Tag Archives: Boys

News

Young women now being paid more than young men

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From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Young women have reversed the gender gap and raced ahead of men in the pay stakes.

Landmark official figures showed yesterday that a woman in her 20s working full-time will typically earn 2.1 per cent more than a man in her age group.

The average annual salary of a person in their 20s is around £20,000, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The turning of the tables comes after a decade in which younger women – increasingly better educated and better motivated than men – have been remorselessly narrowing the historic pay differentials between the sexes.

The achievement appears to be a death blow to the long-standing argument of equality campaigners that women are paid worse than men because they suffer from discrimination and disadvantage on the part of employers.

The new reckoning of the pay gap published by the ONS showed that until the age of 30, women can now expect better pay than men.

The majority of women ease up in their careers and devote more time to their children, a choice that in most cases hits their earnings potential.

[…]A spokesman for the Government Equalities Office said: ‘The narrowing of the gender pay gap is very welcome but it still remains too large, which is why the Government is committed to promoting equal pay and taking measures to end discrimination in the workplace.’

And finally, some sanity:

The insistence that the Government must act to close a pay gap that, for many women, no longer exists brought a scathing response from some critics.

Economist Ruth Lea, of the Arbuthnot Banking Group, said: ‘There is no pay gap for women who do not have children, and for women under the age of 40 the gap is now trivial.

‘We always knew that single women were paid just as well as men. The idea that women are discriminated against was always a fantasy. I think the equality lobby will be running out of things to say.’

But there isn’t any discrimination against boys in school – oh no, not at all. I’m sure boys do just as well as girls when they are taught female-oriented books by female teachers, all the way through school.

As men lose their traditional role of provider, and the authority and respect it brings, fewer men will want to marry, and women will have to settle for taxapery-funded IVF, taxpayer-funded day care and taxpayer-funded single mother welfare. The only upside to this is that it will be mostly women who will be paying those taxes.

Commentary

Are boys performing poorly in schools?

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From the Charlotte Observer.

Excerpt:

In American schools, boys are underachieving and girls are excelling. This gender gap in academic achievement is evident as early as kindergarten. The longer students are in school, the wider the gap becomes.

Boys are more likely than girls to earn poor grades, be held back a grade, have a learning disability, form a negative attitude toward school, drop out or get suspended or expelled.

The education gender gap is affecting colleges, the workforce, the marriage rate and the fatherlessness rate in America.

Women outnumber men in college by 4 to 3. Four decades ago, men outnumbered women in college by 4 to 3. The tipping point occurred in the late 1970s. Not only are men less likely than women to go to college, they’re also less likely to graduate once there. Among 25-to-29-year-olds, 33 percent of women have earned at least a bachelor’s degree compared with just 23 percent of men. This is the first generation of women to be more educated than their male counterparts.

This shift means that women will increasingly get the highly paid jobs while men will experience a drop in earnings. This is already happening. Men in their 30’s are the first generation to earn significantly less than their fathers’ generation did at the same age. As jobs that require little education increasingly shrink, more and more men will become unemployed.

As the gap continues to grow, fewer college-educated women are able to find college-educated men to marry. Many of these women are choosing not to marry at all rather than marry non-college-educated men who are likely to earn significantly less than they do.

This is not to say that college-educated women and non-college-educated men never get married. But these marriages tend not to last. Marriages are more likely to end in divorce when wives earn more than their husbands.

This is increasingly becoming a problem. Thirty years ago, wives earned more than their husbands in 16 percent of marriages. Now it’s 25 percent and continuing to rise. By 2050, nearly half of the married women will earn more than their husbands.

The rise in the number of single American women has given birth to another trend: the rise in single motherhood. The non-marital birth rate rose sharply from 18 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 2006. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, this trend is not being fueled by teenage mothers but by women in their 30s and 40s.

The National Center for Fathering found that 72 percent of Americans think that fatherlessness is the most significant social problem facing our nation. America is the world’s leader in fatherless families.

I tried to think of a “balance” for this, but I can’t think of any way that the schools discriminate against girls.

Commentary

What is the best way to encourage young men to read?

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My answer is to have all-male schools, with all-male teachers, with all fiction books and drama selected by men, and field trips that appeal to male needs, (e.g. – the war museum! the air show! the underground caverns! a computer lab!).

But what about video games? Do they make reading seem boring to young men?

Consider this Wall Street Journal article.

The problem:

When I was a young boy, America’s elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can’t read.

According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.

The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.

Everyone agrees that if boys don’t read well, it’s because they don’t read enough. But why don’t they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the “stuffy” literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must “meet them where they are”—that is, pander to boys’ untutored tastes.

Spence explains how many publishers are writing books for boys that are really childish and disgusting.

Spence’s solution:

One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.

The other problem is that pandering doesn’t address the real reason boys won’t read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.

So why won’t boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: “They’ve tried bribing him with new video games.” Good grief.

The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time “plugged in” than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys’ attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?

Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn’t it, but Science has spoken.

The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.

What do you guys think about his idea?

I love video games. ECM helps me to find ones that I will like, and then I play those very sparingly. So this year, I played “King’s Bounty: The Legend”, “Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway” and “Arma II: Operation Arrowhead” on PC, “Etrian Odyssey 2: Heroes of Lagaard” and “Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies” on my Nintendo DS.

And previously I played games like “Silent Storm: Sentinels”,  “Dangerous Waters”, “Silent Hunter IV: Wolves of the Pacific”, “Combat Mission: Afrika Korps”, “Hidden & Dangerous 2: Sabre Squadron”, “Steel Panthers: World at War”, “Harpoon”, “Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers”, and my favorite RPG, “Wizardry 8”.

So I basically like large-scale tactical squad-based first-person shooters, large-scale realistic military simulations, and 2D turn-based fantasy role-playing games.

But what I noticed is that picking games like these that are adventurous, and playing them modestly, really hasn’t stopped me from reading. So long as I can link the topics that I read with apologetics or with developing a Christian view of politics, economics, marriage, family, parenting and foreign policy, then it seems to me that my reading is just an extension of my game playing. Life is an adventure, and books are weapons.

Specifically, I like to be adventurous and to fight, and I read books that help me to be able to have a job in engineering so that I can travel the world, and also fight about science, philosophy, history and religion. Maybe the real problem is that boys don’t see books as adventuring tools. My married friends view their marriages as very adventurous and subversive – they are very serious about reading and planning things out.