Story here in the Ottawa Citizen.

Excerpt:

More men than women are prime ministers and brain surgeons, making it easy to think boys have it made, says the study by psychology professor Judith Kleinfeld. She says we forget that men are also more likely than women to be broke, homeless and illiterate.

[…]”The difficulties of boys, however, which span far more areas, have been generally ignored. It is boys who are performing at strikingly lower levels in literacy,” she writes in the journal Gender Issues. It is boys who are more likely to quit school early, to be in special education, to have behaviour problems and be suspended or expelled.

Boys are far more likely to skip their homework, arrive at school without books or pencils and cause a disturbance that gets them kicked out of class. Boys are more likely to commit suicide or to be arrested.

“Policy attention has focused on the supposed underachievement of females in mathematics and science but these gender gaps are small,” Kleinfeld writes in her study. “In contrast, substantial gender gaps are occurring in reading and writing, which place males at a serious disadvantage in the employment market and in college.”

I blogged before about one of the causes of this problem – the dearth of male teachers in the schools.