The afflicted world in which we live is characterised by deeply unequal sharing of the burden of adversities between women and men. Gender inequality exists in most parts of the world, from Japan to Morocco, from Uzbekistan to the United States of America. However, inequality between women and men can take very many different forms. Indeed, gender inequality is not one homogeneous phenomenon, but a collection of disparate and interlinked problems.
The feminisation of education
The Bias against Boys
See also
When the GCSE results come out on Thursday it is highly likely that, once again, girls will have beaten the boys at the examination game.
For years now, girls have been taking the lion’s share of success in public examinations. Last week’s A and AS-level results were further evidence of the trend. Girls out-performed boys in almost every subject. They took nearly 45,000 more subjects than boys at A-level, and nearly 90,000 more at AS level. And in both exams, they achieved a higher proportion than boys of A grades in almost every subject.
Of course, it is good news that girls are doing so well. But it is worrying that boys seem to be slipping further and further behind. For this trend isn’t confined to the high-fliers passing exams. At the bottom of the system, the drop-out rate among boys is causing serious concern. The reason is nothing other than the wholesale feminisation of the education system. In GCSEs, A-levels and – increasingly -- degree courses too, coursework accounts for an ever greater proportion of the final marks. This in itself favours girls.
Boys tend to like ‘sudden death’ exams. They like taking risks, pitting their wits against the odds. Girls don’t. They prefer to work steadily and conscientiously without gambling against memory, the clock and questions from hell. Which is why at degree level boys have until now achieved more firsts and thirds than girls who tend to get safe, if dull, seconds.
Nor is it surprising that girls are taking more exams than boys. For the curriculum has expanded in ways that suit girls rather than boys, with a proliferation of discursive, ‘soft’ subjects like general studies, sociology or drama.
The evidence suggests that boys and girls learn in different ways. Research has found that girls gain more satisfaction than boys from understanding the work they are doing. Boys are more ‘ego-related’, gaining more satisfaction from competing with each other.
Nevertheless, education policy denies such differences and imposes instead an agenda of ‘equality’. For at least twenty years, feminist teachers have made a determined attempt to change a school system they held to be hostile to girls. The assumption was that since boys tended to opt for science, maths and technology and girls for languages, humanities and domestic science, this proved discrimination against girls.
It never occurred to them that this pattern had evolved because each sex naturally gravitated towards these subjects. The view was that boys and girls were identical, and these differences therefore had to be corrected. The result was active discrimination against boys. As James Tooley comments in his book, the Miseducation of Women, girls began to be privileged over boys at school. Teachers gave priority to girls in classroom discussions, playground space and sporting fixtures.
The ‘masculine content and orientation’ of textbooks, topics and tests was obliterated in favour of female references; teachers were forbidden to use ‘sexist’ language; and male teachers’ bonding with boys through jokes or shared allusions to football had to be reprogrammed out of the system.
During the 1980s, moreover, one project followed another to get girls into studying maths, science and technology. But it wasn’t sexism that was keeping girls away from such subjects – it was their choice. For time and again it has been shown that wherever they have the opportunity, boys gravitate naturally to mechanical sciences and girls to discursive or domestic subjects. Clearly, if any prejudice existed it would be right to address it. But this was not prejudice. It was rather that boys and girls behaved in different ways. This was never an issue in single sex schools. But once co-educational schools became the norm, the differences became striking – and feminism assumed that to be different meant inferiority and discrimination.
This was not only wrong in itself. It was also disastrous for boys. For rather than men being masters of the universe as feminists contend, their sense of what they are is fragile. Unless their particular male characteristics are acknowledged and supported, they start sliding downhill and some go off the rails altogether.
In school, boys find girls intrinsically threatening, a fact generally masked at the top of the ability range but in often violent evidence at the bottom. Girls mature earlier than boys, so unless boys are exceptionally able they tend to be outclassed by girls. And if they don’t dominate, they tend to give up or drop out.
Because doing well in school involves no manual or physical activity but requires instead sitting quietly, reading and writing, the most vulnerable boys view learning as feminine and uncool. And being feminine is their deepest dread. This is because men’s sense of their masculinity is far more vulnerable than women’s sense of their femininity. Biology reminds girls what they are every month. Boys, by contrast, need to prove their identity and role, particularly among those with poor prospects and few confidence-boosting attributes. But rather than celebrating male characteristics, society tells boys at every turn that its values have turned female, and that if boys want any place in it they must do so too.
Thus, male characteristics are derided. Warfare is said to be obscene. Authority is oppressive. Chivalry is a joke. Competition creates losers – taboo in education, where everyone must be a winner. Stoicism is despised; instead, tears must flow and hearts be worn on sleeves at all times.
Men, however, define masculinity by being different from women. So this unisex culture has resulted in two things. More men are driven into stereotypical macho behaviour to prove their masculinity. And they simply withdraw from any sphere which becomes identified with women.
Because girls’ success is now such a regular feature of the league table carnival, disadvantaged boys identify school failure with being macho and worthwhile. So more give up or drop out. It is not good for either sex to be placed at a disadvantage by the other. The aim must be to make opportunity as fair as possible. But that cannot be done by confusing equality of opportunity with identical experience, the fundamental error of our age.
Boys and girls are different. It would be far better if they were educated in single-sex schools. Neither sex is well served by co-education. Neither sex benefits from coercion by the educational gender police.
Many girls resent the pressure to do science subjects. Feminists fear that if girls don’t study science in the same number as boys, they won’t have the same career opportunities later on. But girls make different choices from boys because they have different impulses and interests and calculate their life prospects very differently.
This is not an argument against girls studying engineering, or women becoming train drivers or particle physicists. It is rather that the system has become unfair and discriminatory against boys – the outcome of a philosophy that, despite its feminist credentials, does not allow girls the freedom to make their own choices, for fear that the dogma of unisex behaviour will be exposed once and for all as a big lie.
The Bias against
Boys
The feminisation of society is partly to blame for the problem of boys doing badly at school
Charlotte Leslie December 2007
The feminisation of society is partly to blame for the problem of boys doing badly at school
Charlotte Leslie December 2007
Charlotte Leslie is the editor of
the Bow Group magazine Crossbow
Parents have long suspected it, school reports have hinted at it and teachers have often accepted it. Now the statistics show it: school is a girl's world. Research published by the Bow Group think tank this summer revealed that boys fall dramatically behind in the key disciplines from the beginning of their school career—and then carry on falling. As young men, a significant minority fall out of school into crime, young offender institutes and sometimes prison.
For a government intent on extending the learning experience to 18, these statistics should make sobering reading. The Bow Group's figures show that at the age of seven, 9 per cent more girls hit government targets than boys. By 14, the difference is 15 per cent. Only 52 per cent of boys get five good GCSEs, compared with 61 per cent of girls. And last year, 44 per cent of girls stayed on to do A-levels, against 36 per cent of boys—more school seems to be the last thing boys want.
The distaste of boys for the school environment becomes more apparent if you look at behaviour and attendance records. Last year, boys were responsible for 79 per cent of expulsions and 72 per cent of suspensions. That's over 250,000 boys who had such severe problems with school that they were thrown out.
This is bad news for everyone involved in trying to raise educational standards. But it seems clear to me that the problem with boys at school is a symptom of a bigger issue: the rapid feminisation of developed societies. There are three main ways in which what one might call traditional male virtues have been downgraded or delegitimised. They are the rising importance of emotions and feeling in modern life, the delegitimisation of risk and competition, and the declining relevance of physical strength.
First, the world of education and, increasingly, of work requires more "soft" interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence than in the past. I do not want to venture too far into the debate about whether female superiority in this area is cultural or "hard-wired," but it is, for now, true that average performance in the "fact" world and the "feeling" world differs markedly between the sexes. Simon Baron-Cohen at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre has even suggested that autism is an "exaggeration" of the normal male brain.
Second, the explosion of the litigation culture and the tyranny of health and safety rules in the education system discourage risk-taking and physical competitiveness, and this bears down more heavily on male forms of behaviour.
Finally, muscle doesn't count for much any more. Changing technology and work patterns mean that men's historical advantage—their physical strength—is increasingly an obsolete currency in the workplace. This is felt with special keenness in parts of the country formerly dominated by heavy industry, where there are a high number of underperforming schools.
These factors comprise the three-way assault on male virtues: feeling over fact, safety over risk and the downgrading of physical strength. There has been reluctance to broach the subject of the difference between males and females for fear of being accused of gender stereotyping. But we are now seeing the tangible results of that inhibition.
It is not by chance that girls are staying on at school more than boys. The trend towards exam questions that concentrate on subjective interpretations over factual analysis, favours girls. The anti-risk culture is manifest in the introduction of endlessly retakeable modules. The proliferation of coursework tends to favour conscientious girls over boys who prefer the one-off risk of the exam.
If we are going to force children to stay at school until they are 18, we have to think hard about what those extra years will entail, otherwise the difference in achievement between boys and girls will only become more ingrained. Any extra compulsory school years must start to reset the gender imbalance. We need a greater appreciation of analytical skill, more competition and rewards for risk-taking, and more development of sport and practically demanding qualifications.
If our world is becoming more feminised and masculinity is being recast, that's all the more reason to give boys the best start we can. Particularly for anyone who believes in the equality of the sexes.
See also
Running out of men
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