Grrl Power

BusinessWeek has an interesting story about how girls and women are flourishing these days.

From kindergarten to graduate school, boys are fast becoming the second sex. "Girls are on a tear through the educational system," says Thomas G. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington. "In the past 30 years, nearly every inch of educational progress has gone to them."

But of course, it wouldn't be a story if it didn't fret over the dark side of a positive trend:

A new world has opened up for girls, but unless a symmetrical effort is made to help boys find their footing, it may turn out that it's a lonely place to be. After all, it takes more than one gender to have a gender revolution.

[Link via Arts & Letters Daily]

Comments

[joe]

The feminists rejected the idea that gender relations were a zero sum game a long time ago. (Most of them, anyway - it's tough to make generalizations about a movement that includes Gloria Steinham, Camilla Paglia, and Howard Dean). When will the anti-feminists catch up?

[Brad S]

Girls are better suited to education than boys (as a whole), especially education in "soft skills" areas like people skills, leadership and motivational skills, communications skills, team-building and consensus-building skills, and so forth. Today, education is more about these sorts of "soft" skills than it is about "hard" skills such as science and math. Ergo, today girls are better suited for the educational system that exists than boys. It should come as no surprise that they are suddenly doing better in it than boys.

[Ron Hardin]

Feminism isn't a transcendent observation of a truth about the war of the sexes; it's a position within the war between the sexes. Something's wrong with the world and men have to change to fix it. So what else is new? The counterposition is for men to hang out somewhere else until it blows over.

The woman's side depends in the end on men having extremely low standards; which, fortunately, they do.

[Warren]

Brad,
You could be right, but there's more to it than that. I am an electrical engineer. No amount of recruiting seems to be able to entice women into the EE dept. I'd say that less than 5% of EEs graduating this year are female. Yet at least three times that many will be Mechanical Engineers, despite nearly identical coarses for the 2+ years of undergrad.
In the workplace, I work side by side with Comp-Sci. programer types and there the ratio seems to be approaching parrity.
These are just my observations and I'd like to get a look at some harder data, but there is more to the gender devide than just hard/soft.

[joe]

Urban planning is about 50/50, and we're about as soft as you'll find this side of art history.

[Michele O']

If women want to see an example of de-masculinized men, they can look to Germany as a solid example. In the ferver to make sure there was never another Fuhrer, boys have been raised and schooled to be very passive. I know many Germans, have been to Germany many times, and until recently worked at a German company with mostly male German managers. My gaydar went off every time I met one, and had to have hard proof (i.e. wife or girlfriend) to get the signal to stop sounding. And German women are very commandeering and unpleasant, in general.

This is the argument against the existing liberal indoctrination centers we call public education; the liberal whackos decided males and male qualities were bad, and they've managed to beat the boys down to the point where simple boyishness is abhorrent behavior.

Obviously, I'll have 50,000 German men who would tell me how full of crap I am, but to a woman in my company, we agreed; German men are pansies compared to our good ol' American boys. And we prefer our men to be Men. From the liberal feminist posture to remove the traits that make a male male, is a product most real (American) women won't like very much.

[Anonymous]

oh michele! do keep writing!

[trainwreck]

Clearly the German neutering scheme didn't get to all the tough guys.

H: I am Hanz
F: And I am Franz
H,F: And we are here to *clap* PUMP YOU UP!
H: Ya, Americans are the most obese people on Earth
F: Look at me, do you think I got this way from sitting on my ass in a chair pointing a mouse at a computer screen? Computers are for Girlie Men.
H: Yes, with my strong muscles I could break that keyboard.
F: Look at your plump bottom and my strong muscles.
H: Ya, we may need to take a belt to your buttocks muscle to whip you in to shape.

[SM]

Paging Herr. drf ...
How about a response for Frau. Michele O' ...

[Warren]

trainwreck,
You flabby girly-man blogger
Here me now and listen to me later but think about it sometime.
Hanz and Franz are not German. They are examples of Austrian pumpatude.

[A.Swarzenigger]

Blick hier! Ich kenne nicht Hans noch Franz, aber ich kann Ihnen erkl?ren, da? sie den falschen Stereotypen nahmen, um an auszuw?hlen. Wie kommt es verwendeten sie sagen wir Clint Eastwood nicht als Beispiel des amerikanischen Mannes? Oder Tom Selleck? Sie verwirren mit dem falschen Amerikaner, Trainwreck! Aber Sie doo-doo Ihre Namensgerechtigkeit.

Ich bin zur?ck!

Look here! I don't know Hans nor Franz, but I can tell you that they took the wrong stereotype to pick on. How come they didn't use, say, Clint Eastwood as an example of the American male? Or Tom Selleck? You're messing with the wrong American, Trainwreck! But you doo-doo your name justice.

I'll be back!

[James Merritt]

Sie sind alle verruckt hier, ich glaube. Kein fehler: Unsinn.

[Frenk]

As I seem to be the only one residing in Germany right now, I will definitely say that Michele O has a good point. German men definitely tend toward the oversoft and friendly, with an aversion to anyone that expresses a firm opinion about most anything.

On the other hand, nearly everyone in any position of serious leadership is a male. Not every one, but most. So, while there may be a softened of gender roles, there doesn't seem to be any lack of gender "discrimination."

I think that Brad S. is right on--no small part of the new "superiority" of women comes from teaching and measuring different things, rather than from real improvement in education.

[Anonymous]

"Men" "gaydar". This is a person driven by expectations.

[feminist troll]

RE: Womyn on the move...

so we can feel good that women are gaining a lead on the power structure : so we can thematically question their motives for making a move to power : so we put them in check : so they can lose power : so they can lose their sexual identity : so they can again reclaim their sexual identity : so we can encourage women to gain power : so we can feel good that women are gaining a lead on the power structure... (whee)

[Vixen]

Above quote: "This is a person driven by expectations."

Hey, anonymous, isn't everyone?

What drives YOU? Free-floating, zombie-like urges? Or do you wait for CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN to tell you what to "expect" out there, hmm?

[geophile]

There's a thing about it on the 60 Minutes website, Amy.

[joe]

Michele,

A good image for your ideal model of German manhood can be found in "Triumph of the Will." Manly men, not encumbered by things like sensitivity and compassion.

And if your gaydar is so consistently wrong, maybe it's time to recalibrate.

[omnibus bill]

The ratio of women to men in undergraduate institutions is approximately 57:43. Each year, more women go to college, and fewer men.

Any honest college admissions counselor will admit that without having lower academic standards (affirmative action) for boys, those numbers would slump much lower. While there are some areas that are predominantly male (engineering) most other disciplines are overwhelmingly female.

Characterize girls' success as a positive trend all you like - but it has more to do with the educational system being made hostile to men than anything else. This is especially true at the critical K-8 level; if a child hasn't learned to read proficiently by the end of 3d grade, it's pretty much over. Had boys' performance stayed the same over the last couple decades, the girls' improvement would have led to rapidly increasing test scores and so forth - but it hasn't. For example, the SAT was dumbed down close to a decade ago to raise test scores to mid-1960's levels.

Christina Hoff Summers makes a persuasive case that if boys act like normal boys, they are considered unruly and undisciplined. When the school system determines a boy is undisciplined, he gets a bottle of Ritalin and is allowed to sleepwalk through the educational system. It solves male pathology; you wind up with a manipulable social unit, rather than a little boy who runs around and can't sit still.

Laugh and chuckle now, but this is a major problem that is only going to get worse with the passage of time. Though I suppose we can stay true to our libertarian roots by doing nothing and leaving a bad school system as it is.

[Amy Phillips]

Incidentally, 60 Minutes did a really good piece on this last year, and a follow up this weekend (5/25). If you can get a tape, I highly recommend it.

[S. Connery]

The problem is that, increasingly, females are trying to elbow their way onto more and more of the male turf. And we simply don't like it.

When I want to shoot the breeze with the guys while hitting a little ball, I don't particularly appreciate having a female around, so that I have to watch my every word.

Go start your own club, woman!

[Hays Reed]

EMAIL: [e-mail]
IP: 62.213.67.122
URL: http://digital-photo.online-photo-print.com
DATE: 01/20/2004 01:24:49
A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do

[great]

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