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.

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

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.

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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

Your parent post never argued that it was voluntary, but contemplated if it would be perceived to be voluntary sexism if the genders were reveresed.

One of the teaching unions here in the UK was asked why they weren't doing more to get men into teaching. They replied that that was sexist as it implied that female teachers weren't doing a good enough job! You can't win.

"win"?

"Win" means come out of the argument as "not a sexist".

We need more female teachers -> "Why? Is teaching a female job? Fucking sexist!"

We need more male teachers -> "Why? Are female teachers not good enough? Fucking sexist!"

Lose-lose scenario. Therefore you can't "win".

Please everybody, perhaps?

I've come to accept that people simply like people that look like them. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Women in tech is important. Minority representation is important. And yes positive white male role models for little suburban straight white American boys is important.

You know what happens when everything is important, right?

Everything really is important though. If we push the guy who will cure cancer out of the system because he is white and male, then everyone who is not white and male loses out just as much. Obviously pushing out a Latino girl who would cure cancer would be equally bad. But the key words here are 'equally bad'. Equally important.

People aim for a diverse group that roughly reflects society instead of partitioning industries/jobs by randomly chosen personal characteristics?

Less discrimination?

You give equal time share to everything?

I was wondering the same thing. It might be gender, but it could also be a strongly gender-focused society.

It's actually a global phenomenon. Boys are performing worse in most of the Western world as well as much of the rest. When there are similar issues in the US, Japan, and Scandinavia you can rule out many cultural aspects as the cause.

This is news to me. The results I've seen have always uniformly suggested that low socioeconomic status tends to impact the outcomes of young men more then women, and smoothes out for the middle and upper classes.

Which is hardly surprising.

I guess this depends on what you consider low socioeconomic status. There is also a disparity in tertiary education. Women have higher enrollment and completion rates and thus get more degrees, even though sex ratio is skewed towards boys at birth.

For example in 2010 in the Netherlands (from http://barrolee.com/) 45% of women aged 30-34 have some tertiary education and 31% have completed tertiary education (31 / 45 = 69%) whereas the male statistics are 39% and 25% (25 / 39 = 64%). This is then offset by women working fewer hours per week (from Eurostat): in the Netherlands men average only 35 hours per week, and women only 25. Dutch working hours are a little extreme, but the general trend is worldwide.

I could rule out cultural aspects. If I wanted to ignore the long history of gendered culture in both places. As well as centuries of male dominance.

It still could be sexism, it's a gender neutral term even though it is mostly applicable to women.

What's K-5?

Kindergarten to Grade 5

>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.

You are right. I saw this show on CNN a few days ago and it was sad how these people have to re-learn basic things. http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/21/us/prison-reform-overview/

For the statistics: In French prisons there are 3,5% of women.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It would certainly help if you would cite a source - I'm only coming up with blogs for the terms "gatherer-hunters".

Is there any evidence that this diet is nutritionally optimal?

If we don't have any long-term-supported models of what nutrition was like during the bulk of our evolution, then there can be no proof that humans can optimally function on whatever diets historically existed. There's pretty solid evidence that nutritional deprivation stunts both physical and mental development. There's also an overall trend towards higher IQ which has likely coincided with caloric and micronutrient satiation.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that "archaic" can be substituted by "better than". in the past, people spent an awful lot of their lives deprived of developmental needs, and humanity is clearly trending upwards as these needs (nutritional and otherwise) are addressed. Other factors include the elimination of contaminants like environmental lead.

>Evopsyche is pseudo-science.

No, it is just wildly abused. Take all the arm chair physicists running around talking about spooky interaction. Same problem, except misunderstand and misusing the principle of spooky interaction doesn't lend itself well to issues that have nearly as much emotional involvement.

Psychology as a whole has a problem of being used by armchair psychologists and applied to all sorts of issues in society and things like chemistry and physics does not. Evolutionary psychology has an even greater problem with it, but this is an issue with how society consume science, not with the science that is consumed.

> 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?

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.

Don't hyperbolize. It's not all. It's something around 95-99% of "soft science" research done in the last 50 decades. The older research was better, back before we turned the fields into a mix of signalling games and money pumps.

But don't worry. In the recent years we've seen that apparently 90% of medical research from last few decades is likely bullshit too.

Most medical research isn't science either. AFAIK they're stuck at two sigma and one-off experiments as well. (Molecular biology and the like are a different topic.)

Do you think this also implies that men have more incentive to become successful in their careers, if they choose the socially acceptable route? And if so, do you think this might partly explain why we see more men in high prestige/pay professions (e.g. tech)?

Should we really keep using the word "incentive"? It keeps presenting any success as something that doesn't belong to them. If they've worked hard for it, it's theirs, whatever the incentives.

My native language somewhat lacks this word. The translation exists but is mostly too clumsy for use.

Our nation is also infamous for lacking ambition and fostering perverce incentives. I think all of these things are connected. Wittgenstein would probably agree.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Side note: quick research seems to indicate that it may not actually be Genghis Khan who is the male-line ancestor of all those men, but a common ancestor of his and the rest of his tribe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khereid

Even if so, I'm not sure if he would actually be an example of the low-investment male mating strategy. He was the ruler of a large empire, so he would be able to invest in his children. Even those who weren't recognized would have advantages from being rumored to be his offspring.

Groups which allow the low-investment strategy are outcompeted because they don't incentivize any males to invest in the group, while the Mongol empire had plenty of conquered people available to the Mongol men who were excluded by elites' polygamy.

Calling me dumb is out of line. You're making a lot of assumptions that could also be explained by saying that risk-taking is the logical choice for men, for those exact same reasons. We didn't evolve big brains so our genes could decide everything.

Civilization is very recent in human history, and without civilization you can't have Genghis Kahn so I don't see how he is relevant.

I feel like people used to say God made people a certain way. Now that I basically only interact with nerds, they just replace God with evolution. I'd prefer some citations, since all I hear are the same assumptions.

1 in 200 men are direct male-line descendants of Genghis Khan. Many more are descended from Genghis Khan in any path (probably all Mongolians, and large fractions, quite possibly majorities, of many Asian groups).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

If a man gets a woman pregnant and then the male takes risks then even if the risk results in death he still has offspring on the way, if the woman dies while pregnant then not so - could that be a reason?

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)

>my city has a "Girls Learning Code" meetup / lecture series that while advertises being gender neutral is clearly not so

The majority of women drop out of the running for STEM jobs before they even go to college - something is persuading them at the primary school level to avoid tech related fields. It's the biggest reason that the idea of sexism in the workplace pushing women out of IT is absurd - because they never got there in the first place. They never even got to the college classes in the first place. Even high school vocational programs focusing on tech have girls wildly unrepresented.

And it's the exact same reason that organizations like Girls Who Code is extremely important. It's the same reason that an organization like Boys Who Teach/Nurse/Other female dominated profession would be a godsend for evening out the gender balance in those fields.

Should there be code/stem programs for boys? Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with programs that exists primarily for outreach to a gender that is underrepresented in that field? Absolutely not.

"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"

The problem in this country is that we have identity politics, which helped to address real discrimination, but all too often is misused as a tool to obtain power and support from vocal special interest groups.

Perhaps most disturbingly is the rise of the professional identity politician/professor/activist complex, where students are brought in to universities majoring in "Women's Studies", with zero job prospects when they graduate except for teaching more classes or becoming an activist. Suddenly, you have entire groups of people who, although they won't admit it, NEED the problem they are claiming to fight to exist forever if they want an income.

The end result is a constant search for new manifestations of oppression of their chosen group, real or perceived. All too often, its perceived, and even when it's real, these folks have solutions which do nothing more than create new inequalities.

I feel like the dynamics are way too fuzzy to point at one group of people an say "this is the cause of outrage culture, and that is the dominate driver of unexpected inequality flux". The US has a host of initial conditions (heterogeneous population, very young age, combination of high overall wealth as well as extreme wealth inequality) that makes it very difficult to compare apples to apples with much of the world.

It appears that there are only ~2.5k genders studies majors matriculating at any given year [1]. I doubt that's pushing the needle appreciably in terms identity politics. IMO I'd look more too the cognitive dissonance between the gap in achievement of the wealthy vs poor and the taboo in talking about any sort of income inequality in this country as a more potent driver to the under-directed efforts to impose a slanted "equality" in the name of social good.

[1]http://www.nwsa.org/files/NWSA_CensusonWSProgs.pdf

I had similar suspicions about women's studies. But I didn't really believe it.

Then I read Judith Butlers Gender Trouble to about halfway. It's a book that's canonical in womens studies these days. Holy shit it reads like political manifesto, with sciency stuff only to mask it little bit.

>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.

> 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

Isn't North America / Western Europe going the flattening way? Most of the gender equality movement today seems to be focused on creating hatred and making life harder for one group, as well as forcing arbitrary and artificial adjustments.

I was a scout and this really frustrated me. There is currently situation here in Finland "boys are fleeing from scouting". Your choises are to play counter strike at home or knit a pot coaster with girls in scout meeting. What are you going to do?

In 1910 your choised were playing capture the flag with boys in scout meeting. Or stay at home with mom and help her. What are you going to do?

This used to be movement that helped poor boys more than any other single thing. Boys have not changed, scouting has.

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.

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.

>Shouldn't this problem be handed over to the CDC?

I wouldn't want them handling any male issues. In the 2010 study of intimate partner violence, they specifically used a definition of rape that turned most male rape into contact sexual assault and not rape.

Then in their summary, they focused on rape and non-contact sexual assault. Anyone doing a light reading would have assumed from the study that males did not experience much sexual violence.

Personal anecdote: my experience has been this misunderstanding is the more common than not among those who have done a light reading of the study.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436439 and marked it off-topic.

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?

After reading it a couple of times I think there is something to the phrasing. The underlying motivation does matter. No one supports the era where an increasing number of women were in the office just because the boss liked having a "pretty young thing" around, even though it helped the numbers.

Likewise there's a very big difference in helping children because we want to maximise their potential and it being the right thing to do, versus helping them because they're effectively holding society hostage by otherwise becoming criminals later in life. You're probably not going to put your best into helping a group you feel holds you hostage and certain solutions, like guaranteed employment in a physically draining but low paying job, might eliminate the threat for society while wasting the potential of the kids involved.

It may be similar to people who take issue when someone warns another (especially a younger woman) of the dangers of walking around at night alone.

There is a legitimate increase in danger in some areas, but people often view it as victim blaming. The line between 'do this and you'll have a better chance of being safe' and 'if you had done this, you would have had a better chance of having been safe' can be fine.

There are also those who see such advice as misplaced (the whole don't teach people how to avoid X, teach other people to not do X).

Not saying I agree or disagree with either view point, only hypothesizing there could be a common trend of thought underlying the issues some are taking with the original post.

"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?

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

It seems that the post is suggesting the implications of the phrasing can be taken as offensive, and trying to give a different example to express the point.

To avoid gender, consider an example which uses race instead.

>It would help humanity to also give enough focus on black child development so that we could save their future, avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails.

I've only switched one word, and while some may say it is not offensive, I could clearly foresee some people finding the underlying tone as offensive.

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.

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

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.