguish between real and virtual is more porous than we might like to think. Like I said, I told my kid to lay off, and he did.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:09 PM ^
A lot of factors are involved here, and as a parent of two small kids (one of each), I'm seeing parents worry about it in the pre-K level already. And as a bit of background, I was one of, I believe, 2 men in my entire grade in HS who took 4+ AP tests, while I think about a dozen or so women did the same. It was a long time ago, and we didn't offer a lot of AP courses. So I've seen this phenomenon in real life.
For the sake of this discussion not dragging on, I'm not going to address the societal factors at play as well, your race/ethnicity, your economic realities, everything that is "you" as viewed by society writ large plays a role in how you are perceived and what opportunities are presented to you, and so things like white privilege, male privilege, etc. are all real things to varying degrees depending on your viewpoint.
As far as I can tell, the issue isn't that boys are "dumber" or "lazier" than girls at any particular age; I can't find the article quickly, but there have been a couple of surveys that show literacy and reading levels tested after a person leaves HS are vtirually identical for both men and women, even though testing prior to that age typically shows a noticeable difference between the two.
My uneducated guess is that education and testing has moved toward a model that perhaps works better for young women compared to men, or at least is more intuitive. The Atlantic had an article recently about how gender equality and women in STEM, and if you dig into the commentary around it a bit you see that how we measure acuity have so many implicit biases that it can definitely frame the results in a misleading light.
My wife teaches at an elite all-girls school, the type where getting into Michigan is regarded as the most safety of safety schools. These girls and young women are taught from an early age to attack problems head-on, to be immensely self-reliant and self-critical, and to work harder than the people around them. It's an approach that isn't particularly "female" centric, and you'd be hard-pressed not to see it applied to boys as well. But the style of school is perhaps better designed for your "average" female student compared to the male one, with its focus on communal learning and discussion whereas in past eras it seemed more focused on Socratic methodology and aggressiveness.
And maybe it's just that women have caught up to the gains men started with; there is some controversy surrounding innate intelligence between men and women, but the general consensus seems to be it's minor at best. But for a number of reason, women, POC, those with fewer financial resources, etc. trailed in acumen perhaps artificially, and now as boundaries are broken they are getting to where they should be.
But honestly, and this is probably weird after all the text I just burped out, who cares? We've tried forever to have kids be little markers of our own success, little merit badges on the parent sash. I think a bigger focus needs to not be on making boys or girls be the same and more on letting them be who they want to be, and going to college is but one avenue to having a successful and fulfilling lives. Blaming video games or TV is just lazy reasoning, looking for the next bogeyman to explain why the path you think your kid should follow isn't what's in front of him/her. Instead, figure out how to harness what that kid likes to do and do so constructively and I think we'll all be happier for it.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:30 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 6:19 PM ^
Men and women are absoutely different in any number of ways; what got that guy from Google fired was (a) he was remarkably obtuse in his reading of the literature and made statements/cited articles that were just factually incorrect, (b) wrote with an agenda that he struggled to back up at various point, and (c) was bad at conveying the valid points he did have to make.
I'm doing this off memory, but I remember he cited a study saying that men and women had different degrees of certain personality traits such as aggressiveness and neuroticism, but he completely overstated the differences found in the report and the more general findings that such behaviorial traits wouldn't remotely explain the disparity in tech presence). This Wired article does a good job fsking him for being scientifically dishonest.
Again, it's always strange to me that the fallback that "well men and women are different" explains everything, and that when a woman doesn't get something it's her nature and when a guy doesn't it's because people are out to get him.
February 26th, 2018 at 6:34 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 8:53 PM ^
I read the memo as well; I'd like you hear where you think he was right and, say, others are wrong. Also, I'm not sure what Ph.D. your friend "in the field" has or why it matters that she's a woman (please don't pull the whole "I've got a friend who is X, so I know what I'm talking about"), but your comment is full of generalities so I've got no idea where to start guessing. I've worked in tech for almost a decade now after previously being a lawyer, so I've seen two fields with a lot of presumptions and hostility toward outsiders.
But you know what, I'm fine with not talking about this with you. I've seen you state your peace elsewhere, and while I don't really agree with it, you are entitled to it.
February 26th, 2018 at 10:49 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 11:45 PM ^
Okay, I'm still not really sure what your argument is here. Your still-unnamed friend who is a leader in sexual neuroscience (honestly, if she's as famous as you claimed, nobody will "shoot the messenger" if you provide citations to her discourse on the matter) hasn't provided any additional insights. So I'm still going to need something more than your opinion.
Also, I'm going to take an issue with your claims that Damore didn't suggest women possessed traits that made them less ready to work in leadership roles at Google, as his very own TL;DR said
Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
He then said later on:
I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
He then tries to step back from that a bit by saying the differences are small and thus might not explain why, say, Google's technical staff is 80% male, 75% in "leadership" roles. Which makes sense, because the whole "women are from Venus, men are from Mars" routine he's using wouldn't come close to explaining that gap, especially when the persistent gaps between men and women in mathematics and other STEM-like fields aren't nearly that pronounced. And weirdly, he doesn't discuss the near-total lack of racial diversity at Google as well, where close to 92% of all employees are either white or Asian.
As I said above, he makes some banal points that aren't being debated. Men and women are different in any number of ways, and there absolutely is a higher preference for mathematics and working with "things" compared to "people" with men and women. But these are small differences, oftentimes molded and affected by social, economic, and political pressures that far outstrip whatever natural differences may exist. He argues that women have different personalities, on average, compared to men, which is rather fully accepted in the literature (it seems). But then he cites a report about personality differences between men and women and seemingly only reads the title and the first page, since in the results section the authors point out that
Overall, the magnitudes of sex differences (expressed in terms of the d statistic, in which the mean scores of one gender are subtracted from the mean scores of the other and are then divided by the pooled standard deviation1) were relatively small to moderate in size (see Table 1). On average, across the ISDP nations, the magnitude of sex differences in personality traits was largest for neuroticism (d .40).
And the Cohen's d number cited isn't even that large.
So again, he got fired because he said, at best, misleading statements about another gender and insinuated that women couldn't cut it in leadership because they wanted more work-life balance and that "Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more "feminine," then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally "feminine" roles." That's not going to fly, especially in the ham-handed way he tried to argue his points. And that doesn't even get to the merits of his argument that Google shouldn't try to change too much because "currently those willing to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences," as oftentimes "work-life balance" simply means raising families and contributing to the work force, duties not often expected of a father to nearly the same degree.
So again, I'm glad we can keep this civil, but unless you have something more substantive than your friend's unstated opinions to the merits of his firing, I don't see this really being a discussion.
February 26th, 2018 at 6:36 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 7:43 PM ^
was in The Economist, in typically sober, methodical, data-driven Economist style, but highly readable and styled as a letter from Google's Larry Page to Damore). It's really worth a read, and articulates a much better deconstuction of the Damore memo than the reflexive "it was offensive to women" argument (which it was, and which is enough to get you fired almost anywhere, but not enough to win an argument).
February 26th, 2018 at 9:10 PM ^
Thanks. I actually get the Economist and check their site semi-frequently, so I remember reading this response when it came out over the summer, but I couldn't remember where.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:47 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 6:21 PM ^
That might be a tad hyperbole, but something like a third of their class goes to one of the Ivy's (and like, the good Ivy's, not Brown or Cornell) or MIT/Stanford. Here's probably a better example - getting into Tufts University is assumed by basically everyone there, even though that school is probably a top-30 university.
Again, my larger point is that these are some of the more driven young women you'll meet.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:11 PM ^
Every generation of men in human history have looked at the next generation of men and scoffed at their weakness, softness, lack of achievement, etc. I am so fucking sick of hearing about how bad ass my grandpa's generation was for fighting in WWII. Yeah, he did fight in WWII. He also cheated on my grandma like it was a job, drank like sailor on shore leave, and died in his early 60s of cancer he most likely contracted in Europe during WWII.
In other words, the kids aren't as bad as we think, and we aren't as good...
February 26th, 2018 at 5:18 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:20 PM ^
I was raised by a Greatest Generation member and a fucking Baby Boomer. I regularly got the how crummy-your-generation is business from both of them. Fun times...
February 27th, 2018 at 1:11 PM ^
Every generation gives that type of shit to their younger generation but, they're the ones raising the younger generation so isn't that a reflection upon themselves and their parenting skills?
February 26th, 2018 at 5:26 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:55 PM ^
Your assumption is that these men were "braver" than men now. That is...dubious...
I just saw this factoid brought back up again, because of the gun debate and discussions about desensitization in the U.S. to violence, but did you know that one US General estimated that fewer than 3 in 10 soldiers would actually fire their weapons during combat during WWII? Only 3 in 10. Estimates indicated that that number had gone up to 8 in 10 by Vietnam, in part due to cultural shifts, and simple practices like troops using human silhouettes to shoot at.
So, if you are using one cop at one school as an example of men being less likely to "be men" and "rush into danger," or to "pull the trigger when the time comes," you are most likely off base. In fact, given that starting in the 80s every few years we break the record for worst mass shootings by men "willing to pull the trigger," I'd suggest we've maybe gone just a hint too far the other way...
February 26th, 2018 at 6:59 PM ^
That assertion by S.L.A. Marshall has been thoroughly debunked. Not only did he conduct no serious study, but it appears that he pulled his 75% number out of thin air.
February 26th, 2018 at 7:19 PM ^
Yeah, I know the figures themselves are open to debate, and he certainly didn't literally sit there and do a random sample to see who shot and who didn't. But the general idea - that there was a problem with American soliders actually engaging in combat - was apparently pretty wide spread and agreed upon.
February 26th, 2018 at 6:29 PM ^
I am just glad he made it back to knock up my grandmother. Otherwise...
February 26th, 2018 at 5:11 PM ^
I had a similar experience recently. My son starts high school in September. Last week we went to the high school to learn about his schedule options. We went to the Honors English discussion because he is doing well in English. I'd estimate that 80-90% of the kids who were there considering Honors English were girls. Around the corner were the math, computer, and engineering pathways discussions. Those rooms were mostly full of boys.
I am getting frustrated with how much time the boy spends playing video games. But I remembered that I am the parent so I grounded him from video games this weekend. He wasn't too happy at first, but he got his homework done on time, played some baseball, and ultimately, was less of a zombie. We can't always expect our kids to make the right choices. It's our role as parents to help guide them along until they are responsible enough to choose properly on their own.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:15 PM ^
No motivation, lack of focus and school was the last thing on his priority list.
We had him enrolled in a private all boys school (6-9) and he became a totally different person. Once he went to a co-ed high school, the problems came back but much less severe and by 12th grade he was a normal kid with good to excellent grades. Ended up at a very good college.
Sexual peer pressures and the desire to impress others is simply too much for teen, espcially boys.
February 26th, 2018 at 5:16 PM ^
February 26th, 2018 at 5:16 PM ^
In most of my classes, my female students are better acheivers (65%-75% of the 'A' grades). Frankly, my male students seem way more into video games than anything else. That includes the classroom. My female students are generally more engaged. Certainly I do have outstanding male students, but they are few.