Where have all the young men gone?

Parents Forum
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<p>I don't agree with this. If there are heaps of female lawyers combining family and a high-powered career, then we have different ideas of what it means to be "high-powered." If it means equity partnership in a major firm, which is what I think it means, then women are outnumbered at least ten to one, even if you look only at the cohort that graduated in the late 70's or later (when women starting earning JDs in large numbers). The women who do make partner and stick around for the long haul generally either do not have children or have nanny setups that make them virtual non-parents.</p>

<p>God help you coming back into law after ten years home raising kids. You can probably find employment if you have a Harvard JD, but it's likely to be in a small practice, and you're not going to be doing M&A, appellate litigation, or other high-powered fields. Even if you were willing to start over at the bottom of the totem pole, it would be very tough to find a firm that would be interested, because they want young grads.</p>

<p>There are small groups of women who have non-firm legal careers that are truly high-powered; I've clerked for two female federal judges, both of whom have children and raised them hands-on while rising through the ranks of government legal work. But we're literally talking about maybe 50 women in the whole country in that category. This phenomenon is not unique to MBAs at all.</p>

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<p>I'm a guy and I'm not complaining or anything, but I think that in my generation, girls have had much much more encouragement to succeed academically and prove that they "are just as good as the boys," while boys have had little to no encouragement by their role models to be good students. I think this is especially pronounced on television. A very common scenario in sticoms and commercials is that one person gets singled out as the "stupid" person and one person is the "smart" person for the purpose of humor. The stupid character is almost always a man, and the smart character is almost always a woman. Also, I can't help but be a little offended by the some of these things that are posted. It seems like you're all insinuating that a guy's biggest concern in choosing colleges is sports, good looking women, and parties with lots of alcohol. I'll admit, these things cross a guy's mind more than they would a woman's, but isn't that being a little stereotypical, and even hypocritical considering the very politically correct standards of this website? I think the problem is a societal one, in which girls have everyone telling them how much potential they have, with boys having few intelligent role models whom they can emulate. Again, let's look at television. Think of the "smart" high school boys on TV shows. Aren't they almost always portrayed as nerds with no social lives? I get really fed up with this at times. No, I don't think I've been "discriminated" against or anything like that, but I think a double standard exists that people do not feel compelled to take seriously. Just my two cents...</p>

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<p>Good point, jmarsh. </p>

<p>In my opinion, stereotyping either a man or a woman diminishes their true value. I vote for more encouragement for everybody.</p>

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<p>As the mother of two amazing boys who have been recently turning into amazing young men, and even though I'm a "former girl", I absolutely agree with you, jmarsh2006. In the rush to fix some of the gender inequities of the time when I grew up, our society has strayed too far to the side of ignoring the needs of a diverse young male population also. </p>

<p>(Anecdotal aside: my 8th grade chemistry teacher virtually punched me in the gut and drained all the excitement out of me when he announced to the class the first day that he'd paired us up in boy-girl lab teams, "... so the boys can do the science and the girls can clean the test tubes." It was the first time in my life I'd even considered that there were people who thought there were things that girls couldn't do, and it was a shocker. Happily, we have progressed past that, but we ought not to throw the male baby out with the bathwater, to twist an expression.)</p>

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<p>A couple of quick comments. First, I am dissapointed that we only value the worth of women (or men) in the context of business or enterprise --and I am in business. The MBA/LAwyer/PhD; can add great value to society at home or anywhwere, without being engaged in a paid postion.</p>

<p>I also think embedded in the comment is why men arent at LACS--If commerce is the yard stick --practical men realize LACs are the best place to be to 'get a job' so they go to a school with good Engineering/Technical/Business degrees.</p>

<p>think about it</p>

<p>middle aged married male with two sons in the energy business</p>

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<p>I agree that there has been lots of efforts to support women's achievement, but the achievement gap between male and female high school students predates all these efforts; it is linked to the different rates of development of boys and girls. When I was in school in the 50s and 60s in a different country, it was clear that the top students were girls and the guys were goofing off. By the time they're in college, guys catch up with girls in terms of maturity. The trick is getting them into college in the first place, given their less stellar high school records.</p>

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<p>right on jmarsh</p>

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<p>
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nanny setups that make them virtual non-parents.

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<p>Thanks for that little zinger, Hanna. I raised two boys with 'nanny set-ups' thank you very much. I am as much a parent as anyone on this board. I'd stack my boys and their emotional and intellectual health against any 'real' boys raised by 'real' mommies. With glee, in fact. </p>

<p>AS for your stats, if there are only 50 female law partners in the whole country, I know all fifty. Mind you, the female lawyers I know graduated in the late 70's and 80s. Their law firms bend over backwards to give them equity. This is true overseas too.</p>

<p>Over twenty five years, our business has been well represented by female lawyers/mothers in white glove firms. Likewise, I have a number of clients who are highly successful female attorneys and wonderful 'real' mommies too.</p>

<p>I also have several hugely successful female corporate clients (earning seven figures+ in Fortune 500 companies). None of them have children.</p>

<p>Those are my 'stats'.</p>

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<p>As the mother of four boys I have seen boys stereotyped and discriminated against through gradeschool and high school.
Boys are disciplined more frequently for talking/disobeying rules
I am appalled by some of the demeaning and stereotypical posts in this very thread. Just imagine putting females instead of males in the following statements
Males are looking for babes and beer and football
Males only have athletics as an extra curricular and it is what keeps them in school
Males will choose their college on things like sports teams.
Why can we say things like that about males but heaven forbid we make a stereotypical statement about girls even with substantial data to support a stereotype!!
There are too many who are ready to demonize and demean the male population and glorify the females
Enough!!!!!</p>

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<p>As the father of two boys, one off to college this fall, the other 5 years away, I have not seen the discrimination or stereotypes described on this forum. I feel my S found it to be neither an academic advantage nor a disadvantage to be male. A look at the colleges chosen by boys at S's public HS shows no preference for sports programs, and both girls and boys chose Universities over LAC's, with only slightly more girls than boys choosing LAC's. </p>

<p>My S's final choice came down to a decision between a University & an LAC. He chose the University because he thought there would be more academic opportunities (neither had major sports). He is an accomplished athlete in an individual sport and will continue training and competing on his own at the club level. This was available at both.</p>

<p>Personal preference, area of the country, small vs large, all will have an impact that affect students differently. My concern is college preparation at the primary school level. This is where many boys get left behind, which college one goes to and upon what one basis a decision is fun to discuss, but is of little relevance to those with no chance at college at all, and more of these are boys.</p>

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<p>Goodness, you're reading a great deal into my post that isn't there. I said that THESE women (some of the big-firm partners I know) had "nanny set-ups that made them virtual non-parents," not that ALL nanny set-ups do that. We had a nanny in my family; my mother was/is a nationally prominent psychiatrist. If you were seeing your preschool-aged children 30 minutes a day for months on end like some of these partners do, then perhaps you had the kind of set-up I'm referring to.</p>

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<p>Look at my post again. The paragraph with the estimated statistic refers to women who have "NON-FIRM LEGAL CAREERS that are truly high-powered" (emphasis added). So I clearly wasn't referring to law partners, who by definition don't have "non-firm" careers, but rather (as I stated) to female federal judges. If this country has more than fifty female federal judges who have children and who did not come up through the ranks of law firms, then I'd love to see the list. I would add tenured female professors at top law schools to the non-firm/high-powered category...maybe there are another 50 of those nationwide, if you define "top law school" generously.</p>

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<p>I'm sorry, I don't understand your point. I never claimed that big business was more welcoming to women than law; I merely expressed my disagreement with the statement that the phenomenon is "peculiar to MBAs."</p>

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<p>jmarsh beat me to the punch. Posts above have been "cartooning" young men by saying this anti-LAC preference is all about booze and football. </p>

<p>From my experience, public high schools can become a bit of a ghetto for young men. There is a CLEAR preference for women in the most selective and challenging classes. I suspect it's a plethora of reasons--some developmental, some societal, some benign and some pathological. It boils down to this: high school does not really value the things that men bring to the world at large. Men are risk-takers. Men are, generally, more competitive. And, despite the apologies of the Harvard president, there appears to be some gender differences with regard to mathematics and engineering achievement. </p>

<p>Nonetheless, my two sons did NOT enjoy high school. And, they are both thoroughly enjoying college.</p>

<p>I suspect that many males, as they approach their first taste of freedom (including the freedom to fail--yes, we all know it!), want to avoid LACs. They see LAC culture as a continuance of high school patterns. Young men, quite simply, want a reshuffled deck.</p>

<p>But to all the LAC-lovers out there, we get to say (I've always wanted to say this!),</p>

<p>"But I thought you just wanted to be friends."</p>

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<p>Using the Princeton Review site ( <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.princetonreview.com&lt;/a> click on student body). I check the major schools in North Carolina.</p>

<p>public-large state schools (percent females)
UNC 58%
UNC-G 68%
ECU 59%
UNCW 60%
UNCC(charlotte) 54%
Appalachian 50%
Western Carolina 53%
NCSU 42% (engineering)</p>

<p>Private
Duke 48%
Wake 51%
Elon 61%
Guilford 62%
Davidson 51%
Greensboro College 54%</p>

<p>I think in NC the trend of more females than males is across the board. The only major exception is NCSU. Which has large schools of engineering and agriculture. </p>

<p>It's not just the LAC's...</p>

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<p>I reread the thread on "the lost boys," and it was interesting, indeed.</p>

<p>Happened to be chatting with 15 year old S2 yesterday about rock music, thence the 60's and 70's, on, naturally to the War, then civil rights movement, environmentalism, Nixon and the EPA, and the women's movement. When I started explaining (again heh,) how it was when women were expected to be, "barefoot and pregnant," he got snappish and ended the conversation (which had been going strong to that point). </p>

<p>Thinking of these threads on CC, I asked him if, as a white male young man, he felt discriminated against. He answered that it wasn't really that he felt discriminated against, as much as ridiculed. He said white male is "like the joke now, like you have nothing behind you." Everyone else has their history, is overcoming, has reason to be striving. The young white male is like the one who is yesterday's oppressor, "and we weren't even there."</p>

<p>I get the feeling that part of it is, like, if you're a white male, you should have no problem, no struggle, no excuse for any difficulty. Add to that the middle and high school structure, as discussed in other posts above, which favors girls (sit still, be quiet, do as you're told and no questions).
Well, of course, life is filled with struggle, so could it be that some of these kids give up when they hit the hard parts because somehow they get from ambient culture that they of all people should have no struggle?</p>

<p>Let me add that what I saw in middle school was the case of, "the boys who stop reading." As soon as they were given historic fiction with girls as the heroes, a substantial portion of the boys shut down. I won't go into my rant about what boys had to read in 9th grade here and goodness help them if they disliked the stuff - that's a whole 'nother, though related and much discussed, topic. It's all part of the same phenomenon.</p>

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<p>As a white male, this "white male discrimination" is total BS.</p>

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<p>
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He said white male is "like the joke now, like you have nothing behind you." Everyone else has their history, is overcoming, has reason to be striving. The young white male is like the one who is yesterday's oppressor, "and we weren't even there."

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<p>I'd ask anyone who feels sorry because he has nothing to overcome, has things so easy that he does not need to strive, to consider whether he would like to trade places with someone who does have to overcome and has to strive. I know my two boys would not like to be girls.</p>

<p>So okay, some of the literature is more appealing to women, but some is definitely more appealing to boys. I, for one, did not care for Moby Dick and reading The Scarlet Letter made my blood boil; so did Thomas Hardy's Tess of D'Uberville, whose hero, Angel Clare can't get past Tess' loss of virginity because she's been raped. Blegh!</p>

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<p>I think the information in post #36 goes a long way to explain the differences in enrollment. Males have more opportunities than females for decent paying jobs out of high school. The imbalance can be explained in (large?) part by the lack of perceived economic value by males in a college education.</p>

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<p>I am not trying to make excuses for my son(s) or any one in particular. I am trying to understand, or hear a point of view, from the group of kids who are supposedly dropping away from the college population. It may not be comfortable to hear what these young men feel, but if that's what they feel, we need to listen and hear it and discuss it and think about what (if anything, and do nothing is an option) we want to do.</p>

<p>Just curious, Marite - how old were you when you first read those books?</p>

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<p>Prouddad:</p>

<p>I looked at this issue several years ago and I found that at UNC-CH there was a positive coorelation between the percentage of students accepted by sex to the percentage of applicants by sex. BTW, don't forget that it has only been within the last 30-40 years that UNC-CH accepted females in the undergraduate programs who were not residents of Chapel Hill or Carrboro or were not applying to certain very specific programs, e.g., nursing.</p>

<p>You didn't cite the data, but I bet the imbalances are even worse at the HBCUs in NC.</p>

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<p>I was in high school; I read them in French, but they were assigned reading, part of the world literature curriculum. I can tell you that my S disliked Dostoievksy and Dickens, and I don't consider them women's authors. But if he had his druthers, he would only read sci-fi and fantasy asides from math and science.</p>

<p>I agree it's useful to hear different points of view. It's also useful to know what's just whining and what is real. If a kid says he isn't feeling well in the morning, it's a good idea to find out whether he is really not feeling well or just not wanting to go to school. It would save a trip to the doctor. </p>

<p>In my family, it's my H who is more likely to see anti-boys discrimination in programs designed to promote math and science among girls. He does not have the experiences I've had being a female graduate student who was told I would be taking a job away from a male breadwinner, or being told that by not attending a particular university I would be messing up their gender balance (ratio of 15:1 became 15:0).
Remember that Roberts made cracks about not wanting to sit next to a giggling blonde in law class? (he eventually married a blonde lawyer--presumably she had not giggled her way through law classes) That was my generation's experience.</p>