The myth of the boy crisis

[beautifulduckweed]

I've gotten into debates with masculists before. If you're not familiar with the wackier branches of this movement, some masculists hold the view that feminism has gone too far and that men are now being systematically oppressed. They cite several different things as evidence of this fact, such as the fact that more women initiate divorces than men, that women more frequently receive custody of their children, and (one of their favorite drums to bang) the so-called Boy Crisis, which claims that the education system has been feminized to such an extent that boys no longer do well in it, as evidenced by higher rates of high school graduation and university enrollment for girls.

The divorce and custody issues are entwined, and I actually looked the numbers up a little while ago. Women file for divorce more often than men because filing first can apparently impact custody issues, and it seems that women are more likely to want custody of the children--and given that some women divorce men because they perceive them as being distant, inattentive fathers and husbands, this is perhaps not too surprising.

The Boy Crisis was a bit harder to debate. I looked up some primary research, and from what I saw, there was indeed proof that boys received more negative attention than girls in classrooms--but on the flip side, boys received more positive attention as well. Boys seemed to receive more attention, period. But some of the numbers cited were fairly concrete, such as higher rates of university enrollment and graduation for girls vs. boys. It can certainly be argued that for the first time ever, girls are allowed to compete head-to-head with boys in academics, and it seems that girls seem to do a bit better than boys when it comes to certain measures of being a good student, such as sitting still for extended periods of time. But the discrepancies cited seemed huge. Were boys getting short shrift? I had a gut feeling that they weren't, but what the hell do I know?

But Smart Bitch regular Robin pointed to this recent Washington Post article, "The Myth of the Boy Crisis," and if these two writers are correct and not playing fast and loose with the numbers, the differences seem to be split more along racial and economic class lines instead of gender lines. To quote from the article:

The alarming statistics on which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or class. When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that if there is a crisis, it's among inner-city and rural boys. White suburban boys aren't significantly touched by it. On average, they are not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal skills. Although we have been hearing that boys are virtually disappearing from college classrooms, the truth is that among whites, the gender composition of colleges is pretty balanced: 51 percent female and 49 percent male, according to the National Education Association. In Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women.

Yeah, I know: poor kids do less well in school than middle-class and rich kids. SHOCK! HORROR! NEWS AT ELEVEN!

It's nice to see the authors systematically debunk some of the numbers bandied about regarding the Boy Crisis. The big gap between rural/innercity boys and girls is still real, but it appears that it might be a function of shitty schooling systems, period, than a biased educational system per se.

Comments

[brittakbd.livejournal.com]

my own, incredibly amateurish and one-sided analysis of the "boy crisis" concludes that boys seem to naturally need more "recess" kind of time than girls, and they don't get it. I have no idea if this is really true, it's all based on reports from my dear husband, fourth grade teacher extraordinaire. He strongly agrees that girls just seem to do better than boys, and in his opinion, (and mine) it's because the boys just can't seem to sit still as long as the girls can. Is it some testosterone thing? Since the above article mentions the thing about inner city boys suffering the most from this, it could all boil down to bias, tho. I mean, the perception on the part of teachers that inner city boys are just naturally "naughtier" than suburban boys, and girls, whether they are inner-city or not, are more likely to be nice and quiet and actually do their homework. Who knows? Anecdotal evidence will get us nowhere.

Of course, in the seventies and eighties, all the classroom studies seemed to indicate that girls were being insidiously ignored, or encouraged to just be quiet and not try very hard. So now that all that is (hopefully) coming to an end, maybe this is all just proof that, when treated equally, girls are just smarter than boys.

[misshepeshu.livejournal.com]

Boys are somewhat different than girls, but I don't know if the differences are exaggerated by conditioning, expectations and the role of the parent. My gut feeling is that they all have a role to play.

In examining the schooling system, I notice they didn't make a peep about the role home life plays in school performance, but I do know that kids from cultures that have traditionally valued academic and scholarly achievement (e.g. Japanese, Korean and Chinese cultures, which have placed a high value on academics for centuries) tend to do better in school, period, than kids from cultures that don't place as high a value on book learning (or, in the case of black people, weren't allowed to, given that learning to read was a crime for a couple of centuries).

[borktron.livejournal.com]

I can lift heavy things.

[misshepeshu.livejournal.com]

Which is more than I can do.

I...uh, my spelling is impeccable, unless I type too fast and make stupid typos.

ph34r m3!