<p>I don't recognize this thread anymore.</p>
<p>It started with an article about a performance gap in college between men and women, which fed into a lot of stuff recently about a "boy crisis" in K-12 education. I think that the "boy crisis" research tends to be only moderately politicized, but that the commentary on it in the media is highly politicized, with the usual right-wing suspects screaming about feminists castrating our sons and feminists responding that there isn't any problem except fear of women. (And as far as I can tell, there are men and women on both sides of that debate. Certainly many, many male columnists have weighed in on the "boy crisis".) The discussion here followed that pattern: a range of responses, some pretty rhetorical, some sticking closely to the data, all more or less affected by each person's political bias (and I'm certainly not excepting myself here).</p>
<p>In the process, a separate position emerged, which was largely young men addressing the college performance gap data and -- from a pretty anti-feminist perspective -- denying that the data described a real performance gap because girls' better grades were the result of their disproportionate concentration in majors with easier grading standards. Which, by the way, is an interesting hypothesis and probably explains at least some, and maybe a lot, of the performance gap. Some of these posters actually implied that women underperformed men in college because they mainly take fluffy courses. The conversation then seemed to devolve into a discussion of whether "female" majors are indeed less rigorous (as opposed to less rigorously graded) than "male" majors, and why women and men do not study the same things in equal proportions.</p>
<p>So far so OK. But now, we seem to be completely lost in space. The last few pages seem to be filled with utter stereotypes and generalizations so broad and so inaccurate as to undo themselves by the end of a sentence. Aspiring scientists are less oriented towards service to others than, say, French majors? People working in the private sector don't affect other people's lives? Mostly women care about boys' education? Give me a break. This is the Parent's Forum, not the Teen-Toking-And-Talking Forum. </p>
<p>By the way, to the young woman who talked about wanting to go home at the end of the day certain she had made someone's life better: In my experience, that is not how the world works. I am married to a fairly well known, successful children's advocate. Believe me, she does not go home every day secure in the knowledge that she has made anyone's life better. Her key projects take years from conception to implementation, and years from implementation to measurable results, and even more years to refine and to expand the improvements so that they actually impact more than a handful of actual children. Some of them fall apart at each stage, wasting months or years of work. If you think it's a lot different than doing pharmaceutical development, you're wrong. Some people -- women and men -- do almost entirely individual casework (this can be doctors, social workers, lawyers). They do get the satisfaction of daily engagement in people's lives, but they have a very high burn-out rate (except for the ones who become highly-paid specialists). They can usually only handle part of a person's problems, and they can only meet a fraction of the demand that exists for the services they can provide. There is a Groundhog Day effect: they are always doing almost the same thing, with slightly different outcomes, but nothing ever changes. And the less oriented to premium services for the rich whatever you're doing is, the more it tends to become a high-volume, mechanized process which limits your engagement with actual people.</p>