Why are boys behind in school? The gap nobody talks about, TheTinMen Meets Mary Curnock Cook CBE

[@martin5504]

I was a teacher for forty years and am now self employed and lecture around the world. We have failed boys by tightening requirements and not letting teachers teach the people in front of them. Teachers have become facilitators of the present vogue and have lost the art of teaching. Additionally boys (and girls) don't experience enough men and are in classrooms too much instead of learning about the world. They are being taught to pass exams. Girls tend to be more agreeable and pragmatic and boys tend to know intuitively that their situation is wrong and they rebel without knowing why and then turn away from what we are calling education. I have watched this develop over decades of political interference and out of touch academics meddling with spurious illusory educational claptrap.

[@WalterHildahl]

I agree 100% I'm a guy and I would not teach under the presant system.

[@formulaic78]

I teach in a place that is run under a misguided set of pedagogical imperatives and your comment definitely rings true (though I think the boys rebelling isn't necessarily to do with sensing that the entire system is wrong, and more boys being boys). What do you lecture on out of interest?

[@stevecarter8810]

​@@formulaic78 imagine if we really acknowledge that boys will be boys and instead of using that to give up on them, instead used it too design how we engage with them

[@TracyCooper-bm9tm]

We saw the sad situation of the headteacher who committed suicide because they got a bad result on their inspection. Schools in England are under enormous pressure to jump through hoops to get funding, good marks and their exam results are also available to the public. Not only that their schools have been literally falling down over the last 14 years. Teachers are undervalued, overworked and under paid while in many cases paying for class resources out of their own money. Class sizes are larger while encompassing sen students with less support staff than they need. And the money follows the child so if your school gets a bad mark, less students, less funding. The government allows those schools to fail rather than giving the needed funding to improve. Once a school gets a bad report or their stats go down it is a vicious cycle. In this circumstance if you are a head of school are you going to focus more on those who are more willing to learn, and sit at peace and be quiet? Or less willing to learn? Are you going to focus and invest in those who can ensure your school continues to get the funding it needs? Or spend time on specialist education to please very specific students so they won’t ‘rebel’ with very uncertain results and no guarantees it will help their funding. In the same token if you are a teacher who is at the end of their rope, too many kids and not enough support, told time and again to suck it up and get on with it, having to cope with students with varied complex needs and more of them without appropriate help. Human nature says you would embrace those who sit quietly and listen and also give you positive feedback by answering your questions. Boys may be boys but in those circumstances I can totally understand why the teacher would simply count them as a lost cause. They are simply unable to be superhuman. A fact that they will probably feel guilty about. Women teachers are more likely to suck it up and do their best under the circumstances. Male teachers are I imagine less likely to put up with it which is maybe why there are less of them. Perhaps it is best to find out who made the education system this way I.e. the money follows the child so that struggling comprehensives are pitted against private schools in competition with one another. You can vote against governments who are funding private schools with public money in the form of tax breaks when state schools are falling down from lack of maintenance. You can campaign against competition in state schools and like Finland, make private schools illegal so that every school is great and child focussed. Yo do this you need to campaign and you need to vote. Destroying your vote is not the answer. The government were petrified when a certain politician became very popular with young people. They know if young people vote then their policies will have to become very different as young people are generally more left leaning. The gov don’t want that. They want to keep young people fed up. If you do not vote and the gov you do not want gets in it is as if you voted for them yourself. Not voting is a political act. You are allowing a gov to get in that acts against your interests. It is just as much your responsibility as it is those who vote for bad governments. The best way for you people to make a mark is to stand up and say you will vote. That you will vote for the least awful government and you will continue to vote against parties that ruin your chances. Find out what parties stand for. A lack of vote or a spoiled vote is a vote for policies you hate.

[@stevecarter8810]

@TracyCooper-bm9tm yes I think that point about men not staying around is what I think is behind it. The video talks about a lack of men in female professions, but history shows that men drive women out of prestigious professions and women end up in positions of diligence, where they get underpaid. Besides nursing and teaching, also the history of telephone operators and computer programmers shows this. I work in software engineering and I also see the diligent engineers and managers being overlooked in terms of being given influence, and ignorant superiors creating a stream of impediments for them to handle.

[@geeknetworkz]

Good job. I hope this channel grows, people need to hear this! Also, I find it inspiring that the guest said she left school at 16 and didn't go to university until her 40s.

[@alfreedfandangle]

Thanks George. Keep up the good work.

[@Aoi_Fans]

8:40 I vehemently disagree with the "Stage not age" hypothesis. The number one issue is the education system is a women's world. If you want to improve boys education you have to increase that ratio of male to female teachers. Having 92% of primary school teachers female is unhealthy and could be the primary reason for the skewered numbers. Be interesting to drill into the number, if a school has a higher number of male teachers, are they more likley to send more boys to uni?

[@nnglnd]

Men have to jump through more hoops than women to become teachers

[@formulaic78]

I had only female teachers in primary school and had no problem achieving. Small class sizes probably helped with that though in my rural school. I am also now a male teacher and possibly the only thing I bring to the classroom that the female teachers don't always is the ability to be dominant when needs be. But then I've seen plenty of submissive/passive male teachers too.

[@drew6194]

You are spot on in your analysis. Sadly, nothing will come of it. In fact, they're likely to double down on this unhealthy situation.

[@philipc8280]

@@nnglnd also it can effect their dating opportunities. They're viewed with less respect and many women want someone who makes more than them

[@Soccer67]

​@formulaic78 The exception does not make the rule. And lots of children of single parent (fatherless) homes come out just fine, BUT the most common factor for those adults with major negative issues in their lives like criminal records, is thst thry had no father's taking part in their upbringing.

[@KairosDBT]

I'm surprised that you don't have a lager subscription base. I'm not terribly influential but I'm sharing your channel with friends.

[@TheTinMenBlog]

I'm new to KZbin, I only just launched my account here - a lot larger of a community on Instagram if you follow me there!

[@jimsimpson1006]

🍺

[@anitagaildemitroff1541]

Thank you so much to both of you for such an excellent interview. I've lived in the US and the UK. Now I am in Spain. The one constant in my life is the classroom: 35 plus years as a teacher. What you say rings true across the sectors in many countries.

[@kylemenos]

How many programs promote men to join further education? I can't name a single one.

[@matthewatwood8641]

Yet the list of organizations doing that for females would be too long to put in a comment

[@DaddyBiscuits]

In about 2008, my male friend got a free computer for signing on to train as a teacher which the women who applied weren't eligable for.

[@TorianTammas]

Why do men need to be promoted? My wife had to jump through the same hoops to become a doctor of medicine like everyone else. They all sat in the same boat.

[@lisa6356]

​@@TorianTammas I was thinking the same thing.

[@MrBigbangbuzz]

Finally found your podcast .. I’d love to help the movement

[@andrewmallory3854]

I appreciate the attention to this phenomenon. Just over half way thru so maybe you talk about this but I think we need to look at motivation of children in education. Disadvantaged groups, [immigrants and women and racial minorities] tend to prioritise education as a way up/out. Children are encouraged to study and be interested in learning. There is - I contend - a tendency to view boys as entitled to succeed. There is often a preference for boys and they get doted on and feted from the get go. Girls have to work harder to get the attention. This preference is still happening even in the UK. I think girls on average ARE doing better at school. The broader question is - what and how are we teaching? And grading. I think an issue is we start grading children too early and amplify small initial differences. Perhaps girls are a few weeks ahead in language skills at school entry age than boys - and maybe boys are a few weeks ahead in motor skills. It needs more study but that would be enough combined with the reinforcement of self image by excessive and too early assessment and grading.

[@witlesswonderthe2nd883]

They use to educate boys and girls in separate classes because they knew they needed different approaches to learning so education was tailored to the different ways each sex learns. In addition to that they had the 11plus which meant both sexes who were academic were given opportunities they needed, schools need various options to suit different children which can help them achieve their best possible potential. As a parent to a son and daughter my son struggled when he first started school with reading, luckily for him he had an old style teacher who spotted the problem and spoke to me about her concerns. She set up a before school learning schedule to monitor and assess as she wasn’t sure if he was dyslexic. Turns out he wasn’t dyslexic it was phonics that was no good for him as a learning tool so she adjusted how she taught him, once she did that he flew past 95% of his class year reading and was using vocabulary and language phrases they’d never seen before in such a child so young. They said he instinctively knew what to use where which even a lot of adults couldn’t achieve. In high school he went onto excel and pass his maths, chemistry and physics A levels it boycotted university in favour of an engineering apprenticeship.

[@DaddyBiscuits]

Seems entirely informed. Now with all your good points thrown out of the education system, what could we say is the intent of the education system? I can observe it has tried to create equality by providing the best to all, but that didnt result in equal outcomes of high standards. So what might be done to reult in equal outcomes of poor standards?

[@TorianTammas]

did that as girls were originally taught to become domestic house workers for the husband and kids. Only later women were allowed even access to more knowledge and higher schools with the same topics than men.

[@DaddyBiscuits]

@@TorianTammas Is that true? I wonder when the change came about, for what reasons and which option results in better outcomes for the majority of people.

[@googitygig]

Excellent content yet again

[@Elegant]

There are a few things to say here; 1) men are encouraged in to the education sector and in fact promoted over women. 2) the style of education was actually designed for boys, but the culture of boys has changed (as has society's view of education) so boys disregard education 3) behaviour is a problem in a class of 30. Finland does not have this problem and boys do well there.

[@garysalisbury8949]

My son didnt have a male teacher until secondary school. The only man in the ealier years was the caretaker. So all the staff with authority who knew everything were women, and the staff who moved heavy stuff and vleaned up sick was a man. So theres your role models.

[@patcartier8171]

OK. How can you attract men to the teaching profession? By paying better salaries. Now, can you pay better salaries to male teachers than female teachers? Of course not: that would be gross, _very_ gross. So the male/female ratio cannot change, since the one policy which could make it change is illegal, and justly so. End of discussion.

[@drewdavis8142]

Great video George! Very Interesting! I've always wondered the relationship between the lack of education/community and Impulsive violent behavior? Maybe focusing on boys/men being more engaged in school may lower rates of violent crime?..... Maybe you have already talked about this and I missed it?....

[@kylemenos]

Imagine if women at the age of twelve were given natural steroids and did not have the framework of society behind them to deal with that increase in strength and energy. Instead we drug them to counter the effects, tell them consistently to act like women do, enforce law against them more harshly and all the people behind their mental framework are women who never taken the steroids. That's boys experience. The violence is roid-rage because they are treated like women by women and we jail or drug them if they are not acting like women. What you do to lower crime in boys is treat them with respect and instil the values of men by men upon them to motivate them toward virtue and apply a framework to allow them to control their behaviour by releasing their energy in a positive way. Not sitting still in a room for 8 hours a day on rydalin talking about their feelings.

[@matthewatwood8641]

People absolutely have been talking about this for years right up until recently. Quite a lot and it isn't a mystery. Bring back real teaching and make success more knowledge oriented and things will improve quickly.

[@guy72277]

That was a fantastic interview. Great questions from you George and answers from Mary. Do you think that teaching is seen as lower status nowadays due to the salaries so recruiting men will remain difficult because men's attractiveness is judged heavily by status. In the country where I live, teachers are very well paid and there seems to be a good teacher gende balance (although less at preschool level). How much does the decline in sport organised through school contribute to boys excessive exuberance in the classroom. If boys are bored or not ready to learn at a younger age, can they start later and catch up quicker when more mature? If healthy role models for boys like Jordan Peterson are villified by the media then the only role models left for boys will be the shameless like Trump/Tate. Have stem/degree stats been massages by changing the categories? Anyway, I have 3 boys ranging from head of the class to bottom, best at sports to nit sporty and tonnes of friends to introverted and I care about the fate of boys who don't have it very easy. Thanks for your work

[@prschuster]

Why there is more concern for girls and women: * women have been denied opportunities in the past * there is a strong feminist movement that addresses female issues * society is more protective of women and girls / males are on their own

[@judewarner1536]

People have been talking about this, to my certain knowledge, for DECADES. Part of the problem is that educational systems are not set up to address this problem... if it even is one... or, indeed, any other problems of the modern world. The system churns out millions of students with qualifications but little practical understanding and almost zero power to change things for the better. That power is wielded by corporations and politicians whose aim is to preserve their own status quo or improve their own corner.

[@DaddyBiscuits]

Nobody questioned the affirmative action for women, because they were already necessarily dissociated from remembering school, where the girls always academically out performed the boys. We were simply told that girls mature earlier, and are just better. Now we're being told that women don't mature at all.

[@larkop6504]

Attended an all boys grammar school from early nineties to 2000. Education was very basic and could depend on who you got as a teacher. Not personally but a lot of boys would state why are you teaching this is it going to make me rich. You finish college and there is still a large gap to what industry requires. Go overseas and you have boys running there own businesses. Yet in the uk that's illegal. Modern education seems more like conformance exercises than teaching critical thinking.

[@HeyUncleJack]

17:00 certainly, a huge cause of fewer men in schools is that women aren't inclined to pair up with a man who is a school teacher. Hypergamy doesn't favor a school teacher

[@loolui-v4h]

I know it's an old video, but I wanted to share the vid where Sapolsky explains the influence of testosterone under this comment specifically: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gqHHf3iabcuKmdksi=hjxQ7Vqvdj72VVaK He basically explains that testosterone increases the importance of status for the individual, not aggression - it increases the willingness to pursue whatever is currently the signifier of status. And because currently, that is physicality, aggression, and dominance, resource accumulation and individualism, not wisdom, teaching or giving, that's what those with more testosterone are driven towards, as the importance of status neurologically affects their well-being most. He's repeated this finding and elaborated over the course of his career, in humans and non-human primates alike. What I draw from this is that this can be a hormonal vulnerability specifically exploited in men, and enforced by society at large. Whether you call it hypergamy or something else, the end result serves somebody other than the man itself. While the ideal is served in a way that seemingly speaks to his empowerment and individual sense of self. It's as much an issue of masculinity being a fundamentally stifling and abusive ideal right now for the individual who aspires to it, and the focus on it being "toxic" is misguided in the same way that ADHD treatment only becomes priority for the external expressions of it, but not the internal turmoil. The last point, even though I only meant it as a comparison, is also extremely important in this discussion. The issue of underdiagnosis has long been just about underdiagnosis of women, but it's much more so an issue of only treating something when it affects the classroom or other people, and I personally know many men who went undiagnosed just the same, because their hyperactivity is not the primary symptom.

[@GoGreaterGood]

You are not being detailed in your idea. But I will make some assumptions of what you are trying to say. (1) How does hypergamy not favor school teachers? Do you believe that all teachers make too little money? - Well... It depends largely on the area you live in; teachers can easily make 6 figures a year in many places after putting in 10 years or so on the job. On top of that, teachers only work half the days of the year, leaving plenty of room for other endeavors. (2) Are male teachers single more often than the average male in the population? I think not. Surely it also does help that male teachers will be well networked with many females in their everyday studies and work. (3) Bigger picture... Do you believe that all of life is hypergamy? Do you not believe that humans are multifaceted creatures with many driving forces, some bigger in some people than others... and oftentimes the drives even conflicting within a given person?

[@philipc8280]

⁠@@GoGreaterGood 1) teachers do not make that much ever, at least not in the US 2) the sample size is so tiny, who knows! 3) hypergamy isn't a guarantee, but with dating apps as the dominant form of meeting partners it will be

[@thecrankster]

The top GSCE school in the country is a boys school up to year 11.

[@Blueorange22]

Multiple studies show that boys get lower grades for the same work. My favorite one is by Camille Terrier, out of the MIT School of Economics.

[@kylemenos]

Of course they would be every human on the planet has bias to their group. Women have complete control of the first 17 years of human life in a ration of about 80/20%. Not a single person will cry inequality though. Boys are invisible to people.

[@formulaic78]

I would only assume this is because generally boys' behaviour is worse in classroom settings and that may affect the teacher when they put a score next to a name, because rubrics, while often helpful, are not fullproof. A student pulled me up the other day on giving a girl a higher score than my rubric would suggest on a presentation; as I explained to him however, after watching several lacklustre presentations from students who hadn't tried their hardest and hadn't listened closely, an extra point or two probably did go her way because the contrast was so stark and her performance made me feel more exuberant. Having said that if a boy had delivered the same presentation I would have had the same feeling of exuberance I'm sure. I wonder also if handwriting might contribute, as girls often have much more pleasing and legible handwriting.

[@philipc8280]

@@formulaic78 so you feel connected to the way the girl speaks? Yeah that sounds like discrimination to me. The entire purpose for rubrics is to help you be objective. As someone who struggled and almost failed out of school even though I've always been a top test scorer, you should be ashamed of yourself.

[@formulaic78]

@philipc8280 the way you responded to my musings are actually a bit like the guy who made the video, who seemed to want to entirely blame the education system for his poor results even though he described himself as being naughty and acting out. I commented that because this girl in my class, who could have been female or male, did all of the things that had been asked of each student much better than the preceding ones I may have given her a point or two extra out of exuberance. I can promise you I am not remotely ashamed of myself for being human and I would have given the same exuberant extra point or two to any boy who did the same. I also teach second language students so the way people speak is something they are graded on.

[@formulaic78]

​@@philipc8280as a language teacher I certainly do feel connected to the way students speak. If you read my post properly you'll see I have no reason to feel ashamed, unless giving 86 instead of 84 or 85 on an in class presentation worth 5% of final score is a hanging offence.

[@wozhardy]

I live in the north east and i have been going to education events for decades, even ones over the past few days.. Colleges, universities, etc staff do not like me . I have a reputation for asking difficult questions.. i have asked all the issues you mentioned.. They run away from me.. i have been told by organisers not to ask any difficult questions.. i have been followed by staff around events and if i speak to anyone perceived as important, they go to them and pull them away, and i have been asked to leave.. No body wants to hear .theres almost a cultural conspiracy of silence over this.. However, i could always read, even very young. I was bullyed.. I think it is too some teachers not all. Ita all about critical race theory and feminists.. The education system needs to to totally scrapped and re built.. I have indirectly been involved in adult education for decades and i agree ... Im working on a new system.. no one in the education system wants to know.. even discuss it . That includes national, local, government and universities.. again.. If people ask what you say. white working class boys . They are asked to leave ..

[@ErinMokhtar]

School expectations are too hard. My 7th grader gets way too much homework, and he doesn't have the maturity. Both my sons had a hard time learning to write in the early grades, yet they were asking them to write a paragraph in first grade. They just weren't ready. Yet they're good writers now. I think they formed their opinions of school early on that it was tedious and boring. On the other hand they were good at math but would get in trouble for doing mental math and not showing their work and again they just didn't have the patience yet to be methodical.

[@ErinMokhtar]

Also in High school they're often required to keep detailed notebooks even with color coding!! Most boys are just not going to thrive at that. It doesn't suit their styles. It's a good habit to write things down, but they they're not at the right age for that either.

[@ozachar]

No matter the facts, no one will start a national "boys education encouragement" prorgam. All will still discuss only discrimination against girls and women, and how to finance more programs and grants for female education.

[@SketchTheSystem]

Why strive for high grades when it does nothing for you on a personal level in the short term? I only went to Uni because I enjoyed learning and the subject. Had I not enjoyed it or had that interest I wouldn't have engaged. you can't expect kids to do well in school if it's detrimental in the short term. School feels like punishment to many boys and you can't expect them to see the long term picture as they are kids.

[@DaddyBiscuits]

So I wonder why the school leaving age has been raised so greatly in the most recent years? And the push to be "equal" by ensuring more people "choose" to go to university. To me, it's like making people start on a career path at 21, that they could have started at 15, given that most people are unremarkable.

[@DanielMacAndrew]

Most studies which test knowledge show that men out perform women on every category with the exception of fashion. Making education slightly more knowledge based would level the playing field.

[@DerekGotega]

Let’s not forget after 10,000 hours of practicing a skill you can obtain mastery but after 12 years of school you’re virtually useless.

[@bimrebeats]

and after 10,000 hours of bad practice?

[@Paul-d2y8s]

​@@bimrebeatsThat is why we have apprenticeships.

[@TorianTammas]

Well being taught something is not practice. When I practice 10.000 hours of English or French or Latin (as in reading writing, talking) then I become good. In school you are taught and do little practice not to mention that per subject in school you get under 2000 hours of being taught.

[@annai157]

We need to stop talking about "equal outcomes" but rather talk about giving everyone the same *opportunity*.

[@danthony4348]

Boys and girls are not treated the same. The difference in treatment could be a contributing factor when the difference takes the form of discrimination. The imbalance did not always exist. How is social engineering not an obvious cause?

[@DaddyBiscuits]

The classroom structure required boys to behave like girls. It's very difficult to manage a classroom where boys are allowed to behave most naturally. Discrimination should be mandatory.

[@zwatwashdc]

Parents of boys need to send them to boys school.

[@matthewcoombs3282]

12.26 hit the nail on the head....battery farm style, exam harvesting mass education is failing all children, esp boys. Let teachers teach to match their pupils

[@DaddyBiscuits]

There's an issue in teaching. The best teachers get the easiest pupils to teach.

[@g.p616]

Why are boys behind? As an ex-teacher, That’s easy to answer…..The education system is tailored to girls. Our education system requires children to; sit, listen, follow instructions, repeat. Girls are happy to do this, boys are not. What made it work for boys in the past was rigid discipline with punishments. Now the rigid discipline has gone, boys won’t follow this system. It’s the adults fault, the progressives fault. Our boys have been let down.

[@peteroleary9447]

There's some truth in this. Here in the States, one is hard-pressed to find a male K-8 teacher. All too often there isn't a man in the home as well. This prospect is so ideologically radioactive to policy makers that it's not likely to be studied. Interesting your observation abt penmanship -- I've observed it's highly correlated to effective note-taking and maths notation. Kudos to the guest for correctly identifying the gap as _sex_ based - not gender. There's a tell right there.

[@peteroleary9447]

There's some truth in this. Here in the States, one is hard-pressed to find a male K-8 teacher. All too often there isn't a man in the home as well. This prospect is so ideologically radioactive to policy makers that it's not likely to be studied. Interesting your observation abt penmanship -- I've observed it's highly correlated to effective note-taking and maths notation. Kudos to the guest for correctly identifying the gap as _sex_ based - not gender. There's a tell right there.

[@katel7309]

My first thought reading the tube heading was Boys weren't made to sit behind desks. I would re change primary education in Australia if I could.

[@StarGrimm-vo3os]

So often we talk about education but fail to talk about compulsory attendance and peer grouping, age grading. All of these things will be known to be humanitarian disasters at some time in the future. We will just have to watch it play out. The education system was designed to create a consumer socialist labor population. Compulsory attendance and standardization of assimilationist education until late life maturity is shocking. It equates to incarceration of an entire demographic population. I wonder what the impact will be? We think its always been this way but no its really less than a hundred years of experimentation.

[@joshdumbrell4867]

Great stuff

[@bryanevans350]

Thank you very interesting and good to see you rexognising gender bias

[@BillMoAquaponicsLLC]

FEMINISM....💯💥

[@kathieharine5982]

The USA has taken up rote education. We need to get girls more creative and get all students back to the older path of shop and practical courses. Lectures are bad for both all persons. Engineering and computer courses should be taught by appreticeships.

[@annai157]

Advertising is severely biased against males - especially white males. Look at 100 ads for "STEM Education" offerings. I'd guess that greater than 99% will have not a single picture of a white male.

[@aidenalamo6262]

1. The overuse of computers, computer games, and tablets along with phones. 2. Abuse within the family unit. 3. The parents not engaged in their son's education. 4. Lack of exposure to chapter books, riding bikes and establishing healthy friendships with other boys and girls. 5. Teachers having problems in their own lives and bringing it into the classroom. 6. Not enough classroom instruction caused by school pupils disrupting it. 7. Not enough hours of classroom instruction or too much classroom instruction with either too much or too little homework. 8. Not enough blue collar work, such as factories that pay really well, to help reduce poverty.

[@kojoboateng6755]

A bunch of crap. Just tell them to stop feminizing the classroom. Boys don't learn by sitting down for countless hours. Boys learn by doing stuff, experimenting with stuff.

[@TorianTammas]

In my youth there were no computer, no smartphones, and no social media, but the very same problems with kids.

[@robertmueller2023]

21 years of constant, round-the-clock, caught on camera "not talking about"? Gottcha.

[@richardouvrier3078]

Your undue faith in the cornucopia paybacks from all education is indicative of your poor achievement and understanding.

[@formulaic78]

I teach in China with students wanting to come to uk universities. With the somewhat low achieving cohort I have (often going overseas is a way of the parents saving face because their child couldn't get into a good Chinese university) i find that nearly always the laziest students are the boys and the best students are a mix of boys and girls. On average though it's obvious that girls are more diligent (just look at girls handwriting vs boys), which therefore results in generally higher scores because they study more. The boys are also more into videogames, though the girls aren't averse to them either, and spend plenty of time doing online shopping, social media, editing videos etc.

[@badart3204]

Girls fear consequences more which makes them more diligent. Girls will work themselves to death to please their parents while boys will quit if they feel it’s too much (noticed this with the children of immigrants especially). I always chose women for group projects in HS and Uni as their neuroticism makes them not wait till the last minute and too non-confrontational to call me out on assigning myself the easiest work. Girls are absolutely better students as they have more anxiety 100% while boys need to actually have some desire to do it

[@katia7271]

They cant sit all day

[@mage3690]

Speaking of feminism in the educator gender divide, I suspect you could get more feminists to agree more viscerally with your point if you presented it a different way. You're using a "we need to lift up men" approach, which I approve of -- I think it's healthier for everyone to ask "how can we uplift" rather than any other question, but it gets the least response. Mean-spirited feminists might even say "good, girls need all the advantages they can get" -- maybe not out loud, but certainly inside their heads. If you instead pointed out that the criminally low educator salary is probably contributing to the gender pay gap, you could get loads more support loads easier. I like to view problems economically, and this presents an economic fix. Simply raising educator salaries would allow more men to provide for a family on that salary (something society still tends to expect men to do, whether you think that's outdated or not), which would give more boys those crucial early role models. Plus, it _would_ narrow the gender pay gap, win-win. That, and bring back shop class. Maybe shop class is an American thing, but that was one of the 2-3 typically male teaching jobs. They got rid of it because it didn't prepare kids for college, and the result is a generation of young adults with criminally few marketable skills, if they couldn't afford college.

[@Matthew-zu6tm]

The institution of feminist policy is precisely how we got here. It was never about equality most especially how it has conducted itself. So. No. That ideology needs to be put into the dust bin just like other isms.

[@mage3690]

@Matthew-zu6tm I'm not intending to suggest feminism is good, I'm suggesting we work with what we've got. Whether feminism is good or bad is an entirely different debate. You'll find it quite impossible to convince a feminist that feminism is bad. I've presented a way that we don't have to, that will fix educator salaries, and may even start a conversation about other criminally underpaid and female-dominated industries.

[@camgere]

I got to use table saws, band saws and oxy-acetylene torches in junior high school. Best classes ever!

[@psikeyhackr6914]

Schools give boys boring crap to read. There is free stuff on the Internet now. *Star Surgeon* by Alan E. Nourse *The Cosmic Computer* by H. Beam Piper *Black Man's Burden* & *Border, Breed nor Birth* by Mack Reynolds *Omnilingual* by H Beam Piper *Damned If You Don't* by Randall Garrett* *The Fourth "R"* by George O. Smith *Space Prison* by Tom Godwin *Little Fuzzy* by H. Beam Piper *The Servant Problem* by Robert F. Young *Deathworld* by Harry Harrison *The Status Civilization* by Robert Sheckley *Ultima Thule* by Mack Reynolds *Adaptation* by Mack Reynolds *The Common Man* by Mack Reynolds *The Pirates of Ersatz* by Murray Leinster *Talents, Incorporated* by Murray Leinster

[@djlivvy46]

In reading these comments, I haven't seen one yet which mentions peer pressure. That is the energy which easily overrides any other influence whether it be from parents or schools. Maybe if you can teach young boys to stop calling each other 'g@y' for the slightest step outside the box, you might get somewhere with this issue.

[@TheCompleteGuitarist]

A facile point that goes nowhere. Scools are oriented around female behaviour/performance and when boys challenge it they are called unruly or disruptive.

[@Insanio]

Are you a woman?

[@azzam593]

real

[@philliphickox4023]

"The gap nobody talks about" that is not exactly true. People have been talking about the "Gap" for at least a decade or more. Perhaps the question is why has the gap allowed to become wider and more apparent?

[@matthewatwood8641]

Even though we know exactly what the cause is. It's because nobody wants to talk about THAT.

[@philliphickox4023]

@@matthewatwood8641 It's like not conducting research or collecting data just in case the research or data shows what you don't want it to show.

[@badart3204]

The gap has widened because fixing it would be a ton of effort that policy makers don’t think is important enough to do

[@annarboriter]

The gap will only become a priority when the negative consequences affect middle class women

[@philliphickox4023]

@@annarboriter When that happens, it may be far too late to repair the damage.