Catapharact
Edit: I'll just use this thread in the future for any long articles and such.
Warning: Very long read. If you get bored along the way (which I don't see how you could,) you were warned.
Personally: I don't agree. Usually at a young age, school is the only option to show off your talent (may it be Sports, Academics or both.) Slackers pertain to both sexes IMO.
Battle of the Sexes: Are Schools Geared to Girls?
by Martha Brockenbrough
Every once in a while, I have to remind myself to step back and think about the big picture. I'm thinking this is one of those times.
Allow me to explain. I was at a book reading for mothers a while back. One of the audience members gave an impassioned speech about her sons, and how they are getting short shrift in the classroom.
Then, a few days later, Newsweek came out with a cover story about the trouble boys are experiencing in school. The magazine reported that boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with learning problems as girls, and twice as likely to be sent to special-ed class.
More recently, I read that my local school district spends one out of every nine dollars on special-ed classrooms. And this amount is growing, forcing the district to cut programs that would serve all students. Our high school students, in fact, have been earning class credit for erasing blackboards and delivering attendance slips because classes are too full to accommodate them--not exactly an educational experience to crow about.
While no fair-minded person would deny support to kids with special needs, a consideration of gender issues in schools needs to recognize the disparity among girls and boys in special-education programs. In elementary school, for example, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities, and twice as likely to be placed in special-ed classes. So it's possible that boys might be getting the lion's share of the money.
Even so, girls are graduating at higher rates. In New York, about half the girls who started high school in 2001 graduated in 2005. Only 37.3 percent of boys managed to do the same. Newsweek also reported that women get 56 percent of college diplomas handed out today, compared to 42 percent of them 30 years ago.
Gender roles: What are boys and girls really made of?
Maybe I'd be more alarmed if I had sons. As a mother of girls, though, I can't forget the statistic that rattles in my head: the fact that women still only make about 75 cents compared to every dollar men make.
If schools really do cater to girls, and if boys really are suffering and failing to graduate at comparable rates, then why do men still make more money? For example, the Census Bureau reported that in 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available), the median income for men working full-time was $40,798. The median for women, meanwhile, was $31,223--both figures slightly worse than the year before.
This is where I make myself step back, lest I join the hopeless boys-vs.-girls battle. Because it is hopeless.
Comparing boys vs. girls, and men vs. women, and playing tug of war over school funding and salaries is hopeless. It assumes that nobody wins unless everybody gets exactly his or her "share," and that unless we're the same, we can't possibly be equal.
Success in school not equal to success at work?
There might, in fact, be a simpler reason why women fare better in school, and less well in the workplace. It's because of the behaviors that get rewarded in each arena.
Remember that cheesy children's poem?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails,
And puppy-dogs' tails;
That's what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice,
and all that's nice;
That's what little girls are made of.
OK, it's about 200 years old, about as out of date as powdered wigs, and painfully stereotypical. Many of us today would also find it horribly offensive. As individualistic as we are in the United States, we hate the idea that we can be put into a gender box.
But it doesn't mean people don't do it for us, and that we don't do it for others. We experience great pressure to act according to gender roles. The movie Boys Don't Cry is a true reminder of what can happen if we don't.
For better or for worse, gender roles play a very important role in how girls and boys fare in school and how they fare later, as men and women in the modern workplace.
As author Nan Mooney told me, "These cultural expectations are deeply entrenched, and they've been around for a long time." Mooney examined some of these expectations of women in her book, I Can't Believe She Did That! Why Women Betray Other Women at Work.
There can even be some benefit to them, as gender roles make people "feel more comfortable," Mooney said. What's more, there may be some biological truth to them. Evolutionary biologists say male and female brains may have been shaped by their sex-based tasks, giving men and women different strengths.
In any case, these cultural expectations--perhaps as much as brain and learning differences--could be why girls today are doing better in school than boys.
Schools are, for the most part, set up so that obedient kids who follow instructions and get the right answers do better than the kids who want to do things their way, on their schedule.
Why girls thrive at school
This isn't the fault of the teachers; they're not only trying to manage dozens of students with different abilities, interests, and even language skills, but they're also saddled with regulations that say how well students must do on tests.
I've sat in plenty of school classrooms and been quite impressed with how teachers manage, despite the challenges they face. It's no wonder sugar-and-spice personalities do well in the classroom, especially now that schools have made steps to rectify the diminished female confidence that journalist Peggy Orenstein noted in her 1996 book, SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap.
But this sugar-and-spice environment is not a very realistic training ground for success in the working world, where right answers are far more ambiguous, and where success, in the United States anyway, often relies on entrepreneurialism*--which requires rebellion and risk-taking.
This isn't an exclusively male arena. Plenty of women run businesses. But even female CEOs tend to earn less than their male counterparts, which suggests they might be paying for bucking the cultural expectation.
Class clowns vs. teachers' pets
We're still learning about how male and female brains differ (and of course, how individual brains, regardless of sex, differ).
But I think we could solve a lot of problems simply by understanding and respecting differences, and working hard not to offer disproportionate rewards, even if obedience helps schools run more calmly, and risk-taking helps businesses earn more money. Both types of personalities exist, and both are necessary.
It would be great, for example, if schools could find a way to reward the entrepreneurial spirit that I suspect is behind a lot of troublemaking at school.
I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the most influential businessmen of our age--Bill Gates and Steve Jobs--didn't finish college. Gates left to start a certain software company. But Jobs left partly because he couldn't see the point in spending all of that tuition money. (If you haven't read the speech he gave Stanford's class of 2005, you're missing out.) Jobs obviously did fine without school, as did Gates.
But how many people are underachieving today because they couldn't overcome their supposed failures at school? If teachers found a way to hook up kids with their passions, and let them explore those fully--instead of spending all that time, money, and energy on maintaining classroom order or preparing kids for standardized tests--then those kids would be primed and ready for the working world.
It might require some huge structural changes for schools. But wouldn't that be better than alienating more spirited kids from school? And shouldn't the more obedient types of students get early exposure to managing the ambiguities of the working world?
Likewise, if workplaces put more value on the people who dutifully kept things running in support of the risk-takers, I suspect we'd see a lot more equity in male-female salaries.
To me, it doesn't matter if these dutiful, supportive people are men or women. But even when I was working as a manager in a big corporation, it bothered me that administrative assistants--who were profoundly necessary for all company operations--made less per year than some salespeople got in their annual bonuses. I couldn't help but notice that these "assistants" were most often women. It makes our tendency to view organizers like them as second-class even worse.
If we can remember to respect individuals for wherever they happen to fall on the spectrum, and recognize that there is a value to both types of behavior and reward them equally with grades, opportunity, and money, then I think we will have come a long way in helping people lead the best lives they can, no matter what their sex.
In the end, no matter how much we learn about the differences between the sexes, I think living equally full, rewarding, and valued lives is the big picture.
And that's what really deserves our focus.
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