
Why Are So Few Male Students Studying Abroad? - Balgair
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/male-students-studying-abroad/583828/
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throwaway_20768
I find myself kind of scratching my head at some of the news stories about
gender differences these days, and how there always seems to be a spin that
casts males in a negative light.

Fewer male students study abroad? It’s that are lazy.

Or this one from the other day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19275394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19275394)

Girls are much harder working and get better grades in school, but lose out in
the office because they don’t know how to skate through with minimal effort
the ways boys are taught to do.

I mean, can we seriously discuss gender outcomes that don’t reduce to:

\- when males are on the losing end, it’s because they are inferior in some
way

\- when women are on the losing end, it’s because they have been set up to
fail.

Sadly, any real discussion of the narrative bias gets you branded a “men’s
rights” activist and dismissed as a crank.

~~~
krapp
I don't see any claim in either article that men are inferior or lazy. One can
just as easily interpret issues regarding male performance in school as being
cultural or societal, or even systemic - that both men and women are being
"set up to fail" in different ways. Even the New York Times article linked to
in the other HN thread (and the thread itself) suggests not that male students
are lazy or inferior, but that the incentives created by the way genders are
socialized lead to those different outcomes.

You claim to want to have a serious discussion about gender outcomes, but
rather than doing so, you're just complaining about the way people treat you
from behind a throwaway account and, in my opinion, a "narrative bias" that
exists more in your interpretation than the actual text.

Do you believe these articles are outright lying? That male students don't
underperform versus female students, or that male students don't study abroad
less often than female students? If you believe the sociological trends exist
as described, to what do you attribute them, and what solutions do you feel
might best address them?

~~~
throwaway_20768
I don't doubt the trends that are being reported. As I said, I dispute the
narrative being fit to the data:

> Samantha Brandauer, who runs Dickinson College’s study-abroad office, told
> me she has experienced this firsthand. In her past job at Gettysburg
> College, she teamed up with a colleague to convene student focus groups on
> why men didn’t go abroad and what the college could do about it. What she
> discovered was a “bro mentality” among men in college—a culture in which
> male students don’t want to leave their friends to study abroad and are
> heavily influenced by their classmates in making choices about what to do in
> college. “Part of this is a messaging problem, because the way we talk about
> study abroad as a transformative experience just doesn’t resonate with
> college-age men,” Brandauer says. “They don’t want to be transformed.”

I may have missed something in my reading, but to my eye this is the only
explanation offered for this trend in this article. And in my estimation, this
is a lazy explanation that fits a political narrative a little too easily.

And yes, I am hiding behind a thowaway account, but I’m not complaining about
treatment of me or people like me. This is a trend I’ve noticed in articles
that blur the boundary between editorial and reporting, and I don’t think it
is fair to anyone.

------
imh
I was so bummed when I looked into this in college. Going for a physics
degree, there was basically nowhere I could go in the spanish speaking world
with classes that counted towards my degree. Which is nuts, since physics is a
degree almost everywhere.

