Pay closer attention: Boys are struggling academically

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• Yes, I came across references to that, but classes start next week, so I've been rationing my blogging.

• Sorry to be so *incredibly* long to come back and agree.

  Been wondering what you made of Lawrence Summers' comments about women and science...?? http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/

  Post-worthy...?

• Thanks for the clarification, and thanks for probing the issue a little more.

  I'm not at that school anymore, so there's no opportunity for a follow-up. At the time, we were talking about undergraduate majors, where most of the science classes were full of male students and most of the English classes were full of female students. My point is that we need the best of both types of consciousness employed in the humanities, too, just as you argue clearly that society benefits from having the best of both types of consciousness in technology.

  It's true that the proportion of faculty didn't match the proportion of students, of course. But within the narrow confines of "how to change the gender balance in major X," which is what the faculty were talking about at the time, I do think my comment was worth more than uncomfortable silence.

  Perhaps if you'd have been there, and explained how my comment could have been misinterpreted, then everyone could have learned a little, and years later I wouldn't still be puzzling over this odd experience (which lasted all of 10 seconds).

  We agree, no?

• I beg to differ. It's not about logistics.

  Let's try a thought experiment here. Remove gender and replace with race. Let's say we're arguing that in a population that's 50% white and 50% black that only 10%+/- of students in technology are white, that only 10% of jobs in the field are held by whites, that only 10% of governmental positions are held by whites. Is there an issue? Is there damage?

  What if there were clear differences in thinking processes divided by groups that aren't necessarily better, but could make a fundamental difference in an end product? Would you say there should be concern about percentages of a group employed? Is it possible that society at large might be damaged by the failure to change the percentages?

  Statistically speaking, there are no real differences between races in thinking processes within the same culture -- but there is between genders. I'll point to Dr. Jenny Wade's work in A Holonomic Theory of Human Consciousness to support this since she diagrams it nicely. It's not absolute that the genders are divided by types of consciousness (and therefore thinking processes), but the bias manifests strongly along gender lines. We're talking about an entire species that is divided nearly in half; each half sees and experiences things differently.

  For this reason it's not about logistics; it's about getting the very best of BOTH the largest groups of consciouness being employed in technology.

  Or in fields requiring the language arts, for that matter.

  If they get weeded out by cultural barriers before they can even explore whether they are well- or ill-suited to a field, or if the entire pipeline screens them out, society ultimately pays a price.

  Were I presenting to women, knowing that a majority of adult women tend to manifest an affiliative state of consciousness, I would present this issue based on the connections, the wide-spread impact this has across society for both boys and girls to be typecast before they enter the workplace -- and not purely on numbers alone.

  Maybe you ought have a woman present the concept for you at the next meeting... ;-)

• I'm not so sure that it's a matter of damages, it's just a matter of logistics.

  If there are 100 jobs in profession X, and someone says, "we need more women in profession X," then doesn't it follow that there will be fewer men in that profession?

  I'm not saying that's a bad thing... Let's hope that some of them will feel personally fulfilled and culturally validated should they choose to be a full-time stay-at-home dad. Others might be encouraged to go into profession Y, thus easing the competition in profession X.

  If more women get degrees that make them competitive for profession X (or, to put a different spin on it, fewer qualified women are discouraged from pursuing careers in profession X), then those men who are displaced will need to go somewhere, won't they?

  I realize that once women leave the university, they may have to enter a workplace that makes little effort to welcome them or celebrate their special strengths.

• Sorry, I meant to come back to this sooner rather than later. Yes, my letter-loving son will face cultural challenges that will obstruct indulging his inate interests and talents. He'll be pushed by most of the culture around him to participate in sports ahead of everything else in order to be normed to his culture. Even his own father won't offer a necessary level of encouragement because doing so would be foreign to the culture in which he was raised (sports-business-white-male oriented). I will repeatedly have to say no to traditional American male acculturation as he gets older. Our rule in this household is one extracurricular activity each semester and sports will compete with the arts soon in this same space. I've already had to be a bit ruthless and say no to some sports for which he appears to have no aptitude. This comes with considerable guilt; at six and seven years of age, how can I really say this? Would spending time in the sport help him? Am I cutting him off from opportunities to socialize because of a bias on my part? Will kids tease him unmercifully if he doesn't have adequate physical aptitude in sports? Gah. How do we really help children make the right choices in the face of so much external and internal pressure? How do we fiercely guard our children and their potential?

  I'll have to do the same for my daughter, and a little more; it doesn't sound equitable, but this is exactly the nature of the beast. Being a woman, I know that my son will land on his feet given my protections and my resources in addition to his own efforts. But my daughter, in spite of greater gifts than her brother, will be up against a workplace that continues to revolve around men, having been designed and made for men, refusing to adapt to women. There may be plenty of women in specifica areas of academia, but we're still seeing less than 25% representation of directorship/officership positions in corporations and less than 25% women in the U.S. Senate. She will need me to keep pushing for her, whether directly or indirectly.

  And that's what you're up against when you ask the question.

  You're probably going to have to make the case to someone like me that a boy won't make a living of choice unless both he and his female counterparts get more non-traditional encouragement. Were this a court of law in which you were trying to make a case, you'd have to show damages. What are the damages? And do they affect only one gender or both?

  p.s. My son loved Potter's Squirrel Nutkin. There's just something about that naughty Squirrel with which he sympathizes.

• And I've used my own blog, in some small way, to encourage girls to be interested in science.

  http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=2173

• Actually, as I remember now, the spouse of the female faculty member who brought up the subject responded to my comment by laughing.

  Regarding infant clothing... yes, in the days before Velcro and Luvs, it was easier to keep babies of both genders clean by putting them in what we would call dresses.

  Thanks for your explanation of why pinafores disappeared from the household... that makes sense. I'm not sure I really had a strong reaction to "pinnie," beyond the observation that it was part of a world that is very different from my son's. As a matter of taste, my son prefers the Peter Rabbit tales to some of the other tales in the Beatrix Potter collection we're working through. While socialization does have a huge impact on gender identity, there are biological differences, too, and the educational system has changed in the last few decades in ways that help girls make great strides, but without creating any obvious changes that cater to the ways that boys learn.

  Re your response to my anecdote: I don't think I asked for assistance from anyone... I suggested another, English-related, alternative that I thought they should consider, in the service of the valuable and goal that they brought to an English faculty meeting -- the goal of getting more women interested in science. Given that context, yes, then I do wonder that my statement was met with silence.

  The example that Steuber mentions in the link you provide, in which girls didn't want to participate in an activity to produce an earthquake-proof radio tower, but did want to produce an earthquake-proof room.... do we know whether fewer boys wanted to participate in the room experiment?

  A curricular design that lets students choose, for example, either a tower or a room would meet the needs of both genders. I see enthusiasm in the humanities for expanding our areas of focus to include such male-dominated cultural fields as comic books and videogames, just as in the past few decades much has been found in women's private letters and journals have been examined. All this is good... but it takes cooperation and communication for that kind of design to happen.

  Women are in all the leadership positions at the student newsper which I advise. I have had to adjust my mentoring strategy, since previously I had taught engineering students and technical writing students. It used to be enough to offer a list of terms -- accuracy, punctuality, verifiability, etc. -- and say, "These will be expected of you in the working world. I can help you learn these values." I can see that as being informed by my own exposure, as a male, to the mostly masculine culture of engineering and business. Some schoarship in technical writing scholarship critiques those values, which I found very enlightening. I'd be a different teacher if I taught those same courses today.

  In advising students to run the student paper, my guidance is necessary not so that they will, one day down the road, be successful in the working world and look back on the lessons they learned from me. Instead, I have to help the students overcome personal friction, differing levels of commitment, and so forth, not simply to help them produce one issue, but to help them to identify and reinforce, in themselves and in each other, the values and characteristics that help the organization work.

  I don't really want to analyze the setting and context of the faculty meeting that was the setting for my anecdote (maybe it was five minutes until the end of the meeting and it was a simple announcement rather than a call for a discussion... I don't remember). But yes, I still do wonder why my suggestion was met with silence.

  The men who currently have the science jobs that women want should be encouraged to explore other career and life paths -- including stay-at-home, homeschooling dad, if they wish. You seem to agree that your letter-loving son may face difficulty in the years ahead... since my wife and I chose to home-school, we can easily adjust to Peter's disinterest in the less-known Beatrix Potter stories. But I recognize that solution isn't the best one for all parents.

• Cuts both ways, doesn't it? Per my comments last week, we lose girls in the sciences -- and boys in the humanities. The world would probably be a much better place if this was dealt with effectively.

  I have the blessing of a boy and girl each; I'm going to have to fight battles on each side of the gender line. My daughter told me as a toddler she wanted to be a doctor; as a kindergartner, she wanted to be a scientist. As a fourth grader she said she wanted to be a hairdresser. [sigh] My son, at seven years of age, tells me he wants to be a reporter; he's always been quite good at creating lengthy, highly detailed, near-epic stories. What will happen to him over the next handful of years? I shudder to think.

  In re: your encouragement of women in sciences; you might want to read Nancy Stueber's testimony dd. 24-JUL-02 before the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space [ http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/072402steuber.pdf%5D No answers there about the issues facing boys, but more information about the scope of the problem facing girls. I suspect these problems are mirrors of each other. It's a cultural thing and it needs both conscious effort and at least a generation to remedy.

  But what happens in a society when people are resisting science and are reverting to fundamentalism? How do we push non-traditional roles in learning under persistent pressure to devolve -- or under reduced funding since only the basics will receive adequate monies?

  I'll also point out an example of a cultural impediment to understanding. Potter wrote for an audience in the late 1800's/early 1900's; the word "pinnie" may well have been understood by all children regardless of gender since boys didn't wear pants until after they were able to walk, and then only short pants until they became pre-teens. If memory serves, I've seen photos of very young boys with gowns and pinafores from before the turn of the century. Over the last hundred years it's increasingly unacceptable in our culture for boys to wear anything approximating a dress; "pinnie" and its source, pinafore, were banned from the language in no small part because of this change. (The increased frequency of laundering clothes also made pinafores unneccessary and increased their social undesirability.) Is your reaction to "pinnie" not unlike that of the female faculty members?

  Consider also that you, as a white male in western culture, have social capital of which you are unconscious but use every day -- a that the female faculty members are are all too keenly aware that they lack even if they cannot articulate it. You asked for more assistance from them for a group that has more social capital than they have. Given both the cultural divide and the gap in social capital, is it any wonder your comment was met with silence?