Item — HN Reader

I think any interpretation of this phenomenon that doesn't include the phrase "it depends" is doing it injustice.

We're now in the first time where the implicit (and explicit) bias against women in education, especially in STEM, is decreasing (but not gone!) and the way girls are socialized compared to boys (and maybe even some developmental differences and movement requirements?) in general seems to make them better prepared for proper studying and learning at schools.

There's a discussion to be had if schools and universities are failing boys and men, and I think that might be part of it. If there are innate gender differences, and that I'm not sure of, the solution cannot be adjusting the schools to boys' needs again if it is at the expense of girls' results again.

I think the most important takeaway in this has to be: What do boys and men need in order to get to that same level, and how can we best provide it? This might be one of the things that can actually be accurately blamed on old-age patriarchial norms and their second and third-order effects.

As a man who's currently in uni, this has sometimes been a hard truth, because knowing that I might've had it easier than others makes it pretty hard to feel accomplished, and makes it feel even worse when you fail at something or courses even though you should have the "preferred" profile for it, and that is something that feels like patriarchial (in the powerful-man instead of all men way) thinking being perpetuated and subconciously being harmful.

There are lots of female empowerment programs nowadays, and while they might seem exclusionary, especially when there doesn't exist an all-gender pendant, I still see them as a net positive, simply because there is still too much social stigma towards women in STEM (that we in our bubble might not even notice) that that clear messaging of "YOU are wanted here" is incredibly helpful.

I like the ending thought in the article that this doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.

Is anyone here more well versed in the topic? I feel like I skipped some steps in my reasoning and can't articulate why

2 comments

> There's a discussion to be had if schools and universities are failing boys and men

"If"??? That phenomenon started a long time ago and the society as a whole is suffering because of that.

> how the current education system places boys at a disadvantage; why boys raised in poverty are less likely than girls to escape it; the fact that female students are twice as likely to study abroad and serve in the Peace Corps as their male peers; Reeves’s policy proposal to have boys start school a year later than girls[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

> there is still too much social stigma towards women in STEM

honestly I've seen nothing of this as someone who's been through the whole pipeline, it's been relentless pro-woman and every other non-white non-male identity cheerleading and it's only gotten more extreme in the corporate & startup workplace over time

When I only look at what I can see myself, it sometimes looks like this as well. But when talking to (female) friends at uni or colleagues, most of them have had bad experiences that made my jaw drop. Some of the misogynists within the institutions are pretty good at hiding it to those not within their in-group.

Of course a person can write a book on all the unfairness of this system many ways.

The long and short of all of this is we are giving person A an advantage over person B because person C did something bad to person D, and it just so happens persons B & C have some matching demographic factor.

Putting it that way, I think the racism / sexism of diversity is laid clear. I don't call it reverse racism because racism can go in any direction it's not a unidirectional graph pointed away from white people. An innocent person is catching the short end of the stick as a dark twisted way to right some wrong that this innocent person had nothing to do with, other than skin color. The sick joke of it is that the ameliorative steps to fix racism are also racist.

I get where you're coming from, and im some instances I feel the same way.

At the same time, both can be true and it's not the same in every situation.

It is possible for there to be situations where these types of programs are required and useful for lack of alternatives, and at the same time have unfairly negative effects on the out-group.

I don't know if anything can and will be done to remove the "you're tolerated, but we'd rather have literally anyone else" undertones.

I agree, as a man that has been identified as “not able to understand it”, with “it” being a lot of unacceptable behaviours toward women (and the same is true with racism btw), you become blissfully unaware of it because the behaviour never is exhibited when you’re around, strangely.

But sometimes there are slippages and that’s when the jaw dropping moments start to roll. I seriously revised the view I had of my people skills when it comes to believing to know people and what they are capable of or not. I have been proven seriously wrong, I clearly wasn’t as good at judging people as I thought. It was for me double jaw dropping in a sense: the behaviour itself and the person exhibiting the behaviour, which I would have sworn up and down was unable of something like this.

Sure I see your point, I'm not sure I accept it, but it just seems to me like the idea that there's "stigma" is flat wrong. At best the argument is that there's some sort of sleeper-cells like you're saying. But this angle completely ignores the fact that there are bad women too, who like any large social group will weaponize and profit off the egregiously favorable policies for women (and every other supposedly "marginalized" identity) in place.