I always thought it was ridiculous that boys were having a 'crisis' because some educational attention was finally being directed to girls. Thanks AAUW.

All my experiences as a teacher disagree with the findings of this report. I taught English and remedial reading in struggling schools and saw again and again that boys were overrepresented in the lower track and special education. When I was a high school student at a large, upper-middle class high school in Texas, the honors track (in humanities, natural sciences, and math) had a clear underrepresentation of boys (like 3 boys in a 27 person English AP course). If we don't buy that gender dictates intelligence or academic interest, these sorts of experiences should be of some concern. For more thoughts: http://www.averagebro.com/2008/05/who-cares-if-tyrone-cant-read-jacob-can.html

*snaps fingers in agreement*
thanks for posting this Jessica. i couldn't agree more.

I know I'm going to attract a lot of shit for this, not the mention that it's sort of out of character, but I have noticed increasingly that discussion and opinion question are used in on tests and quizzes, and every guy I know has a great deal of trouble with these sorts of questions, while my female friends never have any difficulty with them. Opinion and word problems seem to be be challenging to us in a way that don't seem to be to females. I'm not saying the school system should change to accommodate this or anything; I'm pretty sure that it's either an illusionary problem, a result of us males simply not trying, or possibly just us all whining. I'm just stating my experience.

I'm glad this study was published. I read an article in Mensa's monthly mag that spoke of what a raw deal boys are getting in school and the whole thing left me with a foul taste in my mouth.
I've long since believed that gender has little to do with doing well in school and hopefully this study sheds some light on the real issues (socio-economic differences, cultural differences, etc.)

open_sketch -

You do bring up a good point. I don't doubt that taken as groups as a whole, girls and boys excel at different sorts of problems and working situations. It's been said in prior discussions that an emphasis on group work in current curricula has hurt boys, who, as some have argued, are more independent and focused on their own achievements.

Whether or not this is true, I don't know. BUT I do think that group work is part of real life - I do it every day at my job. Discussing a point of view, arguing an opinion, etc. are also skills that are necessary for college and a career. If these aren't boys' strong suits, then perhaps it is good for them to learn these skills, just as it is good for girls to learn more analytical skills.

What is odd, however, is the the women in my classes don't have any problems at all with analytical questions. For the most part, they don't have any problems at all.

It's not just group work, either. It's opinion-based questions, "what do you think about how character x acted" "why do you think person y did whatever" "write a journal from person z's perspective". I pride myself in my ability to memorize and interpret historical and scientific facts, but neither I nor the other guys in the class seem to be able to do these questions well. Our marks on them are uniformly terrible, and as far as I can tell there is no way to study or prepare yourself for them.

Alas open, there is a way to prepare yourself for that sort of question. You have to do a lot of questions of that type. Practice doing that sort of analysis makes doing it much much easier. (It is a much harder sort of studying than you do for memorization and regurgitation questions, but unlike rote learning, working with it in one field is transitive to other fields.

I don't get it. They are a group that "promotes education and equity for women" yet their own research shows no difference between sexes. What is the point of them existing then?

Monte: It showed that the difference wasn't due to sex in this one case. That doesn't mean that there is no need remaining to promote education and equity for women whatsoever.

Girls are doing better in school among every so socio-economic group, at every age. Read USA Today's editorial today. There's something going on, and I know this is a feminist site, but I'm going to stick up for my gender here and say that when women are earning 62% of associate's degrees, 57% of bachelor's and 59% of master's degrees, there's a cultural reason for that, and I think it merits attention. We're raising a generation of male underachievers and it's rather disingenuous to think otherwise.

I take some small offense to the idea that I merely regurgitate what I learn, as I consider myself at least decent at applying my knowledge. That isn't the problem. Opinion and personal feelings of myself or others in the context of history or literature, however, is not something I know how to express well, especially when I don't have feelings towards the subject in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with a character's actions or an Empire's policies.

It's the expectation that I have an opinion on the policies of the Roman Empire beyond how cool I think the legionary uniform was and how fascinated I am with the politics, social structure and history that messes me and my male comrades up. When I'm asked a question of opinion, discussion or perspective, it's usually all I can do to write "hindsight is 20/20, they did what they thought was right" and leave it at that. It frustrates me greatly that questions like that are on tests and exams while fact questions, or "what do you think caused x to happen" questions are becoming a lot less frequent.

My own incompetence aside, can anyone tell me why the girls in my class don't have the same problem with opinion and perspective-style questions?

Really, the American Association of University Women thinks boys don't need help in school, color me shocked. Wouldn't it sort of put them out of a job if they did? Or at least make them like a scholarship for rich white people?

I'd say 60%-75% of the top 10% of my high school class was girls. I don't pretend to know what that was, but it was. I certainly don't think it's a "crisis" but something does seem a little fishy.

In response to other posts:
1. Although this study did not show differences between the sexes, their findings are nevertheless relevent to women because women are more likely to be poor and women of color especially so. Oppressions are often interlinked.
2. It's good that women are earning a lot of degrees, but one must consider the type. Some degrees mean more prestige and income than others. (Trust me, I have a degree in English!)
3. If women are earning more degrees but less money, it may mean that they have assessed the job market and realized that they need more education than a man does to make an equivalent income.
4. This information is valueable to AAUW so that they can direct their energy and money to other sources of women's low status in our culture.

Yeah, I'm pretty horrified by how disingenuous this is too.

It's an entirely fair point that the gap between white and black, and rich and poor, is bigger than the gap between boys and girls. But that used to be true when boys were performing better in education than girls; and they weren't putting out reports then saying the 'girl crisis' in education was a myth.

Those of you who disagree with the study's findings should read the executive summary.

The study does NOT say that there is no "achievement gap". What it DOES say is that the success of girls does not come AT THE EXPENSE OF success for boys.

An excerpt: "Women are attending and graduating from high school and college at
a higher rate than are their male peers, but these gains have not come
at men’s expense. Indeed, the proportion of young men graduating
from high school and earning college degrees today is at an all-time
high. Women have made more rapid gains in earning college degrees,
especially among older students, where women outnumber men by a
ratio of almost 2-to-1. The gender gap in college attendance is almost
absent among those entering college directly after graduating from
high school, however, and both women and men are more likely to
graduate from college today than ever before."

They're saying that, both females AND males have improved in both high school and college graduation and attendence is at an all-time high for both genders, although females have improved more so than males. In other words, when females started doing better, it did not make males do worse. In essence, female achievement got a larger slice of the pie, but that didn't reduce the slice for male achievement. The pie got bigger.

Leah, I don't think people are worried that women were getting ahead at the expense of men. I think the "boy crisis" thing is just a lot of whiny men scared now that women are coming to replace them. Even if there is some bias that makes it easier for women, which I doubt, it seems to me that just means that men need to try harder; that I need to try harder, to learn the right way to do things.

But that used to be true when boys were performing better in education than girls; and they weren't putting out reports then saying the 'girl crisis' in education was a myth.

Having been a teacher once, my tendency is to go back to the parents to explain why girls may be doing better in schools than boys. It may be that it's not the schools that have changed so much, but that parents push their daughters in academics more than their sons, since it is still harder out there for women in the job world.

I really think that parents an make a world of difference in how a student performs, and it would not surprise me that the difference was there.

Boys are failing out of college more and otherwise failing to perform as well as the average female student, but it isn't because of the school or education system. They are screwups before day 1 of class.

My med school admitted its first majority-female class in its history last August. Part of this has to do with the gains among women, but also part of it has to do with increasing failure among boys in undergrad -- again, it isn't because of the educational system. Something else is up.

I do think there's a story somewhere about the New Generation of Failure among under-30s that strikes males far more disproportionately than females. Not sure what exactly it is. Maybe it has something to do with teenage males idolizing the myth of the "Pimp" in music videos and shows like Entourage: guys who do nothing but party and live it up and have everything handed to them for free.

Or maybe not. Dunno.

Open...I get the sense that that's PRECISELY what some people are worried about...that by helping girls you're hurting boys. It's often used as a justification for ending Title IX. Heck, in the thread Jessica linked to about the "feminized" education section a few commenters said precisely that...that if you help out one sex you'll be disadvantaging the other.

Actually, I think this kind of thinking is at the root of anti-feminism and the feminist backlash (and, quite frankly, ALL anti-affirmative action arguments). That if women are given equal status in society, that will mean that whatever gains women get will be at the expense of men. That there is only so much "status" in society and that SOMEone has to have more of it. That raising one person or group's status means pushing down that of others. I

It's not an entirely invalid claim, because in order to achieve equality priviledge must be erased. In essence, males or whites or christians what have you must give up something...that something is priviledge. That something is sexism. That something is racism. However that DOES NOT mean that the one giving up priviledge is now the oppressed. It's just the tendency of the dominant caste to say "Wah! Helping the oppressed takes away from ME! That's not fair! Why don't I get helped like that?" Well, because you don't need the help, bucko. You already have it you just don't know it/willfully ignore it.

Yeesh sorry that got a bit ranty.

Oh and that "you" at the end was general - not directed at anyone in particular.

I don't think that the media has affected men that much. As was stated above, more men that ever get into post-secondary education and getting degrees. Really, the media has always been there to affect people.

Besides, even if it was true, men being lazy just means more positions for women. That such men do badly in school is not a problem; it's that such men are allowed to think they can get away with that sort of behavior that is.

"All my experiences as a teacher disagree with the findings of this report. I taught English and remedial reading in struggling schools and saw again and again that boys were overrepresented in the lower track and special education."

Good point. I've also seen interpretations of this trend which say it indicates girls are being underserved. The idea is that if more boys than girls have reading difficulties and more girls than boys have math difficulties, then having more special ed for reading than for math helps more of the struggling boys than of the struggling girls. Of course, I don't know whether or not this was the case at your school (who took the remedial math classes at your schools? did these schools even hire any remedial math teachers?).

"They're saying that, both females AND males have improved in both high school and college graduation and attendence is at an all-time high for both genders, although females have improved more so than males. In other words, when females started doing better, it did not make males do worse. In essence, female achievement got a larger slice of the pie, but that didn't reduce the slice for male achievement. The pie got bigger."

Exactly! The people who only focus on the percentages miss this (for example, the % of graduate students who are male going down doesn't necessarily mean the total number of graduate students who are male went down).

Sorry, my last comment was directed towards ForbiddenComma. Leah, you're absolutely right, and I'm sorry I made such an uninformed and inane argument.

sepra, I think you're on to something there, about the parents. It matches the majority of my personal experience, although of course I can think of exceptions. I'd love to see a study on that.

No need to aplogize, discourse is good :D

I don't really see why this report should change educational policy. The AAUW isn't an unbiased source on the subject; they have more than a dog in the fight, so to speak. I don't know if there is actually an unbiased source on the subject, though.

I don't really see why this report should change educational policy. The AAUW isn't an unbiased source on the subject; they have more than a dog in the fight, so to speak. I don't know if there is actually an unbiased source on the subject, though.

I don't really see why this report should change educational policy. The AAUW isn't an unbiased source on the subject; they have more than a dog in the fight, so to speak. I don't know if there is actually an unbiased source on the subject, though.

I don't really see why this report should change educational policy. The AAUW isn't an unbiased source on the subject; they have more than a dog in the fight, so to speak. I don't know if there is actually an unbiased source on the subject, though.

"I do think there's a story somewhere about the New Generation of Failure among under-30s that strikes males far more disproportionately than females. Not sure what exactly it is. Maybe it has something to do with teenage males idolizing the myth of the 'Pimp' in music videos and shows like Entourage: guys who do nothing but party and live it up and have everything handed to them for free.

"Or maybe not. Dunno."

Or maybe some of that and some of other factors.

Now I wonder what the tertiary-ed figures look like if one includes trade schools (the post-high-school ones, not vocational high schools, to even the comparison) as well as colleges and universities.

I heard that in the "blue collar" trades the majority-female ones tend to have lower wages and salaries than the majority-male ones. How many of the young men who choose trade school instead of bachelor's degrees IRL would have, if they were young women instead, chosen bachelor's degrees rather than "pink collar" training or trying to break glass ceilings into plumbing, carpentry, etc.?

'bout freakin time! Jeesh, I've had to have so many debates with people either online, or in-person where some mother of a boy brings up this stupid 'boys crisis' nonsense and blames feminism for it. I mean, how stupid can you be?

I am not entirely surprised that the AAUW has come to this conclusion. I'm about as surprised as I would be if a hypothetical group for advancement of boys came to the opposite conclusion--which is to say, what else would a group like this release?

open_sketch,
boys are less likely to do their homework and come prepared to class, maybe thats why you found the word parts of the test to be more difficult? It would make sense that if youre not invested on the same level in education as the girls that it would inhibit comprehension on the test. Its the same for anyone who invests less in school than the status quo - theyre always going to be behind the other students.

Anyways who cares if their was a boys crisis? Less dudes on campus means less misogyny, less rape, sexual assault, harassment, ect....

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that males tend to occupy the extremes on the IQ spectrum. The vast majority of "super geniuses" are male, and the vast majority of "super dummies" are male too.

That phenomenon alone accounts for at least some of the observations of males dominating the "special ed" classes.

Leah, I agree with what you said, but the title of this thread is horribly miscast. If the AAUW is claiming that female gains are not hurting males, then the title/original post should reflect that, instead of saying "there is no boy crisis." Because clearly those are two separate observations: I believe there is a "boy" crisis and I also believe that females rising thru the ranks has nothing to do with it.

Sounds to me like either the AAUW didnt write their summaries coherently and mischaracterized their own assessments, and/or the author of the original article misconstrued what the AAUW report actually said.

What I've noticed while subbing is that in the lower grades (k-6ish) race and income level play a role in how well the student is doing. The schools I sub in put a lot of emphasis on having parents/guardians help the kids with their homework, i.e. reviewing spelling words, reading together, family/group projects like family trees or creative projects like building a castle out of household objects and writing a story about it.

If the kid is from a lower income family, there might not be anyone home to help them out and if they come from a home where the dominant language is anything other than English, they aren't going to get the help they need. The elementary grades are crucial, since it is so structured around base knowledge they will need for just about every other class they take. If they don't have that foundation, later they will sink and fail.

Once puberty hits, though, I've noticed more disparity among the genders than I do among different races and social classes. Just today, the assignment was a straightforward review for the final next week. The vast majority of the girls got right to work and finished. Most of the boys goofed around, acted up and generally wasted the class period. It's a huge generalization, I know, but teenage boys aren't too good at sitting still for long periods and time and probably would benefit from classes that are more open to movement, alternative learning methods and physical tasks. Most of the girls are fine with sitting still because they have figured out they can sit and talk and still do their work. There are exceptions to both, of course.

Freely admitted, I'm cautiously in favor of gender separation in the higher grades, simply because I think it would benefit both sides for various reasons.

I might give a shit about the "boy crisis" if it were not blamed on feminism all the time.
"Ooooh, female empowerment has made the boys look bad! There was no boy crisis when boys didn't have to compete with girls! Save The Males!"
If anything, dismantling patriarchy, and the ways in which children are stereotyped and socialized according to gender, would BENEFIT boys academically.

It's not a zero-sum game.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that males tend to occupy the extremes on the IQ spectrum. The vast majority of "super geniuses" are male, and the vast majority of "super dummies" are male too.

The problem, of course, is that the standard measures of "intelligence" don't actually tell us all that much beyond, in some cases, the presence of a clinically significant cognitive impairment.

"The vast majority of "super geniuses" are male, and the vast majority of "super dummies" are male too."

Where did that stat come from? I wonder because maybe it has always seemed that the majority of geniuses are male simply because men were allowed into the public spector to do things, while women, up until recently, were kept at home. Also, the smartest person in the world is a woman, and many women with mental problems (ADHD, autism) have better intelligence and functionality than their male peers.

Open...I get the sense that that's PRECISELY what some people are worried about...that by helping girls you're hurting boys.

To me, the question isn't whether boys and men were (in some respects) better off when they had near-exclusive access to education. Obviously, there is an advantage to having unchallenged access to 100% of a limited resource.

Before women's suffrage, men were 100% of the electorate. Afterwards, men were only roughly 50% of the electorate, which constituted a significant dilution of the value of a vote.

Similarly, before girls and women were allowed access to secondary and higher education, boys and men had access to about 100% of the limited seats in schools and universities. Giving girls and women access introduced new competition, and thus reduced the likelihood of an individual boy or man being admitted to a particular institution.

The exclusion of women from wide areas of civil, political, and economic life constituted a sort of subsidy for the male population. Women's progress towards equality has resulted in a significant reduction in that "subsidy".

The question to me isn't whether boys and men were better off in some respects prior to the gains of the women's movement. Obviously, in some respects they were.

The question is whether it is somehow unjust that the value of male privilege has gone down as a result of women's progress towards equality. To me, it is obvious that it can't be unjust.

If I have something that is yours, and I'm forced to turn it over to you, I objectively have less; however, since what I lost wasn't rightly mine to begin with, it isn't unjust that I lose it.