One of the few things I'm sure I'll remember from this weekend's Times Magazine profile of Peter Gelb, Met Opera chieftain, is its report that his college career comprised one (belated) semester at Yale. He's so much a product of his class that he's otherwise useless for the OP, but I suspect that his sort of insistent refusal to matriculate was tolerated as rugged, ambitious individualism, and a woman's equivalent behavior wouldn't have been.
(One of the other things I'm sure to remember is the disastrous analogy that's at the bottom of page 8 online. It involves ineffectively gluing a dog's mouth shut and goes on for a full paragraph.)
Heebie is of course exactly right. The link post is slapdash and the NYT article is willfully obtuse. Among numerous other issues, the Times seems to be blind to the fact that millions of Americans, the majority of them men, have criminal records.
They are ineligible for federal student aid, unemployable in an ever-growing list of professions (school custodian, bus driver, bank teller, security guard, home health aide, etc. etc.), and often incarcerated during their prime college-going years.
I'm probably overly alert to this given that about 300K out of Philadelphia's 1.5M residents are ex-offenders, but it's just not possible to talk about men, work, and education without mentioning this issue.
(I've even seen a fairly persuasive argument that the modest but persistent US gender gap in reported happiness [men are happier than women] is because incarcerated people aren't included in happiness surveys.)
about 300K out of Philadelphia's 1.5M residents are ex-offenders
?!?!
I did think this was especially priceless:
"And it's very, very scary for economists because people should be responding to price signals. And men are not. It's a fact in need of an explanation."
Oh no! The world is failing to adjust to my models!
I haven't read the NYT article, but over what period of time is the reduction in men's attendance at college charted?
I know, it's horrible, isn't it? We're the poorest big city in the country; that has a lot to do with it. Still, the mind boggles.
Also women that opt out of careers after earning diplomas from all levels of college, in order to stay at home with their kids...how exactly do they fit into the economics argument?
6: The article seems to be talking about the last 30 years or so, but the very nice accompanying chart goes back to 1965.
Given that that chart measures the share of 35 year olds with a bachelor's degree, there's a 15 year lag built into when most of those people went to college, so the gap for today's kids could very well be way higher.
9: Huh. Nice chart. So what happened between, roughly, 1985 and 1995, when male possessors of a 4-year degree began to tank? I'm coming up empty. Did incarceration rates rise? The economy wasn't doing great in the late 80s.
Oh, Heebie's right, it's for 35-year-olds. So adjust backwards by 15 years: what was happening between 1970 and '80?
the gap for today's kids could very well be way higher
Yep. Here are some stats for 25-to-29-year-olds:
Differences in educational attainment by gender have shifted over the past few decades, with female attainment now greater than male attainment at each education level.
The percentage of females (21 percent) who had attained at least a bachelor's degree was 3 points lower than the percentage of males (24 percent) in 1980, but in 2011 the percentage of females (36 percent) was 8 points higher than the percentage of males (28 percent).
between, roughly, 1985 and 1995
Washington really ramped up the Drug War during that period.
But that was when they were 35--so they would be college age late 60s to late 70s. So you had Vietnam and there is an overall flattening probably just do to alternative pathways chosen and/or inability of colleges to keep up with the growth in numbers due to the baby boomers reaching college age (I think 1957 was the largest cohort).
Oh, right. 35-year-olds. Carry on.
about 300K out of Philadelphia's 1.5M residents are ex-offenders...They are ineligible for federal student aid
How are we defining ex offenders? I had arrests as a juvenile, a booking as an adult for a traffic warrant and another plea in abeyance on a misdemeanor as an adult and I was able to get hired as a cop. My brother spent the weekend in jail when he was 18 for setting off "explosive devices" and he's been a cop longer than I have. And my understanding is that the restriction on financial aid isn't for any conviction, just drug convictions incurred while you're already receiving aid.
Fuck that's high. A lot of them are probably still eligible for tuition aid but having to check the felony box on job apps in this economy? Bad times.
I thought this was an interesting comment:
I have no link to it, but there was research published some years ago that looked at what happened in a class when a very bright newcomer arrived. If the newcomer was a girl, the average of the original girls rose. If the newcomer was a boy, the average of the original boys would decline. The explanation was that you get the best out of boys when they can belive in winning. Enter a new star kid, the former top kids would loose interest, since there was no chance of winning. Boys are hard to motivate if they sees no chance of winning. It is smarter for them to redistribute the effort to another venue with better odds for winning the game (and the girl).
Don't know what to do with it, except wonder if it's a WEIRD result.
Has HS competence dropped absolutely among upper class men? That is, have norms of masculinity changed everywhere, or are we having a class-sex interaction, or what?
I think part of the male/female difference is biological. Boys are just more likely have this crazy physical energy that literally makes it hard to sit still, particularly when agitated or excited for any reason (and classrooms can be anxiety-producing environments that create agitation). I know I felt this when I was a boy/adolescent, it was an intense physical drive. There just strike me as a fair amount of physical reasons that boys would have a harder time adjusting to certain types or styles of passive and regimented environments. I think testosterone also does make you more physically aggressive, it makes anxiety and depression more likely to appear as some form of defiance or anger. (Anyone doubting this is free to slap on a testosterone patch and report back on your experiences).
This discussion seems to be conflating Dean Baker's article and the David Autor paper reported on in the Times. Dean Baker actually disagrees with the Autor paper that ascribes a significant share of the shift in relative educational attainment to family dysfunction. The Autor paper claims that something new is happening, Baker just says that male college payoffs have always been more variable. (Actually almost everything about achievement, income, etc. is more variable for males than females).
Re the Autor paper, I would be astounded if he didn't include an extensive discussion of the impact of criminal records. He can't just exclude them though as they are part of his theory -- to the extent family dysfunction leads to a higher level of criminal involvement for males than females, they are part of his hypothesized link between family background and the male-female gap.
Unless you're claiming that upper-class men have less testosterone, that's not an explanation in itself for why women are doing better in a system designed for boys. (Am reading David Copperfield. No girls cramming there.)
23: I don't understand your point. Nothing in what I was saying rules out class differences in addressing whatever disciplinary/motivation problems may be created by testosterone in certain circumstances. Obviously there are many ways to manage the particular issues that arise there, it's when you fail to address them that you run into problems. That is part of Autor's implicit claim -- that family dysfunction is worse for boys because intact families may be particularly important for addressing whatever issues are unique to boys.
(And the system is not designed for boys, or girls either, it's just designed for the system).
Single-sex male schools, historically, were not characterized by a lack of discipline or regimentation. Boys and men may systematically be less able to function under circumstances requiring physical discipline and focus than girls and women are, but I can't think of a system, even looking back to a time when it was assumed that the academic elite would be all male, that seems to me to have taken that difficulty functioning into account.
So I just now clicked through and read the articles, and they are poorly written. They repeatedly mention economists being mystified that more college attendance hasn't increase with the graduate pay premium and don't mention the obvious countering force, skyrocketing tuition in any of the summaries (it's mentioned midway through the PDF article). No evidence is given that there is a different response to a price signal based on gender; they seem to assume that increased attendance of girls relative to boys is such evidence and don't consider that it is likely of girls just being better at school (after all, we see improved performance in girls at all ages).
25: obviously there is no shortage of institutions that have succeeded in disciplining and regimenting males. I suspect those all-male institutions did indeed take specifically male characteristics into account.
Sure, possibly, could be, you can't rule it out. Still, back when the educational system at the highest levels was openly and explicitly meant to serve boys and men exclusively, there was an awful lot of sitting quietly at desks whether or not it was facilitated by some pedagogical techniques that took specifically male characteristics into account; it seems odd that sitting quietly at desks would now be an explanation for poor performance in school by boys. Not impossible, just peculiar.
27 has been often taken as support for corporal punishment, more recess, the brutishness of lower-class men, and the exclusion of women from anywhere important. Only one of these is not creepy.
"I have no link to it, but there was research published some years ago that looked at what happened in a class when a very bright newcomer arrived. If the newcomer was a girl, the average of the original girls rose. If the newcomer was a boy, the average of the original boys would decline. The explanation was that you get the best out of boys when they can belive in winning. Enter a new star kid, the former top kids would loose interest, since there was no chance of winning. Boys are hard to motivate if they sees no chance of winning. It is smarter for them to redistribute the effort to another venue with better odds for winning the game (and the girl)."
Lots of stuff like that in the book "top dog" which I recommend:
http://www.amazon.com/Top-Dog-Science-Winning-Losing/dp/1455515159
28
... it seems odd that sitting quietly at desks would now be an explanation for poor performance in school by boys. ...
The poor performance today is relative to girls so I don't see what's odd about such explanations. It didn't matter that women were inherently better (at performing in some learning environments) when they weren't allowed to compete.
Well, see 'not impossible, just peculiar.' You're right that things could work out that way, there's nothing that means it couldn't be true. It'd just be weird that society came up with the 'sit down and shut up' model of education when its primary goal was educating boys, and it wasn't terribly important what happened to girls, and now it turns out that sit-down-and-shut-up happens to be fundamentally ill-suited to boys and much better for girls. It could happen, but it'd be a funny way for things to work out.
Having read the NYT piece, boy, am I uncomfortable with this:
Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers "appear to fare particularly poorly," Professor Autor wrote
And this:
Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.
This is inches away from World War II-era rhetoric claiming that some of our nation's mothers are prone to raising neurotic sissy boys, and must therefore be guarded against as a downright threat to the country's security and well-being.
There's not much in the article to clarify whether, among single-parent households, it's specifically single mothers whose boy children fare poorly. We get this:
Professor Autor said in an interview that he was intrigued by evidence suggesting the consequences were larger for boys than girls, including one study finding that single mothers spent an hour less per week with their sons than with their daughters. Another study of households where the father had less education, or was absent entirely, found the female children were 10 to 14 percent more likely to complete college. A third study of single-parent homes found boys were less likely than girls to enroll in college.
So have there been studies comparing the children's educational performance in father-led single parent homes as opposed to mother-led ones? As far as I can tell from that reporting, only the last sentence reflects a study that doesn't single out single mothers.
Perhaps this is just really sloppy reporting on the part of the writer.
Sorry that was so long, with such extensive quoting: it's just that some people are disinclined to click through to NYT articles because of its metered-reading/paywall setup.
32
Well, see 'not impossible, just peculiar.' You're right that things could work out that way, there's nothing that means it couldn't be true. It'd just be weird that society came up with the 'sit down and shut up' model of education when its primary goal was educating boys, and it wasn't terribly important what happened to girls, and now it turns out that sit-down-and-shut-up happens to be fundamentally ill-suited to boys and much better for girls. It could happen, but it'd be a funny way for things to work out.
Well the primary goal was educating high status boys who I expect are still doing fine (in general). And the model has changed along the way, more female teachers for example.
And "fundamentally ill-suited" seems like a straw man, it just has to be less suited for boys than it is for girls. And greater variation among boys means more will do really poorly which becomes more important as greater amounts of education become necessary to function in society.
So have there been studies comparing the children's educational performance in father-led single parent homes as opposed to mother-led ones?
Just as context, the most recent Census figures I can find show that about 28% of children live in a household with a single parent -- 24% with a female parent and 4% with a male parent. So that would make it harder (certainly not impossible) to do comparison studies.
36: Yeah, that likelihood had occurred to me. Given that, I think people should be very careful about specifying single mothers at all. Look again at the way the first quoted bit in 33 progresses from sentence to sentence: it looks very much like single mothers are especially bad parents to boys.
Unless there's research to show a difference between single fathers and single mothers, I'd rather insist on using the term "single parent", period.
Also, there's gotta be a big difference between two, active co-parents who are divorced, and one absentee parent and one parent doing everything. But it sounds like they're lumped together.
There are also plenty of families like ours where there's only one legal parent, but that doesn't actually describe how the family works.
Well, the original report by Autor and Wasserman is linked from the NYT article, though I can't quite figure out how to make it readable. Though I'm not trying very hard.
Mm, I've figured out how to read it, but I'm not in the mood at the moment. It seems a bit concern-trolly at the start, but who knows.
Maybe it deserves its own front-page post, but boy, this really bummed me out today. TL;DR: woman at a tech conference who tweets about some brogrammers making sexist jokes gets fired by her company, because riling up the misogynists at 4chan (who were DDoSing said company) apparently means she can no longer be an effective developer evangelist. (A not-unfair parody of that argument can be found here.)
Jammies was just telling me about that story.
I'm very torn, because I wouldn't have necessarily thought that forking and dongle jokes create a hostile atmosphere. (I'm not torn that it's insane that she got fired, though.)
44: Probably depends on whether the jokes are accompanied by leering and a lot of Beavis and Butthead style sniggering.
32: It's not peculiar when you remember that the purpose of mass schooling is to teach people to submit to authority, obey rules, accept being explicitly ranked, and perform tasks as ordered rather than freely. Industrial society needs that kind of tamed person.
Even with all of feminism's advances in the past several decades, extracurricular society does a better job crushing women's spirits than men's. So unsurprisingly women adjust better to schooling, since the lessons are being reinforced at home and out in the world
For the same reason, kids in homes where there are lots of books and their parents read to them probably do better at reading and writing. You do better at what you have more practice at.
Yeah, context is everything. Even from her own blog account, it's impossible to know what happened. She spends a lot of time emphasizing that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, so I think she's got some perspective.
Basically it all sounds more or less like due process until she gets fired.
It seems part of the problem here is that it's too easy for employers to fire people. What the brogrammers did sounds inappropriate, but getting kicked out of the event seems like an adequate response, and being fired for this level of offense is overkill. Doesn't justify strangers on the internet reacting they way they did, and it certainly doesn't justify being angry at the woman complaining instead of the company doing the firing, but it does contribute to the general fuckedupedness of the situation.
Mostly "OMG I overhears some dongle jokes" makes the complainer sound a tad nuts.