
A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls - pavornyoh
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/upshot/a-disadvantaged-start-hurts-boys-more-than-girls.html?ref=business
======
enlightenedfool
Glad that there's a discussion. It would help humanity to also give enough
focus on boy child development so that we could save their future, avoid the
crimes they commit and their languishing in jails.

~~~
forrestthewoods
I've always wondered how much of the gap comes from a near total lack of male
teachers in K-5.

~~~
cperciva
Probably quite a lot. I'm reminded of a study I read a year or two ago which
looked at academic performance in high school; girls received considerably
higher class marks on average. However, this effect vanished when they took
standardized tests ... and it also vanished when they had male teachers.

Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something
else, I don't know; but gender definitely makes a difference in teaching.

~~~
woah
Would there be a suspicion that this was because of sexism, if the genders
were reversed?

~~~
bsder
I think you are looking for something voluntary when that is almost certainly
not the case.

1) A friend of mine once astutely commented that the diagnosis for ADHD was
basically "middle class with behaviors which annoy female schoolteachers."

2) Boys tend to challenge authority from teens to early 20's to try and work
out their place in the world. Most male teachers just roll with it until they
have to make a sarcastic, embarrassing remark which short circuits it (never
heckle a teacher or a stand-up comic--they've seen it all before). Female
teachers tend to react more strongly. I suspect its a physical thing--boys
start getting problematically large for most women about 7th or 8th grade and
if, as a female, you don't nip it in the bud hard and fast, you can lose
control over the situation.

3) Boys need male role models just as women need female role models.

4) Male teachers don't tend to view approval by their students as something
useful or desirable (in the case of approval by the female students--it's
downright dangerous). The better female teachers are in the same boat, but
there are a _LOT_ of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's
approval.

If we stew all that together with an absence of male teachers, I suspect that
you have more than enough unconscious bias to account for everything.

~~~
XorNot
(1) doesn't apply to the actual results of the study reported, which finds the
(oft-found) effect that boys from low socioeconomic groups (not the middle
class) are disproportionately disadvantaged compared to their female peers.

The usual explanation tends to be that the outs in progression to university-
level education are much more available to young men than women overall, as
well as the worst excesses of lost potential (i.e. gang membership and
fatalities are disproportionately male).

(2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will,
what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real
improvement in teaching outcomes.

(4) also demands actual evidence.

~~~
bsder
Evidence? Mostly personal experience of my own teaching along with my parents
who both taught.

> (2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will,
> what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real
> improvement in teaching outcomes.

There are two pieces to this. One is physical and one is social.

As for physical: if I'm managing a classroom, I have a lot of authority by
virtue of being 6"+, 100bs+ bigger than most of the students. My voice alone
is far more powerful than that of a woman. In addition, I can embarrass or
insult a troublemaker without much fear of physical repercussion. This is
really huge as it gives me a lot of graded options that a woman would have to
think twice about. And, at bottom, the students have to wonder exactly how
much damage I could do to them if they really push me into a corner.

As for social: my personal experience is that a lot of female teachers want
compliance (personal control dynamic) while male teachers can function as long
as there is no interference (group outcome dynamic). A good example of this
was an exchange between my parents:

<female> "I want them to quit chewing tobacco in my class" (Note: personal
control dynamic).

<male> "Well, you're not going to get that without throwing somebody out of
class every day. Are you willing to disrupt your class for that?"

<female> "Not really."

<male> "Okay, so presumably you could ignore it if they don't spit in the back
of the class (group outcome dynamic)?"

<female> "I guess, but ..."

<male> "Fine. That's achievable by telling them: "If you're man enough to
chew, you're man enough to swallow it (Note: peer embarrassment). If I see any
on the floor, all the people I see chewing are cleaning it." Now they'll
police each other, and you'll only occasionally have to send one to the
office."

> there are a LOT of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's
> approval.

Go teach at a school. There are always quite a few women who want to be "buds"
with the students. I don't really see this among the men except in the
genuinely dangerous cases.

~~~
Benichmt1
In regards to your point about the physical size being a thing: I worked at an
inner city school and one of the teachers that could get students in line like
nobody else was a 6'5" 275 lb man who worked as a biker bar bouncer on
weekends.

This was middle school, so maybe the effect was exaggerated, but he could stop
fights like no other.

To your point about trying to gain the approval of students, the dynamic
definitely makes a big difference. Teachers that tried to be the 'fun' teacher
were taken advantage of time and time again. I wish this wasn't the case, but
an authoritarian role was the best way to provide consistency, stability, and
true opportunity for learning in these types of classrooms.

------
parennoob
I suspect this is true for a larger cross-section of society in the USA –
_disadvantaged_ males are hurt more than _disadvantaged_ females. However,
_advantaged_ males are way more successful than _advantaged_ females. This
leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where males in high positions
positing that men have an advantage because of their gender (because in the
already advantaged group, they have seen the additional advantages of being
male), and calling for more opportunities for females.

To give a practical example – as an Asian male who is not that good at coding,
if I ask someone to explain some code to me, I am met with way less enthusiasm
than if a female coder asks the same question. On the other hand, the guy
giving the talk at the event has already written 10 libraries used by
thousands of users, and codes kernel exploits in his spare time. He _is
already at a high position in life_ (in geek terms anyway), and tells me,
"Hey, you have male privilege and weren't told to not code at elementary
school. So we're going to focus on helping women more at this event."

I wonder how we can solve this conundrum and give disadvantaged women at the
top, and disadvantaged men at the bottom access to opportunities. One thing
that would definitely lead to progress (in my opinion) is a recognition and
broader understanding that "male privilege" is often (but not always) confined
to the top 1-2% of males in a given broad category. The rest of us often
suffer the same impostor syndrome, rejection, and nervousness, regardless of
our gender.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think a good start would be getting rid of the feminism-as-status-symbol
problem. That guy who dismissed you because you're not a woman and therefore
privileged was expressing a belief that's most likely just signalling his
status as "enlightened person". If we can stop that, we can start having a
movement towards equality that doesn't hurt both genders more than it helps
them.

------
jqm
Boys have trouble being ready for kindergarten and having self discipline. But
those that do make it, even though they are fewer, tend to do better than
their female counterparts in later life.

Kindergarten activities and society's ideas of self discipline aren't really
the conditions human life evolved under. Maybe fighting and looking for
action/excitement are the same qualities that make boys successful later (if
it doesn't kill or otherwise ruin them first).

Here is my theory (after hours of watching the discovery channel). You don't
need many males biologically speaking. So for males, it's do or die from day
one. Mostly it's die, but there are a few winners that pass their genes on.
Women, as long as they are fertile, don't necessarily enter the same
competition... they are the prizes.

Of course civilization doesn't work very well with all the males running
around trying to kill each other and breed all the women, so we have laws and
religions and kindergartens and diversity training classes. Which kind of puts
males (and females maybe to an extent) in a biologically uncomfortable
position. Those that succeed in this unnatural environment are those that
channel their natural impulses into the pathways society has set up. The poor
disadvantaged souls that aren't ready for kindergarten and wind up in prison
for violent crimes? Well... they might have been leading the pack 20,000 years
ago.

~~~
XorNot
Evopsyche is pseudo-science.

EDIT: To expand - it is useless to speculate on psychology in an evolutionary
context, because we have precisely 0 observation supported models of what
anything was like many thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of
evidence that a lot of modern narrative was constructed to suit the current
gender roles.

For example, "hunter-gatherer" is a complete misnomer. It should "gatherer-
hunter". Because evidence shows that 80-90% of early nutrition was likely
gathered by the tribe, and that hunting was exceptionally infrequent and
probably a huge waste of resources the majority of time it was engaged in.

~~~
JupiterMoon
> EDIT: To expand - it is useless to speculate on psychology in an
> evolutionary context, because we have precisely 0 observation supported
> models of what anything was like many thousands of years ago. We do however
> have plenty of evidence that a lot of modern narrative was constructed to
> suit the current gender roles.

Really? I thought that anthropologists studied remote tribe in e.g. the Amazon
basin in order to gather exactly this type of data?

~~~
XorNot
There's very few uncontacted tribes, and more importantly, uncontacted tribes
themselves _are_ outliers to the general human population.

They also tend to defy most evopsyche gender stereotyping anyway because
they're totally different cultures with wildly different understandings of
things.

------
copsarebastards
At a very basic level, when I was volunteering helping the homeless, I saw a
great deal of disparity. There are many homeless shelters and programs that
only take in women and children, and many shelters which accept people of all
genders but have limited space will make men wait to gain entrance, while
letting in women and children, so that if someone doesn't get in, it's always
men. Donations are frequently given under the condition that they go to help
homeless women and children.

I do understand some of the legitimate reasons for this: women are at higher
risk to be raped and experience more medical issues related to homelessness.
But this only accounts for some of the disparity.

Part of the issue here is that there's a belief that adult males _should_ be
able to support themselves. This is evident in the programs that do serve men:
while homeless programs that target women provide food, shelter, medical care,
and childcare, the few homeless programs which target men almost universally
focus on helping homeless men get jobs. Men do experience privilege in
employment when they're actually employed, but this idea is inapplicable to
the homeless. Most homeless people are mentally ill, and a mentally ill man is
no more employable than a mentally ill woman.

~~~
justifier
children?! where do you live?

in sf finding a shelter for children is disgustingly difficult and, as i
finally concluded, impossible on weekends

i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs'
about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing
ire

programs to help the homeless are flawed, i know it first hand, but
complaining about someone else's idea of a solution does the least possible to
help

if you want a shelter organised under your own incentives i'd suggest starting
your own

it's an asshole thing to say but look at the landscape of shelters

currently we have overcrowded, underfunded understaffed solutions:

some universal, few women only, few men only

how do we remove the gender bias?

bulk the universal with the necessary staff that administer the specific needs
of the gender exclusive shelters

but the universal shelters are already overcrowded, underfunded and
understaffed so to ask more of them would only aggravate the issues further

so we need more shelters, and to have more people willing to open and operate
a shelter, and some people get the will to do so by focusing their attention
on a specific group, in this case gender based

why is there gender bias in shelters? i'd argue because the people who are
willing to put in the work choose to create an environment for the gender bias

should we regulate out the bias with legislation forbidding discrimination
based on gender? in the current landscape i only see that harming the issues
because then those that have the personal will to run a gender biased shelter
will lose their incentive and simply do something else, limiting the number of
shelters available to share in the solution

instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter
program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out proactively

~~~
copsarebastards
> i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs'
> about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing
> ire

It's not a conflation, it's acknowledging what I believe to be a causal
relation. If I'm correct, changing the beliefs will help fix the issue.

> instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter
> program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out
> proactively

Yes. The solution to disparity is enough abundance that it doesn't matter.

~~~
justifier
my bad, i called it conflating because the differences between your own
beliefs and the apparent beliefs of others were lost and i interpreted your
statement as speaking for each

    
    
        ..acknowledging what I believe to be a causal
        relation. If I'm correct..
    

this new language clears up that confusion

------
Mimick
What I notice on boys vs girls is that girls are more likely to get/accept
help from their families and people around them. Specially financially for
like the purpose of education.

I was there, I just pretended like more education doesn't worth it that much
(not on US btw).

------
dropit_sphere
My guess is that most things---good and bad---have a disproportionate effect
on boys.

~~~
hugh4
Makes sense. Consistent with a greater prevalence of men than women at both of
society's extremes. Evolutionary strategy suggests taking higher-risk paths
for male phenotypes than female phenotypes.

~~~
mherkender
Maybe it's just cultural. I don't see why risk taking favors men millions of
years ago.

~~~
Super_Jambo
Large risks imply large potential rewards (otherwise you're just being dumb).

But in terms of genetics the female upside is limited by the very high costs
of child bearing & the limited number of children they can physically have.
The male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can
have sex with.

1 / 200 men are apparently descended from Genghis Khan! This feat would simply
be impossible for any woman of that era.

~~~
belorn
You are describing one reproductive strategy used by males, which is not true
for all men, and is defently not true when looking beyond humans.

Having many low investments into offspring can be effective, but it is also
risky. The more champion based a race is (one male per many females), the more
energy is going to be spent on competition. The offspring will also have to
depend solely on the mother, since each child is just one of many from a
single male and has thus less individual investment value.

The alternative strategy is to focus on a smaller number of children, making
sure that that the reproductive investment has a higher chance to be
successful. Children gets the value of having two parents that are invested in
the offspring, but there are issues of "cheating" (an observed behavior in
many animals).

Of course, I am only describing male strategy here and naturally it can not
exist in a vacuum. Female strategy often has higher initial cost, but it does
not dictate the outcome. In the case of humans also, the observed strategy in
both sexes is normally said to be a mix strategy, so it is far more complex
than just saying that the male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number
of women they can have sex with.

~~~
Super_Jambo
So you would argue that men (particularly young men) do not exhibit greater
risk taking behaviour than women? Or do you have some other explanation for
this propensity?

Non-humans do not I think enter into the discussion, and a strategy doesn't
have to be universal to have a big enough effect on our psychology to be worth
worrying about at the level of education policy.

~~~
belorn
Im saying that the conclusion will never be correct if we try categorize men,
particularly young men, as having a reproductive strategy which research has
shown as not true for humans.

Risk behavior is complex concept, goes well beyond reproductive strategies.
Behavior is significant more effected by culture than genes, and culture is
effected by gender identification rather than sex.

Would you be surprised if transgenders has a identical risk taking behavior in
relation to the gender which they identify themselves as? Would you be
surprised if sexual presence has no impact at all? In both cases it would
strongly imply that reproductive strategy has no impact on risk taking
behavior.

Some explanation for the claimed propensity of men taking higher risk would be
that being successful is more rewarded socially for men then women, while
averageness and failure is generally socially more for men than women. Finding
root causes for that social pressure is harder, but my guess is that it has
both biological reasons and historical ones.

------
pmalynin
Where to even begin,

Part of this issue I feel is, as mentioned in the article, is that boys are
taught from the young age to take care of their problems, which leads to more
isolation. Another important reason I feel is the rising amount of "girls-
only" opportunities that systematically make boys feel inadequate and since
they are not able to participate for whatever reason (e.g. "its only for
girls") they continue to lag behind. I even have a perfect example of this, my
city has a "Girls Learning Code" meetup / lecture series that while advertises
being gender neutral is clearly not so, the question is how many meetups are
there that are for boys, e.g. "Boys Learning Code" (creating these would be
classified under men 's rights activism and therefore dismissed). My point is
(or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're
automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting
opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand,
available to girls from all backgrounds. There has also been a decline in male
bonding occurring at the young age, which I (and some academics) believe is
very important to male development over all. This is caused by the fact that
traditionally boys-only facilities (in this specific example Scouts Canada)
have been pressured into accepting girls, which prohibits boys
from...essentially being boys. Girl Guides of Canada received no such
pressure. Coming back to the issue of masculinity, even though many young
adults might have good enough grades to get into university they might not be
high enough to go into fields that wouldn't cause strange questions and don't
have stigma around them if you're male (I'm talking about fields such as
Medicine, Law, Engineering, Computer Science), they might have the grades to
get into Arts, specifically psychology, nursing and things such as women
studies, all of which have a very high female to male ratio (and are generally
considered a "girls" field) making boys pursue other interests (such as not
going to university) instead for the fears of unsexing themselves.

(Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America? I've immigrated
from an Eastern-Block country as a teenager to NA and I've never seen these
problems because communism required that all members of the society do
essentially the same jobs, that is why would you sacrifice half of the working
populace, so you have women in high power positions, police, factories, the
military, a lot of girls even take mathematics and computational sciences,
sure there were problems but not at this scale (my grandmother was a Chemist
and my mother was a corporal in the Defense Ministry and also studied thermal
physics in University); I've never even imagined it was an issue elsewhere in
the world until after I moved to Canada)

~~~
nv-vn
>My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good
start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the
same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the
other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds.

This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all
girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same
thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at
the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about
exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons
affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically
doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge
advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer
Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal
opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every
single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really
skewed edge cases.

>Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America...

I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to
fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up
to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most
successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots
of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be
leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could
possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole
it's proven extremely difficult to do.

~~~
asgard1024
> think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to
> fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up
> to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most
> successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots
> of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be
> leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could
> possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole
> it's proven extremely difficult to do.

I disagree there is a binary choice. Educational system in Finland was
intended to address the inequality, but in the effect it actually helped the
performance.

On the other hand, the U.S. with No Child Left Behind policy failed, mostly
because it didn't address the inequality.

I think there are two things conflated here: power and choice. We should
strive for equality in power, but still give people the choice. If you have
the choice, then no one puts you below. I think the fallacy here is that
people actually don't need huge resources to become successful, only modest
ones. So you can distribute resources equally and yet the best people won't be
topped out.

Contrary to popular opinion, lack of possibility to be rich wasn't the biggest
obstacle in Eastern European countries. The biggest obstacle was existing
bureaucracy (which actually had more power than normal people, it just wasn't
expressed in money). Good innovators don't need financial incentives; they
need (at least modest) access to resources and freedom. For example, this guy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle)

------
treadingvapor
This article was pretty all over the place, and had too many speculative,
opinion based quotes. Shouldn't this problem be handed over to the CDC? The
writer briefly alludes to the fact that gender inequity may be related to
gender roles, which are a construct. Yes, the CDC should study gender roles.

~~~
JPKab
What I found particularly frustrating about the article was its focus on race,
despite the fact that poverty and absentee fathers are the true culprits, with
race simply having a correlation to the root cause condition.

I grew up in an impoverished, white rural community, and the boys without
fathers go nuts. It's a common pattern that doesn't even call for data.
Everyone just knows it.

My wife's father died when she was young, and her mother simply collected
social security checks and lapsed into depression. Her sister and her did
alright. Both of her brothers dropped out of high school, one of them
committed suicide, and the other died at 21 of a medical condition while
attempting to earn a GED and working for $8/hour at a gas station. Both were
in and out of jail from their teen years and up.

------
politicallines
What a sexist comment. In this world where equality for men means "avoid the
crimes they commit and their languishing in jails", does equality for women
means that they will start take a job and not just spend the money of men?

Is the discussion so infected that we can't simply share a goal that every
person should be equal in worth, be able to pursue their passion in life, and
to have liberty. If we can't agree to such simple goals, then how can we ever
have progress beyond political lines than just shout at each other, forever
arguing and never fixing anything for the better.

~~~
grovulent
You're punching air mate.

I think the point was just that if we don't help these boys - then they are
more likely to fall into patterns of crime and violence - which is a cost
everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?

~~~
politicallines
"If we don't help these girls - then they are more likely to fall into
patterns of parasitic behavior - which is a cost everyone in society would
like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?"

You don't see a problem with phrasing equality in that way?

~~~
durzagott
Are you suggesting there are zero behavioural differences between boys and
girls?

~~~
politicallines
Calling boys for future criminals and girls for future parasites is not going
to help creating equality. It has nothing to do with "behavioural" differences
from genes, and everything to do about sexism.

~~~
FilterSweep
That's exaggerating his position. It's not sexist to acknowledge differences
between males and females.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
It is likely sexist to acknowledge differences as being biological in origin
when they are sociological in origin. Of course, some differences are
biological, but the outcome of how the biological differences result in
different social trends is part sociological.

For an example of a difference which is sexist, imagine someone saying women
are less fit for critical roles because they are more emotional, when in fact
it is that our society works to repress male expression of emotions and both
men and women are, at the core, emotional entities.

