In celebration of my return to commenting on Slow Boring, here's some thoughts from me, a former male teacher who left teaching after 3 years and has no intention to ever return.
1) Probably the biggest issue for a young male teacher is the social environment at work is legitimately awful. I mean, it's already kind of hard for a young person to break into any professional job where most of your direct colleagues will be vastly older than you and in a much different place in life. However, this is turned up to 11 when you've got a 22 year old man whose only social options are women who are largely all married mothers. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that having work friends makes getting through the day a lot more pleasant. And that's not to say anything negative about the mostly wonderful ladies I worked with! It's just a fairly banal factual claim that men in their early 20s would prefer to socialize with a different demographic than you find at school. This is a sort of critical mass problem where it only gets better after a substantial number of male teachers are hired, but one reason your male teachers don't stick around is that they feel isolated and misunderstood.
2) I do think there is something about the general decline of both general discipline and social cohesion in schools that frustrates male teachers in particular. I personally felt for each year I was in the job that the social and emotional labor I was performing kept increasing as a share of my total work. I don't mind trying to get kids excited or motivated or get them to behave or get them to put their phone away or help them navigate some interpersonal crisis etc., but I find it to be by far the least pleasant and most exhausting part of the job by quite a large margin because my personality is not well suited to the affectionate, loving manner teachers are supposed to conduct themselves with in these situations.
3) I taught English 2 years and CS for 1. The English classes were very annoying, because my team set the readings we were doing and, see point #1, they had very different interests than me (or, I suspect, most boys). If it were up to me I would've put at least one of the mid-century science fiction classics (maybe Asimov) in our segment on American literature in 12th grade English, but instead we mostly read the usual suspects. Note that (in Florida) this is not because of some mandate that we must read certain books in schools. It is entirely because the sorts of novels that men tend to disproportionately enjoy are at best seen as uninteresting by other teachers and at worst derided as un-serious or not-literary. CS was a lot better because I got to control my own curriculum, but I do not think American schools are really hurting for a shortage of male CS teachers. It's more the male everything-else teachers.
4) This one is sort of unfortunate but true: if you are a young man, becoming a teacher in many states is a terrible idea if you want a sort of traditional dating life and family experience etc. First of all, I received quite a lot more interest from women after I switched jobs into the tech industry (and nothing else about me had really changed besides the fact that I now had a higher-status and more highly-paid job). We have decent evidence that (many, certainly not all!) women prefer to date men who are better-paid and have higher-status jobs than we do, and that this effect does not really seem to exist in the other direction. Secondly, wage compression in teaching is quite bad outside of a handful of states with insanely powerful unions. So if your hope is to be making two or three times as much by 40 as you were at 25 (to support kids, pay for family vacations, etc.) teaching is a bad idea, and separate from that it just makes you feel like you are stagnating or not working toward any great achievement.
5) A smaller piece that makes all this worse: a good male teacher gets tapped for admin/discipline/etc. roles VERY quickly after they begin your career, for basically all the reasons you think that having good male admins would be a school priority, but that just makes it even harder to solve #1-3
Thanks for writing this. I wish more teachers (and former teachers) would write about their experiences in forums like this.
Here's my quick version from my 6 years as a high school teacher:
- Not only is the potential friendship and or dating pool small in school settings, but where I worked the district actively discouraged it. One ongoing rumor was that they purposefully reassigned dating/married teachers to different schools in order to avoid uncomfortable situations.
- Bad work environment: Men were saddled with disciplinary work because, well, they're physically more imposing and wouldn't be as easily overpowered by students. I was frequently called to walk a disruptive student to the office or in-school-suspension trailer, even in the middle of class, because I was the nearest male teacher. Coaches were often stuck with watching the ISS trailer all day because of the perception that a coach is good at discipline. Some of these students needed serious psychological interventions. Often, they were suffering from trauma in the home or community, or even the school itself (fights happen).
- I definitely agree that men are recruited out of the teacher pool and into administration quickly. I don't have a good grip on why that is the case, but administrators make more money and have a clear path to 6 figures if they get to be a principal. I never liked the sound of a degree in "leadership" but that was also usually floated as something that would make a difference.
- There isn't exactly a shortage of male CS teachers but there is a shortage of schools that even offer CS, especially advanced placement CS courses. And there's always the higher pay outside of teaching. If you can code, why teach for $48k a year? The male teachers I knew who left in the first year or two or three (even ones not doing CS stuff) left explicitly to make more money. You can earn more as a store manager at a big box retailer than you can as a teacher. One English teacher opened a tutoring franchise for a large national chain and cleaned up.
- To MY's point about CTE, most schools got rid of it because of regulatory requirements to increase the number of students going to college (technical schools don't count). Add to that the change in accountability that *only tested students' performance in math and english* and you can see why schools would de-prioritize anything else. Too many CTE students could mean the state comes in and takes over your school. Better to just not do it. At my school the CTE program made an interesting pivot and put CS, healthcare, legal, science, and business courses into the mix. Basically, we refocused CTE away from blue collar and into white collar work. Metal shop became "engineering lab" and now required physics as a prerequisite, for example. This meant the students taking CTE courses were all generally high achieving and college bound. What happened to the population that would have taken the older vocational style of courses? They mostly took PE classes over and over again. Some did JROTC. I'd wager many felt school was pointless and didn't teach them what they needed to know to get a job after high school.
- Bad work environment pt. 2 unrelated to gender: I went through several outright hostile administrations. One principal even turned out to be embezzling money from the athletics budget (and having an affair with the school's bookkeeper). Others would show up with pet projects that inevitably failed (teachers should wear costumes every Friday to make school fun and engaging!!!) but were also used as a cudgel to get you to comply with all kinds of crap (I noticed you're not in costume. I'm worried about whether you're following school procedures appropriately. I will be observing your classes on Monday). Bad managers happen everywhere, but bad managers in schools ultimately end up hurting children, even if indirectly.
- Bad work environment part 3, unrelated to gender: I was working with the special education department to provide basic literacy instruction for 9th graders. Long story short, students show up to high school reading at a 1st-2nd grade level. It happens - even kids without special needs can show up with very poor reading skills. They need basic literacy instruction, and, for obvious reasons, high school teachers are not trained to do this. I went out and got OG certified, recruited a speech and language pathologist from the district to help me write curriculum, and devised a holistic approach to identifying students who needed this intervention as they entered high school. Schools often have electives that are basically just opportunities for students to study. So, I set up an elective where the identified students would be able to receive this kind of instruction without messing up their other coursework. Administration said no and claimed we were legally prohibited from provide this kind of remedial instruction. That ended up not being the case, but it took a whole year to get the approvals needed and basically go around the guy.
okay, that's long enough, but yeah, teaching is hard in a lot of ways and I do think it falls differently on male teachers.
I think one thing you get to here which is very important is the college-ification of high school and reorienting students towards that. In Florida fortunately the grading formula has been substantially changed to privilege CTE programs that successfully get students certified and i did notice that kids of a certain typically low performing archetype were big fans of their diesel mechanic classes and whatnot. I think the demand deficient economy combined with deindustrialization sort of broke peoples brains and made them think a vocational career meant dooming a kid to working class poverty and failure
I agree with this diagnosis. Go back and look at how policymakers talked about education from the 90s on. Everything is about preparing kids for the jobs of tomorrow, 21st century jobs, etc. A district near mine once boasted that 100% of their students were college bound. All they had done to make that statement was they'd eliminated the vocational degree option and moved all the students over to the college preparatory track. Mission accomplished.
Welcome back! Lots of really good points in this from an on-the-ground perspective. I wanted to touch a bit on some of them to just see if there are some places to go with the issues.
1) I was curious about this one because my husband is a teacher and finds his coworkers fairly relatable. However, we're in Oregon, which it turns out has the second highest proportion of male teachers already (30%). Although many of his teacher friends are women, they're also largely permanently child-free. I wonder if making it easier to change careers a bit later in life to become a teacher would help, combined with evening out pay disparities between early and mid/late career earnings to soften the blow of a career change.
2) I think I agree. My husband's private school is largely boys who didn't succeed in traditional school settings. He has a very straightforward and candid way of interacting with them, and they tend to thrive under it. Accepting different styles of interactions and putting less pressure on teachers to be everything all at once to their students I think would help.
3) Just generally yes. Being able to choose materials seems to help both the students and the teachers be more engaged, though it will create more work for an early-career teacher I think, leading to burnout.
4) I'll be honest, this one does worry me. I'm the breadwinner working in a tech startup as a wife and mom while my husband works as a teacher, but I'm not blind to the clear preferences that dominate. I do think generally increasing the pay for teachers is a very good idea that may help, but I don't know if that lines up with the data we have now. I think Oregon has pretty middling teacher pay.
5) That seems like an unfortunate consequence of a good impulse, and probably needs to be fixed by the pipeline like you said.
I have a good friend that went to college planning to be a math teacher, graduated college extremely excited to be a math teacher, then became a math teacher, hated it, and quit after two years. Like you said, being 23 and teaching at a high school fucking *sucks*. I wonder if there's some kind of reverse pipeline that could be created by funneling off middle-aged people from related fields and recruiting them to teach, because getting men out of college to join the profession seems doomed.
You are also describing one of the big hurdles to getting more women into STEM fields. If the field is dominated by men, then the people and culture you interact with is male-centered. Makes sense that the opposite would be very true as well.
Seriously! I find all the "women are being mean to us men" stuff extremely embarrassing. Have some pride for crying out loud. Maybe us men just need to "lean in" more.
Anecdata: I had a fantastic male English teacher in 11th grade, who had _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ on his curriculum -- which is kind of a weird, more-literary sf novel, but certainly more interesting to 16-year-old me than a lot of the other more standard canon books.
More: I am math inclined and no good at English lit. My grade 12 AP English teacher was awesome. One example of this was she spent an entire month on Heart of Darkness, including making our own Heart of Darkness board game and watching Apocalypse Now. Can't remember if it was original or redux.
One thing that’s true about male teachers is schools want us. There’s a huge pipeline problem in that the certification system is designed for someone who knew they wanted to teach when they were 17.
If you haven’t been pursuing it it’s a huge hassle and doesn’t have much to do with actually being good at teaching.
Like if you go in directly to a quality teaching program you’ll get a pretty good prep program. Like new grads from state schools get a pretty good preparation program where they do a lot of good field work including a quality internship.
I went through an alternative pathway and basically as long as you can
Pass some tests having to do with basic content knowledge you will get through. Knowing how to classroom manage, and be good with students is barely prepared at all.
Like a practical apprenticeship type program isn’t really an option
My son did exactly a teacher apprenticeship program with a charter school system to get his M Ed and switch from being an engineer to a math/science teacher. So those programs do exist or did a few years back. Probably not widely available though.
For those interested, Notre Dame has an apprenticeship-type certification program that's free if you teach in an underprivileged Catholic school for a time after graduating.
I'd say yes, it's a feature of the field. The point of the alternative pathways is to reduce barriers to entry so that people who didn't go to school for teaching can quickly and easily become teachers. Requiring a person to go through a year of student teaching is a big barrier to entry. You basically can't hold a full-time job because you're in school 8-4 and then need do some kind of training "class" at night that helps you process the experiences and learn from them. The alternative pathways mostly assume that content knowledge alone is sufficient.
You know math? Great! Can you prove it on a test? Great! You're certified, go apply for jobs.
What Seneca mentions above is one of the options but they're not very common. The typical version is you sign up for a "residency" where you are placed in a school as a full teacher and then have coursework/training/seminars at night and during the summer. Some are university based, some are run by districts or cities. There are probably only a few thousand slots nationwide.
Because these kinds of programs also focus on placing "resident teachers" in the worst schools, my guess is that these programs have high attrition, but I haven't looked for a study to verify that. I know that Boston's teacher residency program is successful and that teacher who graduate from it stick around in their teaching jobs longer than teachers who went through other alternative pathways.
Just hijacking the top comment to say that when I started 5th grade I was very excited to have my first male teacher. But then Mr. Wairi got arrested for child pornography (of students from Somerville when he taught there, not of anyone in our class) after I switched to the public school closer to my house, so…
I sympathize, but getting into any new career mid life is difficult. I'm sure it's not any easier to get credentialed as a lawyer or basically any other field that requires credentials.
Let's be real, the learning curve to become a competent lawyer is much steeper than the learning curve to become a competent teacher. There's no evidence that MEd programs make teachers better at their jobs and selective private schools often hire teachers without teaching degrees with few problems.
In reality you could hire plenty of non-credentialed people to do lawyer work and things would also work out fine. Just look at Erin Brockovich. Most entry legal work is just doing discovery and filling out paperwork. Way easier than teaching a class. Everyone thinks their job is so hard and no one else could do it. Apart from maybe brain surgeons those people are wrong.
The question isn't "can some people do this job without credentials", it's "do credential requirements improve the level of education the children receive". I think the answer is pretty obviously yes, which is why every important job requires them.
If the limit of your abilities is doing doc review or filling out forms that don't require legal knowledge, you're a paralegal, not a competent lawyer. And graduate programs in education are well-studied and have no apparent benefits, which is why e.g. North Carolina has eliminated them.
It's also systemically difficult for people who want to switch to teaching mid-career. I've written before here about two friends with STEM doctorates who wanted to go into teaching after retiring from the military. The rules basically dictated they would have to start as first-year teachers with no experience and to progress they'd eventually have to get a master's in education. Then seniority, vesting and credential requirements make the teaching profession very inflexible.
Why would they not start out as first year teachers if it is their first year teaching? I have known plenty of brilliant people in STEM fields who are terrible teachers. And others who failed out of engineering courses but we're great at teaching. Anyone new to teaching should start at the bottom and prove themselves.
If you want to get more people into teaching and increase the diversity of the profession, then you need to find a way for mid-career people with relevant experience to not have to jump through all the same hoops as a newly minted teacher with a fresh BA in education.
One of these guys taught at a university for four years. And most anyone who has a doctorate has done at least some teaching. That counts for little to nothing.
This is the result of a system where promotion and advancement are contingent on credentials and seniority. It has other perverse incentives as well.
And I think a lot depends on what's being taught. A person with a doctorate in physics, with 20 years experience in the field, and with university teaching experience should probably be beelined to teach AP STEM courses and be compensated more than someone who just got a teaching degree and barely knows algebra.
Would you complain that a software developer still has to get a law degree and take the bar to practice law? I think your complaint centers on the belief that teaching is something that just anyone can do well and which smarter people can do better than people with experience. From what I have seen, lots of smart people make terrible teachers. I agree with you that we want to encourage more people to join the teaching profession, and making a clear path for people who want to make mid-career changes could be beneficial. But it sounds like you are arguing that people in more prestigious careers shouldn't have credential requirements and should be paid more than experienced teachers who already know what they are doing. I don't think that will lead to better outcomes for kids.
How would you feel if your company started hiring a bunch of outsiders with no experience and paying them more than you? Would that encourage you to work harder?
My complaint is about unnecessary credentialism that creates barriers to entry and gates compensation and promotion opportunities (along with seniority systems). In most places, particularly those where teachers unions are strong, these are hindrances that - at best- made a mid-career change into teaching more difficult. But that is only one aspect of a system that doesn't have good incentives.
"But it sounds like you are arguing that people in more prestigious careers shouldn't have credential requirements and should be paid more than experienced teachers who already know what they are doing. "
That is a strawman. This isn't about "prestigious" vs other careers, and I never said that mid-career teachers should be paid more that experienced teachers.
My point is about attracting talent and diversity into teaching. The present system does that poorly.
I think part of the question is what is meant by experience. If someone spent 20 years in IT and then went back and got a law degree that person would expect to get paid a lot more than a 25 year old who went undergrad-law school and had no other real world experience.
They might expect that, but in reality it won't happen. They might be able to get a little more, but not much. Mid career changes are tough because you are starting over. Having other real world experience should help with getting hired, but not necessarily with pay.
AP is perhaps a bit of an outlier but generally speaking k-12 school teaching and college teaching are very different. I’m not sure if experience in one should count towards the other.
Sure they are different, but they are not that different. Someone with experience in college teaching (or even other types of education and training) will have skills that will apply in a K-12 classroom, just not all the skills necessary.
Do we have data on how educational grad schools skew? I have anecdotally heard men be disproportionately frustrated with the grad school experience for teachers
The Biden Administration, from March, 2022: "Biden Harris Administration Announces Commitments to Advance Pay Equity and Support Women’s Economic Security". https://tinyurl.com/2f2h7bj5
I understand Matt's desire to avoid this as a culture war battle. However, the current situation is the result of 50 years of messaging like the one referenced above. The statement even includes the canard that women are paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to their "average male counterpart", which has been disproven time after time. Seriously, read the whole thing to see how the message is all about division and excluding men from the list of "good people".
Yes, actual policy proposals are important. But it is also important to push back against the prevailing analytical framework that the world is all about victims and oppressors. The victim/oppressor framework is ubiquitous in academia, in politics, in newspapers and in activist circles. For 50 years, this framework for analyzing the world has been used to tell the following people they are victims of oppression: Women, Black people, LGBTQI+, Native Americans, Hispanics, people of color (all groups cited in the White House communique above). Hmmm...who does that leave as the oppressors of those groups?
Messages sent are usually received. And the evidence shows this particular message has been received.
It boggles my little neolib, elder millennial mind that it is still so taboo to discuss that the constant messaging to white males about being the opressor (the theme itself if not the word) against anyone and everyone else is so counterproductive to an "equity" outcome.
>>the constant messaging to white males about being the oppressor<<
Long time white male here. This seems overdone, at least to the extent it's being presented as a possible reason for struggling boys.
Yes, there's a modest portion of the population that seems to have problem with white males qua white males. My sense, though, is that such types are not so influential to people who don't spend a lot of time on Twitter (ie, normies). The president is a white male. So are most governors and members of Congress as well as a plurality of the Supreme Court. Major media figures seem disproportionately white male (they're only about 32% of the US population, after all). A lot of our biggest actors, directors, producers and writers are white males. Maybe most of them. And most sports team owners (almost all, really) as well as the vast majority of billionaires and an overwhelmingly dominant share of the very richest one are likewise white males. Again, white males are less than a third of the population.
The evidence cited by Reeves and others—helpfully summarized here by Matt—leaves me with zero doubt that America has a serious "boys" problem. It's seems likely, though, that—at least for boys who happen to be white—the message that they live in a society that advantages and encourages their kind would be significantly more powerful than the background noise of anti-white male wokery (Anti *conservative* white male wokery is a lot noisier, for sure, but it saves nearly half its derision for women, as the numerous "Karen" memes and stories will attest).
I should clarify that I wasnt proposing it context of the book review, and more just a general response to the comment above mine. I would also say that I spend a good amount of time in community initiatives of all sorts, which love themselves some DEI, and I think (in my little worldview) that it (problem with white males) is much broader than twitter. OR, I also may be over snowflaking. {insert shrug emoji}
Yeah, but nobody is locking their car door when they see you walking by. You're complaining about paper cuts to people who have lost a leg. I'd rather be called an oppressor than a thug myself.
I think I would prefer that also - and there is a lot to try and unpack from your comment in regards to my original comment... but I have a feeling that any nuance or well intentions may not be received if you already think I am just whining.
I've just heard complaints like this a lot, and unless you are being really clear about what you are saying, it's going to sound douche-y. I had a friend who would complain that some person using food stamps was buying expensive steaks. My friend was making around $140,000 a year at that point. What was he complaining about? Would he like to switch places with that guy? No? Then what's the point?
Would you rather be a black person that just got pulled over for speeding? Or a woman going into a meeting to ask for a raise from a super creepy boss? Or living on a Native reservation? If not, then what is the point of the complaint? A millionaire can complain about money to a billionaire, but should never ever be complaining about money to anyone else. As a white guy I tend to roll my eyes at the whole oppressor thing, but I don't complain about it for that very reason. We are still at the top of the food chain. When 75% of the CEOs in this country are women you can start to make complaints like this. Now a good argument about this topic would be to point out that evidence shows that we function better as a group when you point out our similarities than when you point out our differences. Matt has done a bunch of takes that go into how counterproductive identity politics has been for Democrats and for the cause of social justice. But notice that he is careful never to say that Democrats are being too mean to white men.
It's true that those groups are victims of oppression! I don't dispute your point that it is not good to constantly tell the average straight white man, who's just living his life trying to be a good person, that he is to blame for all the world's problems. But it's equally bad to tell people who are the victims of oppression that it's not happening. We just need a more mature, nuanced political discourse than we have at the moment.
Would you describe women or Hispanics or Native Americans in today's United States as "victims of oppression"? How so? I'm sure we can both find examples of sexism and racism that are impacting some individuals or small groups of people, but labeling groups of people as large as an entire gender as victims seems like an unhelpful stretch. What victims exactly would the Biden admin by gaslighting if they changed their language?
I feel it's pretty likely you're going to say "abortion" but in most areas where abortion has become more restricted the average woman voter supports the restrictions. That feels like a disagreement over the morality of abortion and not some kind of handmaiden's tale abortion to me.
Let's focus on women. To me, it's clear the answer is yes.
- Political disenfranchisement: there's never been a woman president. The Senate is 76% male. The House is 72% male. Governors are 82% male. The Supreme Court is "only" 55% male, but the majority, which holds all the power, is 83% male.
- Abortion: I believe what you wrote is just wrong. 71% of American women opposed overturning Roe, and it was done by a SCOTUS majority which as noted is 83% male.
- There are (controversial) reports indicating high rates of domestic violence by US police. There are reports of tens of thousands of rape kits the police don't test. Like many police abuses in the US, the systems seems so disinterested as to prevent availability of good data to illuminate what is happening, let alone address it.
I'm male, living in the UK. But I've heard lots of American women express the view that America has some pretty patriarchal elements. The women I know in the UK (and other countries), who are of above average socioeconomic status, express many of the same concerns, especially sexual harassment at work and apathy (or worse) by police.
It's not the Handmaid's Tale but it seems there's lot of room for improvement. That does not mean it's wise to label all women as victims or all men as oppressors. But my original point was we should be able to address oppression without sweeping labels.
The Senate is 76% male but the voters are 55% female. Women are more often victims of domestic abuse but men are 90% of the prisoners and were 60% of covid deaths and they (we) live 6 years less. Women now soundly outperform in education as today's post made clear.
At the end of the day there's no equation that will tell you who is "more oppressed". It's not math. It's subjective. And ultimately it's a pointless question. Domestic abuse is something we should prevent because it's a problem for any victims, not because it hurts women more and we need to "balance the sexes". Ditto for people falsely accused or imprisoned - it's a societal issue, not a "men's issue". Framing it as a gender thing is not helpful.
Also, on abortion the numbers on abortion support / oppose from Pew are 63/35 women and 58/41 men. My point was that in most states where it is or will be restricted, Alabama, for example, that support is closer to 50/50 or even the other way. In California or Connecticut abortion won't be restricted.
Wigan: are you really saying there's oppression in relation to groups (x,y,z)
Me: yes
Wigan: but groups (a, b, c) are also oppressed
Me: ...
What's the argument here? Near-ubiquitous and often tacitly tolerated workplace sexual harassment, whose victims are mostly female, isn't oppressive because the barbaric criminal justice system's victims are mostly male?!
This might be easier were it in Spanish where you can use estar / ser to indicate temporary "to be" from more permanent meanings of "to be"
Oppressed definition: keep (someone) in subservience and hardship, especially by the unjust exercise of authority
When you say women are oppressed, it implies to me that it's a state of being. So (some) women are subject to A, B, C, D, etc and therefore they are an oppressed class of people. But every group of people is subject to something, so by that definition it feels like everyone is oppressed and the word loses all meaning. In that sense of the word I'd like to save it for Uyghurs in China or describing the Jews in Biblical Egypt.
If you want to use it more widely and apply it to any hardship inflicted on any individuals, especially by authority figures, than there are certainly many individuals in the United States who have been oppressed at some point in their lives.
But there's not really anything interesting about saying "yes, but [bad things] still need tackling" since we all agree on that. That said I wouldn't count 76% of the Senate being male as a hardship imposed on women, given they are the majorities of voters and women can and do run and win Senate seats all the time, and furthermore your gender doesn't determine your vote.
Also, you're probably tired of hearing me say it, but " barbaric criminal justice system's victims" is such a wild, glass half-empty and extreme framing of the US justice system. I really think you could benefit from being more widely informed on that topic.
I'm not a fan of victim/oppressor mentality, but it's laughable to say that Joe Biden, a man, is on a crusade to make people think men are evil.
When my mom was growing up women couldn't even get a bank account without a man. That's not oppression? It wasn't that long ago. I don't want to keep whipping ourselves over this stuff forever but these are all things that happened and there's nothing wrong with pointing that out or trying to make the world a little more fair. If you ever get told you need to bring your wife along to open a bank account or get a credit card then we'll have something to talk about.
I don't think the 83 cents thing has been "disproven." If anything, the number is closer to 60 cents if you include all adult men and adult women and don't control for being employed
Depends what you are trying to measure: if you say that society as a whole values people by what they are paid and women are, on the whole, paid less than men, then why should it matter what the cause is?
If you're arguing that the cause is employer discrimination, then you need to control for other things.
But if you're just saying "these people are richer than those people" then you don't need to control for anything, you just measure their incomes.
Sure and that's a good point but it was also be an extremely materialist view of how we measure societal value. Even in the modern world we still value many non-material markers of work, success and status.
It depends on what you are trying to estimate. If you are trying to find out how much more money men make then women, I don't think you want to include non working women.
You can argue that this figure really implies X instead of Y, but I don't understand what people mean when they call these numbers debunked
I've never gone deep into the data on this topic myself so I only know what I know from articles. But what I think I've read is that if you control for the basic strong determinants of salary - type of job, role, years on the jobs, etc.. the gender gap mostly disappears.
I don't actually know if that's true or not, but that's the argument I've heard.
Andrew Valentine already kind of referenced this but I think the gender pay gap is mostly:
-A pipeline problem in certain, relatively-highly-paid, fields.
-A motherhood penalty.
There has been some progress on the first issue. The second is much thornier.
There is a lot of lazy discussion about it that tends to imply that it's mostly about evil sexism and/or that being male grants you access to raises and promotions via some kind of magic voodoo and/or takes the strongest versions of the argument and applies them to fields like media, academia, or law, where women seem to be doing just fine relative to their male counterparts.
The first link there _specifically_ (and this is not the only place I've seen this) addresses that this is per-hour worked, there is basically no part-time penalty for pharmacist work, so a woman working 30 hours a week earns pretty close to 75% of what a man working 40 hours a week would earn.
1) Ideally, working 30 hours a week would pay roughly 75% of working 40 hours a week (benefits like insurance as part of 'pay' make this less 1:1 on salary). This may not be possible for all jobs. If some jobs are legitimately 'greedy' (that is, work performance per hour goes UP as time goes up, this may be hard: See 'greedy' jobs https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/01/24/business/why-well-educated-women-cant-close-pay-gap/ )
2) If the hourly pay is the same, but women usually choose to work fewer hours due to childcare etc, then this is possibly a societal issue, possibly a "women legitimately want to do childcare more", possibly a mix of both. I'm not sure how much this is a problem, or at least a problem employers should be on the hook for.
3) If professions which pay more are often unavailable to women for discriminatory reasons, that may not show up when comparing similar positions, but is a cause for concern.
4) Related to his post yesterday on TFA vs. P(olice)FA, police pay benefits greatly from overtime in a way that I don't think teaching does, maybe male-dominated jobs supporting more overtime than female-dominated jobs is messing things up?
If you add no controls you end up with a useless analysis: Group A has one mix of job titles and makes, on average, less money than Group B that has a different mix of job titles.
It does largely, and that's important because an 4% gap requires different policy prescriptions than a 17% gap, but at the same time it completely erases pipeline problems like women being discouraged from most trades and STEM until recently.
No you shouldn't for the question, "Do women face wage discrimination?" One's sex can influence the type of job they take. Controlling for occupation can remove an important causal pathway, through which discrimination could occur. Now this fact does tell us some important things, like if women are discriminated against, it's probably not mostly from openly sexist bosses docking women's pay. It's probably from more subtle things like gender roles around child care or lack of role models or a combination of many factors. Thats important to know, but it doesn't "disprove" the gender wage gap.
The wage gap is always messaged as "same work for unequal pay". I think you're raising fair points about issues that deserve attention, but they are no longer wage gaps as they are usually being discussed in politics.
This is a semantic argument, which is my least favorite type of argument. However, I have seen many people frame the wage gap in the broad terms, as I have done, and others in narrow terms, like you have done. I don't think that it's helpful to focus on the word "discrimination" instead of thinking about these issues and what steps (if any) should be taken to solving them. As is, our society typically puts extra burdens on women that make it harder for them to make more money.
Not to extend the semantics, but 'issues', 'solving' and 'extra burdens' sound a lot like argument by semantics. The fact is women bear children and men don't. This is biology. 'Society' doesn't put extra burdens on women. The basic economic unit of our society is the family, which needs to provide itself with shelter and food. Every successful family I know of that hasn't broken up in divorce figures out how to do this with the minimum of friction and the maximum of gain. Almost always this involves some division of labor that is gendered, found without much squabbling about who's doing what and works out to the benefit of both. I've driven my wife half a million miles; she's driven me none. She's cooked me more meals than I've cooked her. Do I feel like her chauffeur and she my cook? Nope.
“…discrimination…It's probably from more subtle things like gender roles around child care…”
Some discrimination - such as discrimination based on biology - cannot be eliminated. That is to say that a problem without a solution isn’t actually a problem.
Maybe, and you can argue that. This doesn't change the fact that occupation is a bad control for assessing the burdens that women typically face compared to men in the workplace.
Yeah, I did see a study that suggests that most of the gender pay gap has to do with child rearing decisions. Basically a lot of women reduce their hours or quit to take care of children and most fathers don't. Then when women come back to the work force full time they have lost seniority. Thats notable because if so then it's not really something you can fix. It may start to change if women become the majority bread winners, but the societal stigma would have to change.
It's just one study though, I would hardly call this one settled.
Depending on the job there's a lot more than seniority that is lost by stepping out of the workforce. I'm part of a 3 person business that is 2/3s female, and we've all stepped back a bit because we have young kids. The technical team members are sacrificing skill growth, and the person who handles most sales and business development has to sacrifice on building her professional network. In our case, at least, the lost professional growth is not something that could be paid back by reimbursing seniority or removing a stigma.
Agreed. I was trying to say what you are saying, that making that decision involves a real cost that pretty much can't be solved. I just wanted to be brief.
Considering how much female labor force participation has changed over the last century, it seems odd to say that we've reached the limit of what can be achieved here.
I don't know what the limit is, but I think that there will always be more women quitting work to stay home with children than men. Do you disagree?
Beyond stereotypes and social norms there's the fact that men can't breast feed, and pumping at work is difficult and stressful and many women don't have workplaces where it's a practical possibility. Even if fewer and fewer women make the decision to cut back hours, I don't think that the same number of men will choose to cut back instead. So there will probably always be some level of disparity there.
Claudia Goldin’s work was referenced earlier and she’s a good economist to look at for research on this. She’s done a lot of work showing how it’s the lack of flexibility in hours and family responsibilities that drive a lot of the career discrepancies between men and women. Pharmacists have very flexible and well-defined work schedules and a lot of women have gone into the field and they do as well as men. Really high-paid lawyers, conversely, make a lot of money by grinding out super long hours, etc, and that is hard for women if burdened with disproportionate levels of child and home work.. but she has a lot of interesting stuff on this and I’d just Google her for details.
Breastfeeding (contra the recent dumb CDC guidance) is mostly practiced for ~6 months, so a paid year of paternity and maternity leave would basically cover this issue? Women who choose to pump beyond that would be serious outliers.
Paid maternity leave would help ease the burden of caring for young children, but it won't change that they would still be missing a year of work and therefore experience. There's also the fact that many people have more than one kid, so after a year the mother goes back to work and then maybe a year later she is having another baby. Some people keep working as much as possible during that time, some people decide that it just makes sense to have one parent stay home until they are done having kids. This isn't necessarily a problem to be solved, there's nothing wrong with people making that decision. It just means that when you look at macro numbers you will see a small difference based on gender that isn't the result of managers discriminating based on gender. How big a difference is definitely up for debate.
At the risk of coming across as reactionary, I do think there are probably some Discourse Magic that would help on the margins of the male teacher imbalance.
The professional environment in teaching generally and the educational environment at teachers colleges in particular seems somewhat hostile to masculinity and males. Similar to how there has been an effort to adjust the culture of STEM schools and workplaces, you could emphasize making teaching spaces more inviting and accepting of men.
Entirely anecdotal, but having worked around STEM groups for years I’d say that the culture shift has been as impactful as any top down quota policy in encouraging more women to work in the field. An underrated amount of effort has been made there (again, not in all workplaces, but in lots) and it has been largely successful.
I do think that there’s an element of hostility toward male teachers, especially for younger grades, that was a bit glossed over here too. My husband is a junior high teacher, and he recently had a parent (thankfully not of one of the students in his class) make a comment to an administrator that they “didn’t like him when they saw him at the school open house.” He’s a tall white man who otherwise fits into the cohort of teachers just fine. He generally is unbothered by things like that, but he is unusually thick-skinned. I felt quite sad for him when he told me about it.
This is making me feel bad about one of my own reactions. I don't know if it's comparable, but in the spirit of openness and honesty I hope you don't mind me bringing it up.
My daughter goes to 2 preschool / daycares and starting this year they both hired their first male teacher. In both cases my honest, gut reaction was something like "oh no".
Now she is 4. So maybe it's different. Or maybe not, I'm not entirely sure. I think part of it comes from a deep-seated feeling that a certain (very small) % of men are sexually predatory. Just last year, for example, they arrested the music teacher at my alma matter Junior High for possessing child porn. It's a very small % but the % of women who I'd describe that way is many times smaller.
So if I had to guess, I think that's where it comes from in my own personal case. It feels bad to acknowledge that I feel this way, though, since I'm a man myself and my male teachers in Junior High were mostly great. But on the other hand sexual predators are real, too, so I can't completely explain away my cautious fears.
I'm sorry someone said that about your husband though, that statement was just shitty.
It would be disingenuous for this conversation to entirely exclude that unfortunately real fear, and I truly can’t blame you for it. I will say that my husband’s school has some very strict rules about never being alone with a kid. Someone else must always be present, even if it’s just another student. It’s a private school with small class sizes, and on a day close to a school break when only one student showed up, they had to have a school administrator be there the whole day to follow that rule. The school rule can be a little annoying at times for the teachers, but I hope it goes a long way toward making the scenarios you’re afraid of much less likely.
Interestingly, there were two inappropriate incidents in my high school. One with a female coach and one with a male teacher.
This is really sad. I'm a 70-yr old heterosexual male who was hit on all the time by male high school teachers. None of it did me any harm, I haven't needed years of therapy. Many of them were excellent teachers from whom I learned a lot. The world really needs to get a grip.
"It's a very small % but the % of women who I'd describe that way is many times smaller."
This is a true statement, but the solutions here are limited. We either need to accept some risk that predatory men will exist with the ranks of teachers, and then treat your reaction you had wrt the male teacher being hired as socially shameful, or not accept the risk of predatory men getting into teaching and ban men from teaching.
The solution (or mitigation, rather) is to institute strong safeguarding measures, like the rule of a teacher never being alone with a child that Lindsey mentioned above. In some sense those kinds of rules treat every single teacher, male or female, as a potential predator.
That rule is very depressing and sounds super excessive to me. You’re leaving a babysitter alone with your kids, so you can’t do the same for a teacher ? Is the damage from the kind of atmosphere it creates worth the slight reduction in the likelihood of an extremely unlikely scenario ?
The rule isn’t too terrible for them in most instances, though yes I believe his school has stricter rules than the public schools because they’re a relatively new private institution trying to navigate a somewhat fraught landscape of hyper-aware parents.
What I’ll also say is that in my 4 years of public high school, one coach (a woman) and one teacher (a man) were caught having sexual relationships with students, including a freshman. It’s given me a somewhat different perspective on how likely these scenarios are.
I think that's a pretty standard rule these days? I volunteer for a children's ministry at my church and that's our approach, even though we are pretty much all middle-aged church ladies at extremely low risk of offending. There's no drama about it and apart from the occasional cancelled Sunday school because there's only one teacher available it's rarely even an issue.
Schools and other institutions entrusted with the care of other people's children have a very different decision-making process than individual parents. A miniscule risk of abuse occurring could mean multiple victims in a large school district over enough years.
I'm not paranoid or excessively worried about my children being abused, but I am a big fan of having clear, simple, blanket rules that reduce risk. And for what it's worth I would probably not have an unrelated adult male (especially one that I only know as well as I know my children's teachers) babysit my kids.
Shaming is more likely to backfire and create distrust than actually address the tradeoffs. Shaming people for natural feelings of parental protectiveness isn't really going to work.
"Men can go into teaching, but it's totally fine for people to insinuate that they're pedophiles" is not a sustainable (or indeed moral) approach, any more than is "Women can go into engineering but it's fine not to invest in their development since we assume they'll quit at age 30 to raise children." My point was not to advocate active shaming, but to say we need to find some way to make reactions like yours vanishingly rare.
I didn't insinuate that men in teaching are pedophiles. Phrasing it that way makes it sound like it's a blanket statement of all men in teaching. I was clear to say it's a very small percentage, and hopefully a vanishingly small percentage. But whatever the % is it's likely larger than the even smaller number of women who are.
"Men who are teachers must be pedophiles" probably should be shamed. But no one is saying that here.
Yeah men in preschools is a little weird and I don't think that important. What's probably more important is lower SES boys having good mald role models in those critical preteen years.
I believe Ray's point is that making an effort to be more welcoming to women in STEM has helped more women succeed in that environment, and that should be replicated with men in teaching. You seem to have read it very differently, to put it mildly.
I'm not sure how good an idea it is _anyway_ to criticize bad work in public.
VERY early in my programming career I had someone criticize my work not _exactly_ publicly, but not privately and it was humiliating. It also discouraged me from pushing back a bit for more info at risk of being humiliated further.
The more senior programmer was certainly overall correct about the issues, but it didn't feel like a helpful framing for me. I wouldn't classify it as "harassment", it wasn't personal, but I think making criticisms more private can help.
(Code review comments that can be seen by other reviewers on a site are trickier. I want the comments public so other reviewers can see, and so we have history in the future. But criticism there also feels less personal, so it doesn't feel as "public")
Yeah, I choose to believe that most participants are behaving in good faith, but I think the DEI dial has probably been turned up enough to be net-detrimental in a lot of cases like this.
(To be more precise, most of the participants that you've never heard of. Any blue-checks are to be treated with great skepticism.)
I think overall your points are good, I have two sons who I think about constantly in this context because they're disabled and that puts them at a long term disadvantage in all of this. I think it's important to give them the basic skills to succeed at school.
However, at the end when you point out that married men live longer, healthier lives and it's important for them to be successful, there's more going on there than simply boosting education. Women who are married don't live as long or as healthfully as their single counterparts because married women take on a lot of their partners unpaid domestic labor, and the point you made about being a partner that knows how to equally share when women are now often breadwinners and /or equally working outside the home is critical for men to have a long happy marriage to have that longer, healthy life. School and education is important for getting married, but sharing work is important for staying married. "Fair Play" and Eve Rodsky are a good place for the skills a lot of men aren't taught and/or rewiring women as the default caregiver and home manager, it would be awesome to hear you talk more about the later part of this.
Also - what up with the Peterson stans and "women really have gone too far" in the comments today? That's not typical of the group here, the hostility only contributes to the lack of women showing up in this space.
"Women who are married don't live as long or as healthfully as their single counterparts because married women take on a lot of their partners unpaid domestic labor, and the point you made about being a partner that knows how to equally share when women are now often breadwinners and /or equally working outside the home is critical for men to have a long happy marriage to have that longer, healthy life."
Citation needed for both the fact asserted and the causation. I have always understood that both married men and women both live longer than their single counterparts.
"Similarly, at 65 years, TLE for married women was 21.1 years, 1.5 years longer than unmarried women, and ALE for married women was 13.0 years, 2.0 years longer than unmarried women. "
I agree, folks could read a good modern philosopher like Peter Singer instead of a hack like Peterson but some folks here do seem to have bought into his whole “traditional Christian conservatism is the answer” message as some brilliant realization that no one dares to say out loud (the Republican Party does this loudly and constantly). Maybe it’s internet galaxy brain disease? IGBD, the real threat to boys!
I honestly don't get how today's comment section is being read as pro-Jordan Peterson. It's people (myself included) saying he's not completely terrible and sometimes say interesting or useful thing. He's also a weirdo and sometimes says things that are wacky or that I disagree with.
If that's support, it's fairly tepid, and it only came up because Matt Y seems to have brought him up just to put him down. Who cares? What's the big deal?
I question the reason for needing to defend Jordan Peterson for saying things that other arguably better people are saying or have been saying for a long time. It’s not like he is introducing new ideas into the space, he’s just rehashing lots of traditionalist stuff. He’s not wrong on some things but he’s also often weirdly aggressive or defensive (something he shares with his many of his “woke” detractors) and doesn’t contribute anything meaningful other than being a sort of alt right celebrity.
He’s like Ben Shapiro without all the charming quirky impertinence.
What I think I'm reading here is he shouldn't be defended because he's not the originator or best articulator of the ideas he's talking about, and that just seems like a weird bar to clear to me.
I think it was about 2 years ago that I had started hearing about JP and decided to check him out for a bit. I probably watched a dozen video and interviews including one very long-form debate (Munk Debates, I think). It was...fine? Good mostly, a few bad parts and maybe a bit crank, but so what?
Was it original? - I don't know, some parts felt like new idea to me. I remember him saying something about how society sees the dangers of left vs right extremism that felt illuminating. I also heard a "hold yourself accountable message" that I'm sure is not his own original idea, but again...if the bar is every idea needs to be your own not many people will deserve to be defended.
Anyways - I haven't tuned in again since then and I have a bit of a sense that he went off the deep end recently so maybe he's worse now.
I also wouldn't bother to write a comment "defending" Ben Shapiro if that was who MY had mentioned. If we replaced JP with BS in this thread I would agree with you entirely. But my experience with JP was overall on the positive side, and I didn't come across material where he was just "scoring points by owning the libs" or even being weirdly defensive or aggressive.
His focus on boys has always been pretty reasonable and mainstream. It's when he wades into other areas where shit gets weird. Plus the whole going to Russia to get put into a medically induced coma to get off benzos is some crazy shit. Benzos are very addictive, but you just do a slow taper to get off of them. Getting put into a fucking coma by some sketch Russian doctor just to get off benzos is insane.
That’s a fair critique of the “bar clearing” issue.
I’m probably letting my exhaustion with JP online bros creep in here, which I imagine is also relevant to Amanda’s point. There is a sphere of defenders of JP online who seem to have, overall, pretty terrible post histories and toxic attitudes.
That's all reasonable. Like I said, I haven't really been exposed to him meaningfully in about 2 years, and if I was following him on Twitter I could easily imagine having a different response.
I’ve witnessed people get their lives together after reading / watching him. I don’t like the guy but that’s why people defend him. I haven’t seen a lot of stuff work.
Sure but lots of things could turn someone around. I’m glad his philosophy can help people but I would then encourage those people to seek out other philosophers and not stop to kneel at his alter exclusively. The issue is the fan boyism and celebrity around him in my opinion.
Healing has many teachers and I’m willing to accept that even someone I dislike may make someone else’s life better.
Well this is why I said, in practice I have not seen much else that works. These folks are, for the most part, not autodidacts and not that open to new ideas
I think the idea of how to lead an ethical life is an important one. I believe Peter Singer approaches this better, I don't agree with everything Peter Singer says but I think what he does say he says better and more nuanced than what JP brings to the table. "Writing's on an Ethical Life" is much more interesting to me than what JP is turning out imo. That's just my, like, opinion though man.
Mormons are doing extremely well. Their kids have much better life outcomes on basically every metric. Yeah they believe even weirder stuff than regular Christians, but it's pretty clear the community they build improves their kids outcomes. I'm agnostic but I really do think there's hole in society that religion used to fill.
I think you see this with other social cultures that put an emphasis on community advancement over individual advancement. I think you are right that religion used to be good for community advancement but christian religion essentially has made itself more political and driven lots of people away. I don't think that is atheists fault (not that you are making that point) but some people try to make that case. The christian church should just be better at appealing to a broader group of people.
Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism are no more or less political than they ever have been. Same with large swathes of Evangelicalism even, though the loony parts of Evangelicalism obviously get the most press. The idea that all American Christianity is political is typical of people who have never stepped foot in a church outside of Christmas and Easter.
I went to church 3 days a week for a lot of my life. I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time in pews friend. I can tell you I went from being in a church in the early 90’s where politics was never mentioned beyond “lord let our leaders put you first” to some pretty direct insinuations about democrats and liberals by the end of the 1990’s. I also saw the rise of purity ring culture and the weird attendant political issues tied up in that with things like sex education and public health education.
I was there, I saw the change and I am not the only one friend.
It sounds like you were in Evangelical churches, which I acknowledge have politicized, especially among the fringes. But there's a lot more to American Christianity than Evangelicalism.
Agree that it would be good to hear more on how we can encourage more men to be primary care givers. Seems a way to have cake and eat it too - improve family life/childhood development whilst not impeding gender equality, or relying on additional government spending (an issue that seems to get people on this site very animated)
As much as I enjoyed the early years of the Simpsons, I think the bumbling uselessness of Homer (and his generational ilk like Al Bundy) did society no favors in terms of setting cultural expectations.
Better to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, etc. as the Scouts professed to teach us to be.
This was a pretty well-worn sitcom trope at the time. I think that it's important to remember that the Simpsons was originally about making fun of typical, formulaic sitcoms.
While I do agree that there's some stereotyping of the sexes in The Simpsons that I do find disappointing, Homer is a very all encompassing character that contains the positive traits you describe along with all his negative traits--often within the same episode!
Thanks, I think the below from the post sums up my thoughts (better than I could):
“Traditionalists argue that the feminist revolution has gone too far, and we need to get more women back into the home. But I think it makes more sense to take the opposite perspective: that the feminist revolution is only half finished. We’ve done a lot to encourage women to pursue careers in traditionally male professions. But we still don’t do enough to encourage men to do traditionally female work in our homes and communities.”
Note how he antifeminist stance has moved over the years.
Women wouldn't have been smart enough for education (check Harriet Taylor/John Stuart Mill's times but that lasted and lasted), are OK but not for sciences and engineering until "whatever" but it isn't good if more girls than boys pursue this.
Thank you for the review of the book, Matt. As the father of two elementary school-aged boys, this is a subject of some interest to me. That said, I found the slam on Christina Hoff Summers for being "antifeminist" rather offputting given that Hoff Summers has always been very clear that she considers herself a feminist and she clearly can't be categorized as a cultural conservative by American standards. Further, it seems like if anything Hoff Summers' points from "The War Against Boys" (originally published in 2000) and "Who Stole Feminism?" (originally published in 1994) have been confirmed by developments of the past few years.
"That said, I found the slam on Christina Hoff Summers for being 'antifeminist' rather offputting given that Hoff Summers has always been very clear that she considers herself a feminist and she clearly can't be categorized as a cultural conservative by American standards."
I don't mean this as a slam, but it's a factual description. Her career is dedicated to criticizing feminists and feminist institutions and she's fully embedded in the institutional network of the American conservative movement. I think she's a pretty smart person whose work is worth reading and understanding but she's doing anti-feminist thought.
Hoff Summers can call herself a feminist, but if she has nary an agreement with feminist ideas and rarely uses her platform to advocate on behalf of any feminist goals, then it's reasonable to conclude that it's marketing, not a serious ideological commitment.
This is just yet another demonstration to me why I avoid the word feminism, because it has been so contorted to meet people's own preferences to the point that it is losing meaningfulness.
You've unintentionally made the point of Hoff Sommers' first book -- what is referred to as "feminism" these days is a different ideological project than about actually eliminating sex discrimination and assuring women equal treatment under the law.
Being an X (progressive/liberal/libertarians/etc) simply mean
1. you identify as being on the X; &
2. you have views that are accepted by many on the X; &
3. a significant portion of people in X accept you as being in X.
Summers doesn't meet that criteria beyond point 1. Her views are extremely un-common among feminists and the vast majority of feminists wouldn't accept her so she's not a feminist.
This is why I get frusturated when YIMBYS (and I am one) try to say Left-NIMBYs are really conservative. Dean Preston is not a conservative. He doesn't identify one. His housing views are accepted by many self-described left of center types, and he receives left of center endorsements.
Left-NIMBYism is a bad philosophy but it exists. And people like Matt are doing a good explaining why other liberals should reject it. And hopefully a day will come when nimbyism is no longer found
Does the book mention if there are benefits to attending all-boys’ schools? I went to Catholic school, so I switched from coed to all-boys between grades 8 and 9, and there was a marked difference in teaching styles that seemed helpful enough.
In particular, the (mostly but not all male) teachers were better able to maintain order in the classroom through a stricter application of decorum and discipline than might have been acceptable in a coed class. That was helpful (in the long run, I mean) to low-performers, but it was also helpful for the less disruptive students, who were less disrupted.
There was also a liberal application of sports and car metaphors to all academic subjects, which I didn’t appreciate or need and kinda resented at the time, but probably helped on the margins.
I also had a great English teacher who bragged to us that he was a smart guy who worked hard, owned a bunch of Italian ice franchises, lived in a nice house, drove a nice car, and had a hot wife, which I thought was obnoxious at the time, but per Matt’s conclusion sounds like a compelling argument to young men who don’t feel motivated!
I switched from coed to all-boys in 9th grade, repeating that grade. Compared to coed, all-boys was a much better experience. It seemed that, one, there were more male teachers, and, two, the teachers shifted instruction in a way that was just more interesting to the boys. They also seemed to have a different demeanor? In my experience, things were more substantive and less prim for sake of being prim. For example, you didn’t have to show your work as much on math problems (but if you got the answer wrong and hadn’t, you would get no credit). Also, the vibe was less sycophantic and less passive-aggressive.
The problem is that, today, if you say the boys and girls are different, even just on a population-level, people get shrill about gender essentialism. The funny thing is, in suggesting that boys should start school later, the author basically admits that boys should be educated separately (albeit on a separate track) from girls.
I think there are three problems with separating boys and girls.
First, we can't do it with 100% accuracy (for two reasons, first trans boys and girls exist, and second there are intersex kids who are physically not simply boys or girls). The obvious approach (going by observed genitalia at birth) is something like 98-99% accurate but a two-way segregation really sucks for that 1-2% that don't fit.
Second, there certainly are population-level character differences (whether they are intrinsic or societal really doesn't matter) but there are big ranges, and lots of individual boys will be "more female" than the average girl on many of these characteristics. There is usually a really big overlap on personal character and learning style type characteristics where a teacher might pitch a subject differently in single-sex schools. To pick an obvious example in English class: it is absolutely true that there are "boy books" and "girl books", but there is a big minority of boys who prefer girl books and a big minority of girls who prefer boy books; if you only teach boy books in boys' schools and girl books in girls' schools, then the minority with the opposite preference will get badly put off reading; if you teach a mix in a mixed-gender school, then those with the opposite preference to their gender will enjoy half the books (the same as those with the same preference as their gender). The challenge is to get teachers to teach in both the boy-style and the girl-style and vary between the two.
Third, it's important for everyone to learn how to interact with the opposite sex, and school is an important place to learn those social skills. Given how badly all-boy schools seem to distort sexual and emotional development, mixed-sex education seems to be key.
Also, small, average sex differences can add up over a population. Think about the differences between gay men and straight men and gay men and lesbians. Gays have over 100x the sex partners of straights. And the std rates would shock people (and I’m saying this as a gay who has had basically all of them). Also, gays work out and dress well well into middle age, even when gay-married. The gay-male social setting accentuates the differences, but the given that boys have most same-sex friends, we would expect something similar.
So, you could get a distinct group of students who have different instructional needs based on sex.
The classic traumatic British public school stories are fairly particular to them being boarding schools, relics of the now-departed norm for the British upper class to not play a large role in raising their children.
Eton, Harrow et al are scarcely typical schools in the UK or any place else. The massive sexual and emotional development issues are at least as likely a function of the social class that attends them, not single sex boys schools per se.
From Reeves's Atlantic article: "...than moving toward single-sex schools, which don’t appear to help boys (or girls) very much in any case, and may introduce social distortions by segregating boys from girls throughout childhood." No citations given, but it does conform with my own bearishness on the idea.
It’s seems that if male teachers really help and supply of male teachers is low concentrating boys in the classrooms with male teachers should be good. This is slightly different from ‘single sex education’ but they run along the same lines and may be practically easier to do in an ‘all boys’ school
I also think it runs the other way too - male graduates are more likely to want to teach at an all boys' school, especially when it comes to teaching 'soft' social science or liberal arts courses. Normie hetero men aged 22 have pretty similar interests to normie hetero men aged 14 (sports, cars, wars, insert stereotype of choice), and they're just going to assume (correctly) that the most engaged students in their coed class will be girls, and they will want to focus on subjects with less overlap with the teachers' own interests.
(to be clear, my all-boys' school did cover the 19th amendment, and we read novels by women authors, but there was a lot more *student engagement* and classroom discussion when we were discussing Greco-Persian Wars, US Civil War, WWII, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Macbeth, etc...)
When you’re deciding how strict to be, you have to weigh the risks of overbearing and the risks of permissiveness. Because (at a population level, not necessarily for a given individual) boys and girls respond differently, it’s easier to calibrate how strict you are for a more homogeneous population.
Yeah that's correct IMO. In a boys school, there is a very 'king of the jungle', dominance-asserting role that a good teacher has to play to keep order in the classroom (if there's a large population of... shall we say, less academically inclined fellows; once you get to AP Calc or some such, you need a teacher who's sharp, but for freshman English you need a drill sergeant).
If someone's being disruptive, shouts and insults to put him in his place are quite normal. I can't really imagine that being a norm in a coed classroom.
I'm not saying that strict discipline was perfectly enforced or that the star of the basketball team always handed in his homework...
But also, the 99%ers in the Greek army didn't get to act like Achilles because they weren't Achilles-level top performers. Heavily-male tech startups are populated with self-motivated, skilled performers. They're not heavily populated by resentful, unwilling employees, 50% of whom have below-average test scores. Ajax and Achilles and Odysseus and the other demigods have to be cajoled and pampered, but for the ranker who has no particular skills and doesn't particularly want to be there at all, fear of Agamemnon (or whoever his direct commanding officer is) is primary motivation not to break and run when the unit gets into combat.
To the extent that tech start-ups are less hierarchical it may be because they are smaller companies with less people.
But in my experience with several small tech startups, they are just as hierarchical as any other business, they just do aside with some of the more superficial markers of status, like suits and titles or corner offices. But you better believe the engineers are still differential as hell to the guys who call the shots.
As a man who considered at various times becoming a teacher, but ultimately didn't, I feel like I have an interesting perspective here.
To me, the main thing that stopped me wasn't money really (though probably that should have been enough) but the massive amounts of bullshit around teaching. I was not interested in going back to school for X years just to be a teacher, and despite being a smart guy with relevant degrees, there was no straightforward way to get some practical training and jump in. Aside from that, I heard a lot of horror stories at the amount of bullshit teachers are expected to just put up with. Bullshit from administrators, bullshit from school boards, bullshit from parents, and bullshit from regulators. It seemed like the primary skill leading to success for the modern educator was a willingness to tolerate massive amounts of bullshit.
My guess is that, in a patriarchal world, women are exposed to more bullshit on an everyday basis, and are therefore better equipped to deal with that bullshit. And also due to patriarchy, the bullshit gap between the education world and the regular world is probably less - not because they don't have to put up with education bullshit, but because they'd have to put up with a lot of bullshit anywhere else just for being a woman, and at least in education the bullshit is well-documented and applied equally to all.
A final piece is that I think that education leans towards stability over dynamism and flexibility. Going into education means you have a pretty structured way to go find a job, there's well-defined credentials you can pursue to advance upwards, and you can probably find work most places. This probably appeals temperamentally to young women more than it does to young men.
So overall, if you're a smart young guy with other good options and a preference for a more dynamic, less structured sort of environment, education is just a pretty terrible fit right now.
Hell, even if you are a teacher, it's sometimes hard to get into the job. I taught for six years, moved to a new state and was told my certificate was no good. To get the right cert, I would have to go back to school for an undergrad or masters that included initial teacher certification. Wasn't going to do that again, so I enrolled in a doctorate instead.
To your point about getting practical training, it will be interesting in a few years to see how these alternative pathways have played out. Sure, we've had stuff like TFA and teacher residencies around for a few years, but they're small. It's only recently that entire states have opened up the teaching pool to, say, anyone who's a veteran of the armed forces.
I will add that stability was not a feature of teaching for me. Every year there were new directives, new curriculum, new tests, new administrators, and so on. While my job title didn't change, the bullshit did and it's the bullshit that makes the job feel unstable and unsustainable.
That's fair on the stability point. What I meant was really more like life path stability - it seems from what I've seen that teaching has an appeal for people who want to stay in one place, get married, and raise a family. But as you noted, even trying to move to another state screws everything up.
Each state controls licensure and each state can decide whether or not there is reciprocity with each other state's license.
In my case, the requirement in the new state was that I had taught continuously in the same position for 5 years and they'd accept my cert. Not necessarily at the same school but as, say, an English teacher in a school full-time. I ran into two problems. First, my initial hiring was for two part-time positions simultaneously at the same school. This was an odd bureaucratic situation where I was both a part-time special education teacher and a part time content area teacher for one year. So, for the new state, it didn't count. Second, because my initial certification and degree program were for a content area, my special education certificate was considered invalid in the new state. In GA all I had to do was take a test to add that cert to my original certificate. It's a low bar, so I can see why they'd say that's not good enough. Out of six years, 1 year was considered part time, 2 years were as a special ed teacher, and 3 as a content teacher. Only 3 years counted so I was not eligible for reciprocity.
It's nothing compared to higher-ed doctorate shit. You wouldn't believe the number of offices I had to pay for no reason. They didn't sit on my committee. They didn't review my work. They didn't manage my courses or degree program. Oh well, they each get $500 or you don't get your degree.
This is especially true for the schools pushing for more black men specifically. With so many large corporations make a big push to bring in more diveristy if you're a black man with a college degree you're going to have better options than teaching.
I once taught kids how to use computers at an after school organization as a bridge job immediately after college. I enjoyed it just fine, but a big reason I did is because I had very wide latitude on how I could teach since being there was a privilege and not an entitlement for the kids. When a few people asked me if I wanted to keep teaching, I said hell no, because I knew I did not want to deal with the bullshit that you precisely describe here.
The section about whether we should frame the problem as a ‘boys problem’ is very interesting. It’s somewhat reminiscent of similar questions regarding whether we should address racial disparities directly or via class based redistribution - except this seems to be the first time it’s being applied where those disadvantaged aren’t a traditional ‘minority’ group.
I think in a strict numbers term, by those charts and others I've seen, they either are or quickly will be.
Of course, given how much ink continues to get spilled over majority-minority distinctions in education (e.g. "Asian quotas"), it probably is indeed not worth using that particular SJ-inflected framing. Especially given that some subset of conservative distrust of education views the entire edifice as "feminizing" to begin with. Which - I think? - has more to do with the emphasized values than the teacher sex ratio. Of hooks and frames, indeed.
It’s kind of sad how much Matt goes on about ‘trolling’ and ‘culture war’ here. As if this info would be irrelevant if presented by a guy with a frog avatar, and not ‘in good faith’. Heartbreaking: policy makers need to consider information even if the messenger has a shit eating grin on their face.
I think this is an entirely unrealistic goal for humans to meet. The presenter of evidence will impact how we receive the evidence and that has always been true.
It’s actually quite incumbent on folks to try to correct for this. Of course evidence contrary to one’s priors is naturally rejected as well. But again you can’t just throw your arms in the air and say ‘policy mistakes will never be corrected it’s just human nature to ignore evidence that says you are wrong’
I'm not throwing my hands up in the air. I'm saying that it is entirely natural for people to discount things said by frog avatars on the internet, and that's usually the right way to go.
Most people have uninformed takes on most subjects. If someone doesn't care enough to prepare and make a good impression, one is right to discount their takes more often than not.
The comment is about data. Reeves presents a book, a frog avatar can link you some nber data. Saying ‘most people are uninformed so I do not need to look at this data until the person who brings it to my attention looks and sounds the way I wish for them to look’ is a recipe for failure.
“ Women’s average scores on the SAT have always been lower than men’s—even though they receive higher average grades in all courses in high school and college.”
Is it possible that “school” has increased the amount of administrative detail that favors women? A college example might be the move from having a midterm and a final as the only graded work to having well over a dozen of graded assignments.
I'm sympathetic to this because I was educationally competitive but lazy when I was younger.
And I usually got the best test scores in class, to the irritation of some of the female overachieving teacher's pets, but blew off homework and so got mediocre grades.
However, the 'just do the work' mentality that those girls embraced probably helped them out more in the long run than my 'maverick wanna-be natural genius' mentality/posturing.
The world has administrative crap in it, and will continue to as long as we aren't bombed back to the stone age, so it is best to just learn to deal with it.
Seems like there are some questions about causality here, lol.
Sure, there's always going to be bureaucracy, but to what extent has the growth in red tape been caused by changes in the profile of the typical "bright young person" over time due to changes in education?
I don’t feel like schools teach people how do deal with administrative work, but rather they select for people who enjoy crossing t and dotting i. If selection dominates, then we’re not really selecting for the right thing. You can hire a secretary to help with administrative work (once you identify the deficit) and to keep you on track. It’s harder to substitute for intelligence
When I was in coed school, my teachers also hated me for beating their pets on exams. Granted, I did my homework but I had to drag myself thru it so it was often last-minute and wasn’t at the level of my exam performance. Fortunately, my parents switched me to boys’ school (for other reasons lol), which addressed the issue.
Lol, I went to an all-male high school and still pissed off some of my teachers with their inability to give me anything I couldn't put off to the last minute and then get an A on.
Then I went to college and it kinda kicked my ass for a while.
This is probably accurate but I'm not sure I'd dismiss it as administrative detail. The graded assignments might be substantive and valuable. Girls also tend to be better about turning homework in on time, following the instructions, etc. These are important work habits, so I'm not opposed to rewarding them to some extent, but maybe the pendulum has swung too far in that direction
Not sure how much you can generalize from this but: At Oxford your entire degree grade is based on a ridiculously stressful week or so of final exams. Literally nothing you did before that week in all the years of your degree matters directly. Men significantly outperform women (percentage getting firsts etc.). Both are presumably equally bright but men on average seem to perform better in high stress competitive situations that reward daring more than diligence (as is the case with Oxford exam that reward the highest grades only for very brilliant original answers, not mere mastery of the material).
In celebration of my return to commenting on Slow Boring, here's some thoughts from me, a former male teacher who left teaching after 3 years and has no intention to ever return.
1) Probably the biggest issue for a young male teacher is the social environment at work is legitimately awful. I mean, it's already kind of hard for a young person to break into any professional job where most of your direct colleagues will be vastly older than you and in a much different place in life. However, this is turned up to 11 when you've got a 22 year old man whose only social options are women who are largely all married mothers. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that having work friends makes getting through the day a lot more pleasant. And that's not to say anything negative about the mostly wonderful ladies I worked with! It's just a fairly banal factual claim that men in their early 20s would prefer to socialize with a different demographic than you find at school. This is a sort of critical mass problem where it only gets better after a substantial number of male teachers are hired, but one reason your male teachers don't stick around is that they feel isolated and misunderstood.
2) I do think there is something about the general decline of both general discipline and social cohesion in schools that frustrates male teachers in particular. I personally felt for each year I was in the job that the social and emotional labor I was performing kept increasing as a share of my total work. I don't mind trying to get kids excited or motivated or get them to behave or get them to put their phone away or help them navigate some interpersonal crisis etc., but I find it to be by far the least pleasant and most exhausting part of the job by quite a large margin because my personality is not well suited to the affectionate, loving manner teachers are supposed to conduct themselves with in these situations.
3) I taught English 2 years and CS for 1. The English classes were very annoying, because my team set the readings we were doing and, see point #1, they had very different interests than me (or, I suspect, most boys). If it were up to me I would've put at least one of the mid-century science fiction classics (maybe Asimov) in our segment on American literature in 12th grade English, but instead we mostly read the usual suspects. Note that (in Florida) this is not because of some mandate that we must read certain books in schools. It is entirely because the sorts of novels that men tend to disproportionately enjoy are at best seen as uninteresting by other teachers and at worst derided as un-serious or not-literary. CS was a lot better because I got to control my own curriculum, but I do not think American schools are really hurting for a shortage of male CS teachers. It's more the male everything-else teachers.
4) This one is sort of unfortunate but true: if you are a young man, becoming a teacher in many states is a terrible idea if you want a sort of traditional dating life and family experience etc. First of all, I received quite a lot more interest from women after I switched jobs into the tech industry (and nothing else about me had really changed besides the fact that I now had a higher-status and more highly-paid job). We have decent evidence that (many, certainly not all!) women prefer to date men who are better-paid and have higher-status jobs than we do, and that this effect does not really seem to exist in the other direction. Secondly, wage compression in teaching is quite bad outside of a handful of states with insanely powerful unions. So if your hope is to be making two or three times as much by 40 as you were at 25 (to support kids, pay for family vacations, etc.) teaching is a bad idea, and separate from that it just makes you feel like you are stagnating or not working toward any great achievement.
5) A smaller piece that makes all this worse: a good male teacher gets tapped for admin/discipline/etc. roles VERY quickly after they begin your career, for basically all the reasons you think that having good male admins would be a school priority, but that just makes it even harder to solve #1-3
Thanks for writing this. I wish more teachers (and former teachers) would write about their experiences in forums like this.
Here's my quick version from my 6 years as a high school teacher:
- Not only is the potential friendship and or dating pool small in school settings, but where I worked the district actively discouraged it. One ongoing rumor was that they purposefully reassigned dating/married teachers to different schools in order to avoid uncomfortable situations.
- Bad work environment: Men were saddled with disciplinary work because, well, they're physically more imposing and wouldn't be as easily overpowered by students. I was frequently called to walk a disruptive student to the office or in-school-suspension trailer, even in the middle of class, because I was the nearest male teacher. Coaches were often stuck with watching the ISS trailer all day because of the perception that a coach is good at discipline. Some of these students needed serious psychological interventions. Often, they were suffering from trauma in the home or community, or even the school itself (fights happen).
- I definitely agree that men are recruited out of the teacher pool and into administration quickly. I don't have a good grip on why that is the case, but administrators make more money and have a clear path to 6 figures if they get to be a principal. I never liked the sound of a degree in "leadership" but that was also usually floated as something that would make a difference.
- There isn't exactly a shortage of male CS teachers but there is a shortage of schools that even offer CS, especially advanced placement CS courses. And there's always the higher pay outside of teaching. If you can code, why teach for $48k a year? The male teachers I knew who left in the first year or two or three (even ones not doing CS stuff) left explicitly to make more money. You can earn more as a store manager at a big box retailer than you can as a teacher. One English teacher opened a tutoring franchise for a large national chain and cleaned up.
- To MY's point about CTE, most schools got rid of it because of regulatory requirements to increase the number of students going to college (technical schools don't count). Add to that the change in accountability that *only tested students' performance in math and english* and you can see why schools would de-prioritize anything else. Too many CTE students could mean the state comes in and takes over your school. Better to just not do it. At my school the CTE program made an interesting pivot and put CS, healthcare, legal, science, and business courses into the mix. Basically, we refocused CTE away from blue collar and into white collar work. Metal shop became "engineering lab" and now required physics as a prerequisite, for example. This meant the students taking CTE courses were all generally high achieving and college bound. What happened to the population that would have taken the older vocational style of courses? They mostly took PE classes over and over again. Some did JROTC. I'd wager many felt school was pointless and didn't teach them what they needed to know to get a job after high school.
- Bad work environment pt. 2 unrelated to gender: I went through several outright hostile administrations. One principal even turned out to be embezzling money from the athletics budget (and having an affair with the school's bookkeeper). Others would show up with pet projects that inevitably failed (teachers should wear costumes every Friday to make school fun and engaging!!!) but were also used as a cudgel to get you to comply with all kinds of crap (I noticed you're not in costume. I'm worried about whether you're following school procedures appropriately. I will be observing your classes on Monday). Bad managers happen everywhere, but bad managers in schools ultimately end up hurting children, even if indirectly.
- Bad work environment part 3, unrelated to gender: I was working with the special education department to provide basic literacy instruction for 9th graders. Long story short, students show up to high school reading at a 1st-2nd grade level. It happens - even kids without special needs can show up with very poor reading skills. They need basic literacy instruction, and, for obvious reasons, high school teachers are not trained to do this. I went out and got OG certified, recruited a speech and language pathologist from the district to help me write curriculum, and devised a holistic approach to identifying students who needed this intervention as they entered high school. Schools often have electives that are basically just opportunities for students to study. So, I set up an elective where the identified students would be able to receive this kind of instruction without messing up their other coursework. Administration said no and claimed we were legally prohibited from provide this kind of remedial instruction. That ended up not being the case, but it took a whole year to get the approvals needed and basically go around the guy.
okay, that's long enough, but yeah, teaching is hard in a lot of ways and I do think it falls differently on male teachers.
I think one thing you get to here which is very important is the college-ification of high school and reorienting students towards that. In Florida fortunately the grading formula has been substantially changed to privilege CTE programs that successfully get students certified and i did notice that kids of a certain typically low performing archetype were big fans of their diesel mechanic classes and whatnot. I think the demand deficient economy combined with deindustrialization sort of broke peoples brains and made them think a vocational career meant dooming a kid to working class poverty and failure
I agree with this diagnosis. Go back and look at how policymakers talked about education from the 90s on. Everything is about preparing kids for the jobs of tomorrow, 21st century jobs, etc. A district near mine once boasted that 100% of their students were college bound. All they had done to make that statement was they'd eliminated the vocational degree option and moved all the students over to the college preparatory track. Mission accomplished.
Only 1 of the 8 people running for 3 school board positions had CTE on their agenda in my county last November.
Thanks for sharing your experiences! I was struck by the part at the beginning
"One ongoing rumor was that they purposefully reassigned dating/married teachers to different schools in order to avoid uncomfortable situations."
and
"One principal even turned out to be embezzling money from the athletics budget (and having an affair with the school's bookkeeper)."
Seems like someone at the district might have had the right idea.... unless this principal's spouse was an employee moved to a different school.
Welcome back! Lots of really good points in this from an on-the-ground perspective. I wanted to touch a bit on some of them to just see if there are some places to go with the issues.
1) I was curious about this one because my husband is a teacher and finds his coworkers fairly relatable. However, we're in Oregon, which it turns out has the second highest proportion of male teachers already (30%). Although many of his teacher friends are women, they're also largely permanently child-free. I wonder if making it easier to change careers a bit later in life to become a teacher would help, combined with evening out pay disparities between early and mid/late career earnings to soften the blow of a career change.
2) I think I agree. My husband's private school is largely boys who didn't succeed in traditional school settings. He has a very straightforward and candid way of interacting with them, and they tend to thrive under it. Accepting different styles of interactions and putting less pressure on teachers to be everything all at once to their students I think would help.
3) Just generally yes. Being able to choose materials seems to help both the students and the teachers be more engaged, though it will create more work for an early-career teacher I think, leading to burnout.
4) I'll be honest, this one does worry me. I'm the breadwinner working in a tech startup as a wife and mom while my husband works as a teacher, but I'm not blind to the clear preferences that dominate. I do think generally increasing the pay for teachers is a very good idea that may help, but I don't know if that lines up with the data we have now. I think Oregon has pretty middling teacher pay.
5) That seems like an unfortunate consequence of a good impulse, and probably needs to be fixed by the pipeline like you said.
I have a good friend that went to college planning to be a math teacher, graduated college extremely excited to be a math teacher, then became a math teacher, hated it, and quit after two years. Like you said, being 23 and teaching at a high school fucking *sucks*. I wonder if there's some kind of reverse pipeline that could be created by funneling off middle-aged people from related fields and recruiting them to teach, because getting men out of college to join the profession seems doomed.
You are also describing one of the big hurdles to getting more women into STEM fields. If the field is dominated by men, then the people and culture you interact with is male-centered. Makes sense that the opposite would be very true as well.
Seriously! I find all the "women are being mean to us men" stuff extremely embarrassing. Have some pride for crying out loud. Maybe us men just need to "lean in" more.
Anecdata: I had a fantastic male English teacher in 11th grade, who had _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ on his curriculum -- which is kind of a weird, more-literary sf novel, but certainly more interesting to 16-year-old me than a lot of the other more standard canon books.
More: I am math inclined and no good at English lit. My grade 12 AP English teacher was awesome. One example of this was she spent an entire month on Heart of Darkness, including making our own Heart of Darkness board game and watching Apocalypse Now. Can't remember if it was original or redux.
One thing that’s true about male teachers is schools want us. There’s a huge pipeline problem in that the certification system is designed for someone who knew they wanted to teach when they were 17.
If you haven’t been pursuing it it’s a huge hassle and doesn’t have much to do with actually being good at teaching.
That’s interesting, can you say more about this? What do you have to do that is so tricky if you haven’t been preparing since high school?
Like if you go in directly to a quality teaching program you’ll get a pretty good prep program. Like new grads from state schools get a pretty good preparation program where they do a lot of good field work including a quality internship.
I went through an alternative pathway and basically as long as you can
Pass some tests having to do with basic content knowledge you will get through. Knowing how to classroom manage, and be good with students is barely prepared at all.
Like a practical apprenticeship type program isn’t really an option
My son did exactly a teacher apprenticeship program with a charter school system to get his M Ed and switch from being an engineer to a math/science teacher. So those programs do exist or did a few years back. Probably not widely available though.
For those interested, Notre Dame has an apprenticeship-type certification program that's free if you teach in an underprivileged Catholic school for a time after graduating.
I'd say yes, it's a feature of the field. The point of the alternative pathways is to reduce barriers to entry so that people who didn't go to school for teaching can quickly and easily become teachers. Requiring a person to go through a year of student teaching is a big barrier to entry. You basically can't hold a full-time job because you're in school 8-4 and then need do some kind of training "class" at night that helps you process the experiences and learn from them. The alternative pathways mostly assume that content knowledge alone is sufficient.
You know math? Great! Can you prove it on a test? Great! You're certified, go apply for jobs.
They could pay you for student teaching, like a residency.
I would like that approach to become more common.
What Seneca mentions above is one of the options but they're not very common. The typical version is you sign up for a "residency" where you are placed in a school as a full teacher and then have coursework/training/seminars at night and during the summer. Some are university based, some are run by districts or cities. There are probably only a few thousand slots nationwide.
Because these kinds of programs also focus on placing "resident teachers" in the worst schools, my guess is that these programs have high attrition, but I haven't looked for a study to verify that. I know that Boston's teacher residency program is successful and that teacher who graduate from it stick around in their teaching jobs longer than teachers who went through other alternative pathways.
"Entering education after starting in another arena is even worse....I’ve been down that road, too."
Could you expand on this? Asking as a curious party.
Just hijacking the top comment to say that when I started 5th grade I was very excited to have my first male teacher. But then Mr. Wairi got arrested for child pornography (of students from Somerville when he taught there, not of anyone in our class) after I switched to the public school closer to my house, so…
So?
That development dampened my excitement
It’s also true that in the us black men are far more violent than white men. Also a legitimate preference ?
Dont i know it. Getting all my credentials takes forever and is not meant to be done mid career.
I will say getting into subbing was easy.
I sympathize, but getting into any new career mid life is difficult. I'm sure it's not any easier to get credentialed as a lawyer or basically any other field that requires credentials.
Let's be real, the learning curve to become a competent lawyer is much steeper than the learning curve to become a competent teacher. There's no evidence that MEd programs make teachers better at their jobs and selective private schools often hire teachers without teaching degrees with few problems.
In reality you could hire plenty of non-credentialed people to do lawyer work and things would also work out fine. Just look at Erin Brockovich. Most entry legal work is just doing discovery and filling out paperwork. Way easier than teaching a class. Everyone thinks their job is so hard and no one else could do it. Apart from maybe brain surgeons those people are wrong.
The question isn't "can some people do this job without credentials", it's "do credential requirements improve the level of education the children receive". I think the answer is pretty obviously yes, which is why every important job requires them.
If the limit of your abilities is doing doc review or filling out forms that don't require legal knowledge, you're a paralegal, not a competent lawyer. And graduate programs in education are well-studied and have no apparent benefits, which is why e.g. North Carolina has eliminated them.
It's also systemically difficult for people who want to switch to teaching mid-career. I've written before here about two friends with STEM doctorates who wanted to go into teaching after retiring from the military. The rules basically dictated they would have to start as first-year teachers with no experience and to progress they'd eventually have to get a master's in education. Then seniority, vesting and credential requirements make the teaching profession very inflexible.
Why would they not start out as first year teachers if it is their first year teaching? I have known plenty of brilliant people in STEM fields who are terrible teachers. And others who failed out of engineering courses but we're great at teaching. Anyone new to teaching should start at the bottom and prove themselves.
If you want to get more people into teaching and increase the diversity of the profession, then you need to find a way for mid-career people with relevant experience to not have to jump through all the same hoops as a newly minted teacher with a fresh BA in education.
One of these guys taught at a university for four years. And most anyone who has a doctorate has done at least some teaching. That counts for little to nothing.
This is the result of a system where promotion and advancement are contingent on credentials and seniority. It has other perverse incentives as well.
And I think a lot depends on what's being taught. A person with a doctorate in physics, with 20 years experience in the field, and with university teaching experience should probably be beelined to teach AP STEM courses and be compensated more than someone who just got a teaching degree and barely knows algebra.
Would you complain that a software developer still has to get a law degree and take the bar to practice law? I think your complaint centers on the belief that teaching is something that just anyone can do well and which smarter people can do better than people with experience. From what I have seen, lots of smart people make terrible teachers. I agree with you that we want to encourage more people to join the teaching profession, and making a clear path for people who want to make mid-career changes could be beneficial. But it sounds like you are arguing that people in more prestigious careers shouldn't have credential requirements and should be paid more than experienced teachers who already know what they are doing. I don't think that will lead to better outcomes for kids.
How would you feel if your company started hiring a bunch of outsiders with no experience and paying them more than you? Would that encourage you to work harder?
My complaint is about unnecessary credentialism that creates barriers to entry and gates compensation and promotion opportunities (along with seniority systems). In most places, particularly those where teachers unions are strong, these are hindrances that - at best- made a mid-career change into teaching more difficult. But that is only one aspect of a system that doesn't have good incentives.
"But it sounds like you are arguing that people in more prestigious careers shouldn't have credential requirements and should be paid more than experienced teachers who already know what they are doing. "
That is a strawman. This isn't about "prestigious" vs other careers, and I never said that mid-career teachers should be paid more that experienced teachers.
My point is about attracting talent and diversity into teaching. The present system does that poorly.
I think part of the question is what is meant by experience. If someone spent 20 years in IT and then went back and got a law degree that person would expect to get paid a lot more than a 25 year old who went undergrad-law school and had no other real world experience.
They might expect that, but in reality it won't happen. They might be able to get a little more, but not much. Mid career changes are tough because you are starting over. Having other real world experience should help with getting hired, but not necessarily with pay.
AP is perhaps a bit of an outlier but generally speaking k-12 school teaching and college teaching are very different. I’m not sure if experience in one should count towards the other.
Sure they are different, but they are not that different. Someone with experience in college teaching (or even other types of education and training) will have skills that will apply in a K-12 classroom, just not all the skills necessary.
Do we have data on how educational grad schools skew? I have anecdotally heard men be disproportionately frustrated with the grad school experience for teachers
The Biden Administration, from March, 2022: "Biden Harris Administration Announces Commitments to Advance Pay Equity and Support Women’s Economic Security". https://tinyurl.com/2f2h7bj5
I understand Matt's desire to avoid this as a culture war battle. However, the current situation is the result of 50 years of messaging like the one referenced above. The statement even includes the canard that women are paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to their "average male counterpart", which has been disproven time after time. Seriously, read the whole thing to see how the message is all about division and excluding men from the list of "good people".
Yes, actual policy proposals are important. But it is also important to push back against the prevailing analytical framework that the world is all about victims and oppressors. The victim/oppressor framework is ubiquitous in academia, in politics, in newspapers and in activist circles. For 50 years, this framework for analyzing the world has been used to tell the following people they are victims of oppression: Women, Black people, LGBTQI+, Native Americans, Hispanics, people of color (all groups cited in the White House communique above). Hmmm...who does that leave as the oppressors of those groups?
Messages sent are usually received. And the evidence shows this particular message has been received.
It boggles my little neolib, elder millennial mind that it is still so taboo to discuss that the constant messaging to white males about being the opressor (the theme itself if not the word) against anyone and everyone else is so counterproductive to an "equity" outcome.
>>the constant messaging to white males about being the oppressor<<
Long time white male here. This seems overdone, at least to the extent it's being presented as a possible reason for struggling boys.
Yes, there's a modest portion of the population that seems to have problem with white males qua white males. My sense, though, is that such types are not so influential to people who don't spend a lot of time on Twitter (ie, normies). The president is a white male. So are most governors and members of Congress as well as a plurality of the Supreme Court. Major media figures seem disproportionately white male (they're only about 32% of the US population, after all). A lot of our biggest actors, directors, producers and writers are white males. Maybe most of them. And most sports team owners (almost all, really) as well as the vast majority of billionaires and an overwhelmingly dominant share of the very richest one are likewise white males. Again, white males are less than a third of the population.
The evidence cited by Reeves and others—helpfully summarized here by Matt—leaves me with zero doubt that America has a serious "boys" problem. It's seems likely, though, that—at least for boys who happen to be white—the message that they live in a society that advantages and encourages their kind would be significantly more powerful than the background noise of anti-white male wokery (Anti *conservative* white male wokery is a lot noisier, for sure, but it saves nearly half its derision for women, as the numerous "Karen" memes and stories will attest).
I should clarify that I wasnt proposing it context of the book review, and more just a general response to the comment above mine. I would also say that I spend a good amount of time in community initiatives of all sorts, which love themselves some DEI, and I think (in my little worldview) that it (problem with white males) is much broader than twitter. OR, I also may be over snowflaking. {insert shrug emoji}
Yeah, but nobody is locking their car door when they see you walking by. You're complaining about paper cuts to people who have lost a leg. I'd rather be called an oppressor than a thug myself.
I think I would prefer that also - and there is a lot to try and unpack from your comment in regards to my original comment... but I have a feeling that any nuance or well intentions may not be received if you already think I am just whining.
I've just heard complaints like this a lot, and unless you are being really clear about what you are saying, it's going to sound douche-y. I had a friend who would complain that some person using food stamps was buying expensive steaks. My friend was making around $140,000 a year at that point. What was he complaining about? Would he like to switch places with that guy? No? Then what's the point?
Would you rather be a black person that just got pulled over for speeding? Or a woman going into a meeting to ask for a raise from a super creepy boss? Or living on a Native reservation? If not, then what is the point of the complaint? A millionaire can complain about money to a billionaire, but should never ever be complaining about money to anyone else. As a white guy I tend to roll my eyes at the whole oppressor thing, but I don't complain about it for that very reason. We are still at the top of the food chain. When 75% of the CEOs in this country are women you can start to make complaints like this. Now a good argument about this topic would be to point out that evidence shows that we function better as a group when you point out our similarities than when you point out our differences. Matt has done a bunch of takes that go into how counterproductive identity politics has been for Democrats and for the cause of social justice. But notice that he is careful never to say that Democrats are being too mean to white men.
It's true that those groups are victims of oppression! I don't dispute your point that it is not good to constantly tell the average straight white man, who's just living his life trying to be a good person, that he is to blame for all the world's problems. But it's equally bad to tell people who are the victims of oppression that it's not happening. We just need a more mature, nuanced political discourse than we have at the moment.
Would you describe women or Hispanics or Native Americans in today's United States as "victims of oppression"? How so? I'm sure we can both find examples of sexism and racism that are impacting some individuals or small groups of people, but labeling groups of people as large as an entire gender as victims seems like an unhelpful stretch. What victims exactly would the Biden admin by gaslighting if they changed their language?
I feel it's pretty likely you're going to say "abortion" but in most areas where abortion has become more restricted the average woman voter supports the restrictions. That feels like a disagreement over the morality of abortion and not some kind of handmaiden's tale abortion to me.
Let's focus on women. To me, it's clear the answer is yes.
- Political disenfranchisement: there's never been a woman president. The Senate is 76% male. The House is 72% male. Governors are 82% male. The Supreme Court is "only" 55% male, but the majority, which holds all the power, is 83% male.
- Abortion: I believe what you wrote is just wrong. 71% of American women opposed overturning Roe, and it was done by a SCOTUS majority which as noted is 83% male.
- There are (controversial) reports indicating high rates of domestic violence by US police. There are reports of tens of thousands of rape kits the police don't test. Like many police abuses in the US, the systems seems so disinterested as to prevent availability of good data to illuminate what is happening, let alone address it.
I'm male, living in the UK. But I've heard lots of American women express the view that America has some pretty patriarchal elements. The women I know in the UK (and other countries), who are of above average socioeconomic status, express many of the same concerns, especially sexual harassment at work and apathy (or worse) by police.
It's not the Handmaid's Tale but it seems there's lot of room for improvement. That does not mean it's wise to label all women as victims or all men as oppressors. But my original point was we should be able to address oppression without sweeping labels.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nationwide-epidemic-of-untested-rape-kits-atlantic-daily/594046/
https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/what-are-the-implications-of-the-overturning-of-roe-v-wade-for-racial-disparities/
The Senate is 76% male but the voters are 55% female. Women are more often victims of domestic abuse but men are 90% of the prisoners and were 60% of covid deaths and they (we) live 6 years less. Women now soundly outperform in education as today's post made clear.
At the end of the day there's no equation that will tell you who is "more oppressed". It's not math. It's subjective. And ultimately it's a pointless question. Domestic abuse is something we should prevent because it's a problem for any victims, not because it hurts women more and we need to "balance the sexes". Ditto for people falsely accused or imprisoned - it's a societal issue, not a "men's issue". Framing it as a gender thing is not helpful.
Also, on abortion the numbers on abortion support / oppose from Pew are 63/35 women and 58/41 men. My point was that in most states where it is or will be restricted, Alabama, for example, that support is closer to 50/50 or even the other way. In California or Connecticut abortion won't be restricted.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#h-views-on-abortion-by-gender-2022
John: the victim/oppressor framework is over-used
Me: yes, but oppression still needs tackling
Wigan: are you really saying there's oppression in relation to groups (x,y,z)
Me: yes
Wigan: but groups (a, b, c) are also oppressed
Me: ...
What's the argument here? Near-ubiquitous and often tacitly tolerated workplace sexual harassment, whose victims are mostly female, isn't oppressive because the barbaric criminal justice system's victims are mostly male?!
This might be easier were it in Spanish where you can use estar / ser to indicate temporary "to be" from more permanent meanings of "to be"
Oppressed definition: keep (someone) in subservience and hardship, especially by the unjust exercise of authority
When you say women are oppressed, it implies to me that it's a state of being. So (some) women are subject to A, B, C, D, etc and therefore they are an oppressed class of people. But every group of people is subject to something, so by that definition it feels like everyone is oppressed and the word loses all meaning. In that sense of the word I'd like to save it for Uyghurs in China or describing the Jews in Biblical Egypt.
If you want to use it more widely and apply it to any hardship inflicted on any individuals, especially by authority figures, than there are certainly many individuals in the United States who have been oppressed at some point in their lives.
But there's not really anything interesting about saying "yes, but [bad things] still need tackling" since we all agree on that. That said I wouldn't count 76% of the Senate being male as a hardship imposed on women, given they are the majorities of voters and women can and do run and win Senate seats all the time, and furthermore your gender doesn't determine your vote.
Also, you're probably tired of hearing me say it, but " barbaric criminal justice system's victims" is such a wild, glass half-empty and extreme framing of the US justice system. I really think you could benefit from being more widely informed on that topic.
I'm not a fan of victim/oppressor mentality, but it's laughable to say that Joe Biden, a man, is on a crusade to make people think men are evil.
When my mom was growing up women couldn't even get a bank account without a man. That's not oppression? It wasn't that long ago. I don't want to keep whipping ourselves over this stuff forever but these are all things that happened and there's nothing wrong with pointing that out or trying to make the world a little more fair. If you ever get told you need to bring your wife along to open a bank account or get a credit card then we'll have something to talk about.
I don't think the 83 cents thing has been "disproven." If anything, the number is closer to 60 cents if you include all adult men and adult women and don't control for being employed
I don't entirely follow, but it would seem to be that you should control for being employed at the minimum.
Depends what you are trying to measure: if you say that society as a whole values people by what they are paid and women are, on the whole, paid less than men, then why should it matter what the cause is?
If you're arguing that the cause is employer discrimination, then you need to control for other things.
But if you're just saying "these people are richer than those people" then you don't need to control for anything, you just measure their incomes.
“…if you say that society as a whole values people by what they are paid…”
Don’t say that, because it’s plainly untrue.
Then we should probably look at who largely controls household spending, for married/cohabitating couples at least.
Autopay controls 95% of it in my household; the other 5% goes half to cosmetics and clothes (my wife) and half to cigarettes and alcohol (me).
Sure and that's a good point but it was also be an extremely materialist view of how we measure societal value. Even in the modern world we still value many non-material markers of work, success and status.
It depends on what you are trying to estimate. If you are trying to find out how much more money men make then women, I don't think you want to include non working women.
You can argue that this figure really implies X instead of Y, but I don't understand what people mean when they call these numbers debunked
I've never gone deep into the data on this topic myself so I only know what I know from articles. But what I think I've read is that if you control for the basic strong determinants of salary - type of job, role, years on the jobs, etc.. the gender gap mostly disappears.
I don't actually know if that's true or not, but that's the argument I've heard.
Andrew Valentine already kind of referenced this but I think the gender pay gap is mostly:
-A pipeline problem in certain, relatively-highly-paid, fields.
-A motherhood penalty.
There has been some progress on the first issue. The second is much thornier.
There is a lot of lazy discussion about it that tends to imply that it's mostly about evil sexism and/or that being male grants you access to raises and promotions via some kind of magic voodoo and/or takes the strongest versions of the argument and applies them to fields like media, academia, or law, where women seem to be doing just fine relative to their male counterparts.
I remember seeing citations before that pharmacists were an example with little-to-no gender pay gap.
Link one: 94% Women vs. Men
https://www.promarket.org/2021/10/07/gender-equality-pharmacists-career-family-goldin/#:~:text=The%20median%20female%20pharmacist%20now,no%20discernible%20part%2Dtime%20penalty.
Link Two: 104% ! Women vs. Men
https://narrowthegap.co/gap/pharmacists
Link Three: 93.6% (UNITED KINGDOM)
https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/feature/tackling-the-gender-pay-gap-how-female-pharmacists-can-take-action
The first link there _specifically_ (and this is not the only place I've seen this) addresses that this is per-hour worked, there is basically no part-time penalty for pharmacist work, so a woman working 30 hours a week earns pretty close to 75% of what a man working 40 hours a week would earn.
1) Ideally, working 30 hours a week would pay roughly 75% of working 40 hours a week (benefits like insurance as part of 'pay' make this less 1:1 on salary). This may not be possible for all jobs. If some jobs are legitimately 'greedy' (that is, work performance per hour goes UP as time goes up, this may be hard: See 'greedy' jobs https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/01/24/business/why-well-educated-women-cant-close-pay-gap/ )
2) If the hourly pay is the same, but women usually choose to work fewer hours due to childcare etc, then this is possibly a societal issue, possibly a "women legitimately want to do childcare more", possibly a mix of both. I'm not sure how much this is a problem, or at least a problem employers should be on the hook for.
3) If professions which pay more are often unavailable to women for discriminatory reasons, that may not show up when comparing similar positions, but is a cause for concern.
4) Related to his post yesterday on TFA vs. P(olice)FA, police pay benefits greatly from overtime in a way that I don't think teaching does, maybe male-dominated jobs supporting more overtime than female-dominated jobs is messing things up?
That is true but you are measuring different things when you add in all those controls
If you add no controls you end up with a useless analysis: Group A has one mix of job titles and makes, on average, less money than Group B that has a different mix of job titles.
It does largely, and that's important because an 4% gap requires different policy prescriptions than a 17% gap, but at the same time it completely erases pipeline problems like women being discouraged from most trades and STEM until recently.
No you shouldn't for the question, "Do women face wage discrimination?" One's sex can influence the type of job they take. Controlling for occupation can remove an important causal pathway, through which discrimination could occur. Now this fact does tell us some important things, like if women are discriminated against, it's probably not mostly from openly sexist bosses docking women's pay. It's probably from more subtle things like gender roles around child care or lack of role models or a combination of many factors. Thats important to know, but it doesn't "disprove" the gender wage gap.
But that's an employment gap and not a wage gap.
The wage gap is always messaged as "same work for unequal pay". I think you're raising fair points about issues that deserve attention, but they are no longer wage gaps as they are usually being discussed in politics.
This is a semantic argument, which is my least favorite type of argument. However, I have seen many people frame the wage gap in the broad terms, as I have done, and others in narrow terms, like you have done. I don't think that it's helpful to focus on the word "discrimination" instead of thinking about these issues and what steps (if any) should be taken to solving them. As is, our society typically puts extra burdens on women that make it harder for them to make more money.
Not to extend the semantics, but 'issues', 'solving' and 'extra burdens' sound a lot like argument by semantics. The fact is women bear children and men don't. This is biology. 'Society' doesn't put extra burdens on women. The basic economic unit of our society is the family, which needs to provide itself with shelter and food. Every successful family I know of that hasn't broken up in divorce figures out how to do this with the minimum of friction and the maximum of gain. Almost always this involves some division of labor that is gendered, found without much squabbling about who's doing what and works out to the benefit of both. I've driven my wife half a million miles; she's driven me none. She's cooked me more meals than I've cooked her. Do I feel like her chauffeur and she my cook? Nope.
“…our society typically puts extra burdens on women that make it harder for them to make more money”
What burdens are those that are not seen in other societies?
“…discrimination…It's probably from more subtle things like gender roles around child care…”
Some discrimination - such as discrimination based on biology - cannot be eliminated. That is to say that a problem without a solution isn’t actually a problem.
Maybe, and you can argue that. This doesn't change the fact that occupation is a bad control for assessing the burdens that women typically face compared to men in the workplace.
Biology can be a burden. So what?
Yeah, I did see a study that suggests that most of the gender pay gap has to do with child rearing decisions. Basically a lot of women reduce their hours or quit to take care of children and most fathers don't. Then when women come back to the work force full time they have lost seniority. Thats notable because if so then it's not really something you can fix. It may start to change if women become the majority bread winners, but the societal stigma would have to change.
It's just one study though, I would hardly call this one settled.
Depending on the job there's a lot more than seniority that is lost by stepping out of the workforce. I'm part of a 3 person business that is 2/3s female, and we've all stepped back a bit because we have young kids. The technical team members are sacrificing skill growth, and the person who handles most sales and business development has to sacrifice on building her professional network. In our case, at least, the lost professional growth is not something that could be paid back by reimbursing seniority or removing a stigma.
Agreed. I was trying to say what you are saying, that making that decision involves a real cost that pretty much can't be solved. I just wanted to be brief.
Considering how much female labor force participation has changed over the last century, it seems odd to say that we've reached the limit of what can be achieved here.
I don't know what the limit is, but I think that there will always be more women quitting work to stay home with children than men. Do you disagree?
Beyond stereotypes and social norms there's the fact that men can't breast feed, and pumping at work is difficult and stressful and many women don't have workplaces where it's a practical possibility. Even if fewer and fewer women make the decision to cut back hours, I don't think that the same number of men will choose to cut back instead. So there will probably always be some level of disparity there.
Claudia Goldin’s work was referenced earlier and she’s a good economist to look at for research on this. She’s done a lot of work showing how it’s the lack of flexibility in hours and family responsibilities that drive a lot of the career discrepancies between men and women. Pharmacists have very flexible and well-defined work schedules and a lot of women have gone into the field and they do as well as men. Really high-paid lawyers, conversely, make a lot of money by grinding out super long hours, etc, and that is hard for women if burdened with disproportionate levels of child and home work.. but she has a lot of interesting stuff on this and I’d just Google her for details.
Breastfeeding (contra the recent dumb CDC guidance) is mostly practiced for ~6 months, so a paid year of paternity and maternity leave would basically cover this issue? Women who choose to pump beyond that would be serious outliers.
Paid maternity leave would help ease the burden of caring for young children, but it won't change that they would still be missing a year of work and therefore experience. There's also the fact that many people have more than one kid, so after a year the mother goes back to work and then maybe a year later she is having another baby. Some people keep working as much as possible during that time, some people decide that it just makes sense to have one parent stay home until they are done having kids. This isn't necessarily a problem to be solved, there's nothing wrong with people making that decision. It just means that when you look at macro numbers you will see a small difference based on gender that isn't the result of managers discriminating based on gender. How big a difference is definitely up for debate.
The prime takeaway that I seem to have taken from this over the years is that the gap is particularly notable for mothers.
At the risk of coming across as reactionary, I do think there are probably some Discourse Magic that would help on the margins of the male teacher imbalance.
The professional environment in teaching generally and the educational environment at teachers colleges in particular seems somewhat hostile to masculinity and males. Similar to how there has been an effort to adjust the culture of STEM schools and workplaces, you could emphasize making teaching spaces more inviting and accepting of men.
Entirely anecdotal, but having worked around STEM groups for years I’d say that the culture shift has been as impactful as any top down quota policy in encouraging more women to work in the field. An underrated amount of effort has been made there (again, not in all workplaces, but in lots) and it has been largely successful.
I do think that there’s an element of hostility toward male teachers, especially for younger grades, that was a bit glossed over here too. My husband is a junior high teacher, and he recently had a parent (thankfully not of one of the students in his class) make a comment to an administrator that they “didn’t like him when they saw him at the school open house.” He’s a tall white man who otherwise fits into the cohort of teachers just fine. He generally is unbothered by things like that, but he is unusually thick-skinned. I felt quite sad for him when he told me about it.
This is making me feel bad about one of my own reactions. I don't know if it's comparable, but in the spirit of openness and honesty I hope you don't mind me bringing it up.
My daughter goes to 2 preschool / daycares and starting this year they both hired their first male teacher. In both cases my honest, gut reaction was something like "oh no".
Now she is 4. So maybe it's different. Or maybe not, I'm not entirely sure. I think part of it comes from a deep-seated feeling that a certain (very small) % of men are sexually predatory. Just last year, for example, they arrested the music teacher at my alma matter Junior High for possessing child porn. It's a very small % but the % of women who I'd describe that way is many times smaller.
So if I had to guess, I think that's where it comes from in my own personal case. It feels bad to acknowledge that I feel this way, though, since I'm a man myself and my male teachers in Junior High were mostly great. But on the other hand sexual predators are real, too, so I can't completely explain away my cautious fears.
I'm sorry someone said that about your husband though, that statement was just shitty.
It would be disingenuous for this conversation to entirely exclude that unfortunately real fear, and I truly can’t blame you for it. I will say that my husband’s school has some very strict rules about never being alone with a kid. Someone else must always be present, even if it’s just another student. It’s a private school with small class sizes, and on a day close to a school break when only one student showed up, they had to have a school administrator be there the whole day to follow that rule. The school rule can be a little annoying at times for the teachers, but I hope it goes a long way toward making the scenarios you’re afraid of much less likely.
Interestingly, there were two inappropriate incidents in my high school. One with a female coach and one with a male teacher.
This is really sad. I'm a 70-yr old heterosexual male who was hit on all the time by male high school teachers. None of it did me any harm, I haven't needed years of therapy. Many of them were excellent teachers from whom I learned a lot. The world really needs to get a grip.
"It's a very small % but the % of women who I'd describe that way is many times smaller."
This is a true statement, but the solutions here are limited. We either need to accept some risk that predatory men will exist with the ranks of teachers, and then treat your reaction you had wrt the male teacher being hired as socially shameful, or not accept the risk of predatory men getting into teaching and ban men from teaching.
The solution (or mitigation, rather) is to institute strong safeguarding measures, like the rule of a teacher never being alone with a child that Lindsey mentioned above. In some sense those kinds of rules treat every single teacher, male or female, as a potential predator.
That rule is very depressing and sounds super excessive to me. You’re leaving a babysitter alone with your kids, so you can’t do the same for a teacher ? Is the damage from the kind of atmosphere it creates worth the slight reduction in the likelihood of an extremely unlikely scenario ?
This is an idiotic prophylactic to a minuscule problem
The rule isn’t too terrible for them in most instances, though yes I believe his school has stricter rules than the public schools because they’re a relatively new private institution trying to navigate a somewhat fraught landscape of hyper-aware parents.
What I’ll also say is that in my 4 years of public high school, one coach (a woman) and one teacher (a man) were caught having sexual relationships with students, including a freshman. It’s given me a somewhat different perspective on how likely these scenarios are.
I think that's a pretty standard rule these days? I volunteer for a children's ministry at my church and that's our approach, even though we are pretty much all middle-aged church ladies at extremely low risk of offending. There's no drama about it and apart from the occasional cancelled Sunday school because there's only one teacher available it's rarely even an issue.
Schools and other institutions entrusted with the care of other people's children have a very different decision-making process than individual parents. A miniscule risk of abuse occurring could mean multiple victims in a large school district over enough years.
I'm not paranoid or excessively worried about my children being abused, but I am a big fan of having clear, simple, blanket rules that reduce risk. And for what it's worth I would probably not have an unrelated adult male (especially one that I only know as well as I know my children's teachers) babysit my kids.
Shaming is more likely to backfire and create distrust than actually address the tradeoffs. Shaming people for natural feelings of parental protectiveness isn't really going to work.
"Men can go into teaching, but it's totally fine for people to insinuate that they're pedophiles" is not a sustainable (or indeed moral) approach, any more than is "Women can go into engineering but it's fine not to invest in their development since we assume they'll quit at age 30 to raise children." My point was not to advocate active shaming, but to say we need to find some way to make reactions like yours vanishingly rare.
I didn't insinuate that men in teaching are pedophiles. Phrasing it that way makes it sound like it's a blanket statement of all men in teaching. I was clear to say it's a very small percentage, and hopefully a vanishingly small percentage. But whatever the % is it's likely larger than the even smaller number of women who are.
"Men who are teachers must be pedophiles" probably should be shamed. But no one is saying that here.
Yeah men in preschools is a little weird and I don't think that important. What's probably more important is lower SES boys having good mald role models in those critical preteen years.
Male*
I believe Ray's point is that making an effort to be more welcoming to women in STEM has helped more women succeed in that environment, and that should be replicated with men in teaching. You seem to have read it very differently, to put it mildly.
I'm not sure how good an idea it is _anyway_ to criticize bad work in public.
VERY early in my programming career I had someone criticize my work not _exactly_ publicly, but not privately and it was humiliating. It also discouraged me from pushing back a bit for more info at risk of being humiliated further.
The more senior programmer was certainly overall correct about the issues, but it didn't feel like a helpful framing for me. I wouldn't classify it as "harassment", it wasn't personal, but I think making criticisms more private can help.
(Code review comments that can be seen by other reviewers on a site are trickier. I want the comments public so other reviewers can see, and so we have history in the future. But criticism there also feels less personal, so it doesn't feel as "public")
Yeah, I choose to believe that most participants are behaving in good faith, but I think the DEI dial has probably been turned up enough to be net-detrimental in a lot of cases like this.
(To be more precise, most of the participants that you've never heard of. Any blue-checks are to be treated with great skepticism.)
I think overall your points are good, I have two sons who I think about constantly in this context because they're disabled and that puts them at a long term disadvantage in all of this. I think it's important to give them the basic skills to succeed at school.
However, at the end when you point out that married men live longer, healthier lives and it's important for them to be successful, there's more going on there than simply boosting education. Women who are married don't live as long or as healthfully as their single counterparts because married women take on a lot of their partners unpaid domestic labor, and the point you made about being a partner that knows how to equally share when women are now often breadwinners and /or equally working outside the home is critical for men to have a long happy marriage to have that longer, healthy life. School and education is important for getting married, but sharing work is important for staying married. "Fair Play" and Eve Rodsky are a good place for the skills a lot of men aren't taught and/or rewiring women as the default caregiver and home manager, it would be awesome to hear you talk more about the later part of this.
Also - what up with the Peterson stans and "women really have gone too far" in the comments today? That's not typical of the group here, the hostility only contributes to the lack of women showing up in this space.
"Women who are married don't live as long or as healthfully as their single counterparts because married women take on a lot of their partners unpaid domestic labor, and the point you made about being a partner that knows how to equally share when women are now often breadwinners and /or equally working outside the home is critical for men to have a long happy marriage to have that longer, healthy life."
Citation needed for both the fact asserted and the causation. I have always understood that both married men and women both live longer than their single counterparts.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/201701/is-it-true-single-women-and-married-men-do-best
Quick google pulled this up. It’s a little more complicated than OP’s statement.
Here is another one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7452000/
"Similarly, at 65 years, TLE for married women was 21.1 years, 1.5 years longer than unmarried women, and ALE for married women was 13.0 years, 2.0 years longer than unmarried women. "
I agree, folks could read a good modern philosopher like Peter Singer instead of a hack like Peterson but some folks here do seem to have bought into his whole “traditional Christian conservatism is the answer” message as some brilliant realization that no one dares to say out loud (the Republican Party does this loudly and constantly). Maybe it’s internet galaxy brain disease? IGBD, the real threat to boys!
I honestly don't get how today's comment section is being read as pro-Jordan Peterson. It's people (myself included) saying he's not completely terrible and sometimes say interesting or useful thing. He's also a weirdo and sometimes says things that are wacky or that I disagree with.
If that's support, it's fairly tepid, and it only came up because Matt Y seems to have brought him up just to put him down. Who cares? What's the big deal?
I question the reason for needing to defend Jordan Peterson for saying things that other arguably better people are saying or have been saying for a long time. It’s not like he is introducing new ideas into the space, he’s just rehashing lots of traditionalist stuff. He’s not wrong on some things but he’s also often weirdly aggressive or defensive (something he shares with his many of his “woke” detractors) and doesn’t contribute anything meaningful other than being a sort of alt right celebrity.
He’s like Ben Shapiro without all the charming quirky impertinence.
What I think I'm reading here is he shouldn't be defended because he's not the originator or best articulator of the ideas he's talking about, and that just seems like a weird bar to clear to me.
I think it was about 2 years ago that I had started hearing about JP and decided to check him out for a bit. I probably watched a dozen video and interviews including one very long-form debate (Munk Debates, I think). It was...fine? Good mostly, a few bad parts and maybe a bit crank, but so what?
Was it original? - I don't know, some parts felt like new idea to me. I remember him saying something about how society sees the dangers of left vs right extremism that felt illuminating. I also heard a "hold yourself accountable message" that I'm sure is not his own original idea, but again...if the bar is every idea needs to be your own not many people will deserve to be defended.
Anyways - I haven't tuned in again since then and I have a bit of a sense that he went off the deep end recently so maybe he's worse now.
I also wouldn't bother to write a comment "defending" Ben Shapiro if that was who MY had mentioned. If we replaced JP with BS in this thread I would agree with you entirely. But my experience with JP was overall on the positive side, and I didn't come across material where he was just "scoring points by owning the libs" or even being weirdly defensive or aggressive.
His focus on boys has always been pretty reasonable and mainstream. It's when he wades into other areas where shit gets weird. Plus the whole going to Russia to get put into a medically induced coma to get off benzos is some crazy shit. Benzos are very addictive, but you just do a slow taper to get off of them. Getting put into a fucking coma by some sketch Russian doctor just to get off benzos is insane.
That’s a fair critique of the “bar clearing” issue.
I’m probably letting my exhaustion with JP online bros creep in here, which I imagine is also relevant to Amanda’s point. There is a sphere of defenders of JP online who seem to have, overall, pretty terrible post histories and toxic attitudes.
That's all reasonable. Like I said, I haven't really been exposed to him meaningfully in about 2 years, and if I was following him on Twitter I could easily imagine having a different response.
I’ve witnessed people get their lives together after reading / watching him. I don’t like the guy but that’s why people defend him. I haven’t seen a lot of stuff work.
Sure but lots of things could turn someone around. I’m glad his philosophy can help people but I would then encourage those people to seek out other philosophers and not stop to kneel at his alter exclusively. The issue is the fan boyism and celebrity around him in my opinion.
Healing has many teachers and I’m willing to accept that even someone I dislike may make someone else’s life better.
Well this is why I said, in practice I have not seen much else that works. These folks are, for the most part, not autodidacts and not that open to new ideas
“…defend Jordan Peterson for saying things that other arguably better people are saying or have been saying for a long time”
I’m not super keyed-in on Peterson. But what has he preached that, for instance, Peter Singer said better?
I think the idea of how to lead an ethical life is an important one. I believe Peter Singer approaches this better, I don't agree with everything Peter Singer says but I think what he does say he says better and more nuanced than what JP brings to the table. "Writing's on an Ethical Life" is much more interesting to me than what JP is turning out imo. That's just my, like, opinion though man.
Mormons are doing extremely well. Their kids have much better life outcomes on basically every metric. Yeah they believe even weirder stuff than regular Christians, but it's pretty clear the community they build improves their kids outcomes. I'm agnostic but I really do think there's hole in society that religion used to fill.
I think you see this with other social cultures that put an emphasis on community advancement over individual advancement. I think you are right that religion used to be good for community advancement but christian religion essentially has made itself more political and driven lots of people away. I don't think that is atheists fault (not that you are making that point) but some people try to make that case. The christian church should just be better at appealing to a broader group of people.
Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism are no more or less political than they ever have been. Same with large swathes of Evangelicalism even, though the loony parts of Evangelicalism obviously get the most press. The idea that all American Christianity is political is typical of people who have never stepped foot in a church outside of Christmas and Easter.
I went to church 3 days a week for a lot of my life. I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time in pews friend. I can tell you I went from being in a church in the early 90’s where politics was never mentioned beyond “lord let our leaders put you first” to some pretty direct insinuations about democrats and liberals by the end of the 1990’s. I also saw the rise of purity ring culture and the weird attendant political issues tied up in that with things like sex education and public health education.
I was there, I saw the change and I am not the only one friend.
It sounds like you were in Evangelical churches, which I acknowledge have politicized, especially among the fringes. But there's a lot more to American Christianity than Evangelicalism.
Agree that it would be good to hear more on how we can encourage more men to be primary care givers. Seems a way to have cake and eat it too - improve family life/childhood development whilst not impeding gender equality, or relying on additional government spending (an issue that seems to get people on this site very animated)
As much as I enjoyed the early years of the Simpsons, I think the bumbling uselessness of Homer (and his generational ilk like Al Bundy) did society no favors in terms of setting cultural expectations.
Better to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, etc. as the Scouts professed to teach us to be.
This was a pretty well-worn sitcom trope at the time. I think that it's important to remember that the Simpsons was originally about making fun of typical, formulaic sitcoms.
On tonight's episode of Hot Mom and Fat Dad, ...
And Married With Children did so even more blatantly and outrageously.
While I do agree that there's some stereotyping of the sexes in The Simpsons that I do find disappointing, Homer is a very all encompassing character that contains the positive traits you describe along with all his negative traits--often within the same episode!
Yes, “competent” and “reliable” are the ones he lacks.
Timothy Lee had some interesting thoughts on this!
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/im-a-professional-dad-who-leaned
Thanks, I think the below from the post sums up my thoughts (better than I could):
“Traditionalists argue that the feminist revolution has gone too far, and we need to get more women back into the home. But I think it makes more sense to take the opposite perspective: that the feminist revolution is only half finished. We’ve done a lot to encourage women to pursue careers in traditionally male professions. But we still don’t do enough to encourage men to do traditionally female work in our homes and communities.”
It's still the internet. Haters gonna hate.
Note how he antifeminist stance has moved over the years.
Women wouldn't have been smart enough for education (check Harriet Taylor/John Stuart Mill's times but that lasted and lasted), are OK but not for sciences and engineering until "whatever" but it isn't good if more girls than boys pursue this.
You've skipped the most important reason MY cited in favour of marriage :)
Thank you for the review of the book, Matt. As the father of two elementary school-aged boys, this is a subject of some interest to me. That said, I found the slam on Christina Hoff Summers for being "antifeminist" rather offputting given that Hoff Summers has always been very clear that she considers herself a feminist and she clearly can't be categorized as a cultural conservative by American standards. Further, it seems like if anything Hoff Summers' points from "The War Against Boys" (originally published in 2000) and "Who Stole Feminism?" (originally published in 1994) have been confirmed by developments of the past few years.
"That said, I found the slam on Christina Hoff Summers for being 'antifeminist' rather offputting given that Hoff Summers has always been very clear that she considers herself a feminist and she clearly can't be categorized as a cultural conservative by American standards."
I don't mean this as a slam, but it's a factual description. Her career is dedicated to criticizing feminists and feminist institutions and she's fully embedded in the institutional network of the American conservative movement. I think she's a pretty smart person whose work is worth reading and understanding but she's doing anti-feminist thought.
Hoff Summers can call herself a feminist, but if she has nary an agreement with feminist ideas and rarely uses her platform to advocate on behalf of any feminist goals, then it's reasonable to conclude that it's marketing, not a serious ideological commitment.
This is just yet another demonstration to me why I avoid the word feminism, because it has been so contorted to meet people's own preferences to the point that it is losing meaningfulness.
You've unintentionally made the point of Hoff Sommers' first book -- what is referred to as "feminism" these days is a different ideological project than about actually eliminating sex discrimination and assuring women equal treatment under the law.
What has Christina Hoff Summers done to assure women equal treatment under the law?
Yup, to go a higher level.
Being an X (progressive/liberal/libertarians/etc) simply mean
1. you identify as being on the X; &
2. you have views that are accepted by many on the X; &
3. a significant portion of people in X accept you as being in X.
Summers doesn't meet that criteria beyond point 1. Her views are extremely un-common among feminists and the vast majority of feminists wouldn't accept her so she's not a feminist.
This is why I get frusturated when YIMBYS (and I am one) try to say Left-NIMBYs are really conservative. Dean Preston is not a conservative. He doesn't identify one. His housing views are accepted by many self-described left of center types, and he receives left of center endorsements.
Left-NIMBYism is a bad philosophy but it exists. And people like Matt are doing a good explaining why other liberals should reject it. And hopefully a day will come when nimbyism is no longer found
Does the book mention if there are benefits to attending all-boys’ schools? I went to Catholic school, so I switched from coed to all-boys between grades 8 and 9, and there was a marked difference in teaching styles that seemed helpful enough.
In particular, the (mostly but not all male) teachers were better able to maintain order in the classroom through a stricter application of decorum and discipline than might have been acceptable in a coed class. That was helpful (in the long run, I mean) to low-performers, but it was also helpful for the less disruptive students, who were less disrupted.
There was also a liberal application of sports and car metaphors to all academic subjects, which I didn’t appreciate or need and kinda resented at the time, but probably helped on the margins.
I also had a great English teacher who bragged to us that he was a smart guy who worked hard, owned a bunch of Italian ice franchises, lived in a nice house, drove a nice car, and had a hot wife, which I thought was obnoxious at the time, but per Matt’s conclusion sounds like a compelling argument to young men who don’t feel motivated!
I switched from coed to all-boys in 9th grade, repeating that grade. Compared to coed, all-boys was a much better experience. It seemed that, one, there were more male teachers, and, two, the teachers shifted instruction in a way that was just more interesting to the boys. They also seemed to have a different demeanor? In my experience, things were more substantive and less prim for sake of being prim. For example, you didn’t have to show your work as much on math problems (but if you got the answer wrong and hadn’t, you would get no credit). Also, the vibe was less sycophantic and less passive-aggressive.
The problem is that, today, if you say the boys and girls are different, even just on a population-level, people get shrill about gender essentialism. The funny thing is, in suggesting that boys should start school later, the author basically admits that boys should be educated separately (albeit on a separate track) from girls.
I think there are three problems with separating boys and girls.
First, we can't do it with 100% accuracy (for two reasons, first trans boys and girls exist, and second there are intersex kids who are physically not simply boys or girls). The obvious approach (going by observed genitalia at birth) is something like 98-99% accurate but a two-way segregation really sucks for that 1-2% that don't fit.
Second, there certainly are population-level character differences (whether they are intrinsic or societal really doesn't matter) but there are big ranges, and lots of individual boys will be "more female" than the average girl on many of these characteristics. There is usually a really big overlap on personal character and learning style type characteristics where a teacher might pitch a subject differently in single-sex schools. To pick an obvious example in English class: it is absolutely true that there are "boy books" and "girl books", but there is a big minority of boys who prefer girl books and a big minority of girls who prefer boy books; if you only teach boy books in boys' schools and girl books in girls' schools, then the minority with the opposite preference will get badly put off reading; if you teach a mix in a mixed-gender school, then those with the opposite preference to their gender will enjoy half the books (the same as those with the same preference as their gender). The challenge is to get teachers to teach in both the boy-style and the girl-style and vary between the two.
Third, it's important for everyone to learn how to interact with the opposite sex, and school is an important place to learn those social skills. Given how badly all-boy schools seem to distort sexual and emotional development, mixed-sex education seems to be key.
Almost no one is calling for universal seperate gender schools. I think more ppl just want it as an option.
Also, small, average sex differences can add up over a population. Think about the differences between gay men and straight men and gay men and lesbians. Gays have over 100x the sex partners of straights. And the std rates would shock people (and I’m saying this as a gay who has had basically all of them). Also, gays work out and dress well well into middle age, even when gay-married. The gay-male social setting accentuates the differences, but the given that boys have most same-sex friends, we would expect something similar.
So, you could get a distinct group of students who have different instructional needs based on sex.
Wow, you definitely win the prize for stereotypes, sheesh. We definitely have some work to do even in the 21st cent. It seems.
Why do you think all-boys schools distort sexual and emotional development? That seems bogus
Because I've met old boys of public schools and they sure as heck have massive sexual and emotional development issues.
(uh, British public schools: Eton, Harrow, etc).
British people are weird and lessons learned in Britain shouldn't be extrapolated to the rest of the world!
The classic traumatic British public school stories are fairly particular to them being boarding schools, relics of the now-departed norm for the British upper class to not play a large role in raising their children.
Eton, Harrow et al are scarcely typical schools in the UK or any place else. The massive sexual and emotional development issues are at least as likely a function of the social class that attends them, not single sex boys schools per se.
Also, aren't those boarding schools? That would make a big difference.
From Reeves's Atlantic article: "...than moving toward single-sex schools, which don’t appear to help boys (or girls) very much in any case, and may introduce social distortions by segregating boys from girls throughout childhood." No citations given, but it does conform with my own bearishness on the idea.
So that's weird then. We think it would be beneficial to have more male teachers, but having all male teachers wouldn't be any better than all female?
What is a girl skill? Flashing flesh? Agree it beats school skills in life outcomes for girls. Not sure it translates for boys.
It’s seems that if male teachers really help and supply of male teachers is low concentrating boys in the classrooms with male teachers should be good. This is slightly different from ‘single sex education’ but they run along the same lines and may be practically easier to do in an ‘all boys’ school
I also think it runs the other way too - male graduates are more likely to want to teach at an all boys' school, especially when it comes to teaching 'soft' social science or liberal arts courses. Normie hetero men aged 22 have pretty similar interests to normie hetero men aged 14 (sports, cars, wars, insert stereotype of choice), and they're just going to assume (correctly) that the most engaged students in their coed class will be girls, and they will want to focus on subjects with less overlap with the teachers' own interests.
(to be clear, my all-boys' school did cover the 19th amendment, and we read novels by women authors, but there was a lot more *student engagement* and classroom discussion when we were discussing Greco-Persian Wars, US Civil War, WWII, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Macbeth, etc...)
Why would "a stricter application of decorum and discipline" be any less acceptable in a coed class?
When you’re deciding how strict to be, you have to weigh the risks of overbearing and the risks of permissiveness. Because (at a population level, not necessarily for a given individual) boys and girls respond differently, it’s easier to calibrate how strict you are for a more homogeneous population.
Yeah that's correct IMO. In a boys school, there is a very 'king of the jungle', dominance-asserting role that a good teacher has to play to keep order in the classroom (if there's a large population of... shall we say, less academically inclined fellows; once you get to AP Calc or some such, you need a teacher who's sharp, but for freshman English you need a drill sergeant).
If someone's being disruptive, shouts and insults to put him in his place are quite normal. I can't really imagine that being a norm in a coed classroom.
I'm not saying that strict discipline was perfectly enforced or that the star of the basketball team always handed in his homework...
But also, the 99%ers in the Greek army didn't get to act like Achilles because they weren't Achilles-level top performers. Heavily-male tech startups are populated with self-motivated, skilled performers. They're not heavily populated by resentful, unwilling employees, 50% of whom have below-average test scores. Ajax and Achilles and Odysseus and the other demigods have to be cajoled and pampered, but for the ranker who has no particular skills and doesn't particularly want to be there at all, fear of Agamemnon (or whoever his direct commanding officer is) is primary motivation not to break and run when the unit gets into combat.
To the extent that tech start-ups are less hierarchical it may be because they are smaller companies with less people.
But in my experience with several small tech startups, they are just as hierarchical as any other business, they just do aside with some of the more superficial markers of status, like suits and titles or corner offices. But you better believe the engineers are still differential as hell to the guys who call the shots.
As a man who considered at various times becoming a teacher, but ultimately didn't, I feel like I have an interesting perspective here.
To me, the main thing that stopped me wasn't money really (though probably that should have been enough) but the massive amounts of bullshit around teaching. I was not interested in going back to school for X years just to be a teacher, and despite being a smart guy with relevant degrees, there was no straightforward way to get some practical training and jump in. Aside from that, I heard a lot of horror stories at the amount of bullshit teachers are expected to just put up with. Bullshit from administrators, bullshit from school boards, bullshit from parents, and bullshit from regulators. It seemed like the primary skill leading to success for the modern educator was a willingness to tolerate massive amounts of bullshit.
My guess is that, in a patriarchal world, women are exposed to more bullshit on an everyday basis, and are therefore better equipped to deal with that bullshit. And also due to patriarchy, the bullshit gap between the education world and the regular world is probably less - not because they don't have to put up with education bullshit, but because they'd have to put up with a lot of bullshit anywhere else just for being a woman, and at least in education the bullshit is well-documented and applied equally to all.
A final piece is that I think that education leans towards stability over dynamism and flexibility. Going into education means you have a pretty structured way to go find a job, there's well-defined credentials you can pursue to advance upwards, and you can probably find work most places. This probably appeals temperamentally to young women more than it does to young men.
So overall, if you're a smart young guy with other good options and a preference for a more dynamic, less structured sort of environment, education is just a pretty terrible fit right now.
Hell, even if you are a teacher, it's sometimes hard to get into the job. I taught for six years, moved to a new state and was told my certificate was no good. To get the right cert, I would have to go back to school for an undergrad or masters that included initial teacher certification. Wasn't going to do that again, so I enrolled in a doctorate instead.
To your point about getting practical training, it will be interesting in a few years to see how these alternative pathways have played out. Sure, we've had stuff like TFA and teacher residencies around for a few years, but they're small. It's only recently that entire states have opened up the teaching pool to, say, anyone who's a veteran of the armed forces.
I will add that stability was not a feature of teaching for me. Every year there were new directives, new curriculum, new tests, new administrators, and so on. While my job title didn't change, the bullshit did and it's the bullshit that makes the job feel unstable and unsustainable.
That's fair on the stability point. What I meant was really more like life path stability - it seems from what I've seen that teaching has an appeal for people who want to stay in one place, get married, and raise a family. But as you noted, even trying to move to another state screws everything up.
Each state controls licensure and each state can decide whether or not there is reciprocity with each other state's license.
In my case, the requirement in the new state was that I had taught continuously in the same position for 5 years and they'd accept my cert. Not necessarily at the same school but as, say, an English teacher in a school full-time. I ran into two problems. First, my initial hiring was for two part-time positions simultaneously at the same school. This was an odd bureaucratic situation where I was both a part-time special education teacher and a part time content area teacher for one year. So, for the new state, it didn't count. Second, because my initial certification and degree program were for a content area, my special education certificate was considered invalid in the new state. In GA all I had to do was take a test to add that cert to my original certificate. It's a low bar, so I can see why they'd say that's not good enough. Out of six years, 1 year was considered part time, 2 years were as a special ed teacher, and 3 as a content teacher. Only 3 years counted so I was not eligible for reciprocity.
It's nothing compared to higher-ed doctorate shit. You wouldn't believe the number of offices I had to pay for no reason. They didn't sit on my committee. They didn't review my work. They didn't manage my courses or degree program. Oh well, they each get $500 or you don't get your degree.
This is especially true for the schools pushing for more black men specifically. With so many large corporations make a big push to bring in more diveristy if you're a black man with a college degree you're going to have better options than teaching.
I once taught kids how to use computers at an after school organization as a bridge job immediately after college. I enjoyed it just fine, but a big reason I did is because I had very wide latitude on how I could teach since being there was a privilege and not an entitlement for the kids. When a few people asked me if I wanted to keep teaching, I said hell no, because I knew I did not want to deal with the bullshit that you precisely describe here.
The section about whether we should frame the problem as a ‘boys problem’ is very interesting. It’s somewhat reminiscent of similar questions regarding whether we should address racial disparities directly or via class based redistribution - except this seems to be the first time it’s being applied where those disadvantaged aren’t a traditional ‘minority’ group.
I think in a strict numbers term, by those charts and others I've seen, they either are or quickly will be.
Of course, given how much ink continues to get spilled over majority-minority distinctions in education (e.g. "Asian quotas"), it probably is indeed not worth using that particular SJ-inflected framing. Especially given that some subset of conservative distrust of education views the entire edifice as "feminizing" to begin with. Which - I think? - has more to do with the emphasized values than the teacher sex ratio. Of hooks and frames, indeed.
It’s kind of sad how much Matt goes on about ‘trolling’ and ‘culture war’ here. As if this info would be irrelevant if presented by a guy with a frog avatar, and not ‘in good faith’. Heartbreaking: policy makers need to consider information even if the messenger has a shit eating grin on their face.
I think this is an entirely unrealistic goal for humans to meet. The presenter of evidence will impact how we receive the evidence and that has always been true.
It’s actually quite incumbent on folks to try to correct for this. Of course evidence contrary to one’s priors is naturally rejected as well. But again you can’t just throw your arms in the air and say ‘policy mistakes will never be corrected it’s just human nature to ignore evidence that says you are wrong’
I'm not throwing my hands up in the air. I'm saying that it is entirely natural for people to discount things said by frog avatars on the internet, and that's usually the right way to go.
Ah no you’ve offered no reason this is usually the right way to go
Most people have uninformed takes on most subjects. If someone doesn't care enough to prepare and make a good impression, one is right to discount their takes more often than not.
The comment is about data. Reeves presents a book, a frog avatar can link you some nber data. Saying ‘most people are uninformed so I do not need to look at this data until the person who brings it to my attention looks and sounds the way I wish for them to look’ is a recipe for failure.
“ Women’s average scores on the SAT have always been lower than men’s—even though they receive higher average grades in all courses in high school and college.”
Is it possible that “school” has increased the amount of administrative detail that favors women? A college example might be the move from having a midterm and a final as the only graded work to having well over a dozen of graded assignments.
I'm sympathetic to this because I was educationally competitive but lazy when I was younger.
And I usually got the best test scores in class, to the irritation of some of the female overachieving teacher's pets, but blew off homework and so got mediocre grades.
However, the 'just do the work' mentality that those girls embraced probably helped them out more in the long run than my 'maverick wanna-be natural genius' mentality/posturing.
The world has administrative crap in it, and will continue to as long as we aren't bombed back to the stone age, so it is best to just learn to deal with it.
Seems like there are some questions about causality here, lol.
Sure, there's always going to be bureaucracy, but to what extent has the growth in red tape been caused by changes in the profile of the typical "bright young person" over time due to changes in education?
I don’t feel like schools teach people how do deal with administrative work, but rather they select for people who enjoy crossing t and dotting i. If selection dominates, then we’re not really selecting for the right thing. You can hire a secretary to help with administrative work (once you identify the deficit) and to keep you on track. It’s harder to substitute for intelligence
When I was in coed school, my teachers also hated me for beating their pets on exams. Granted, I did my homework but I had to drag myself thru it so it was often last-minute and wasn’t at the level of my exam performance. Fortunately, my parents switched me to boys’ school (for other reasons lol), which addressed the issue.
Lol, I went to an all-male high school and still pissed off some of my teachers with their inability to give me anything I couldn't put off to the last minute and then get an A on.
Then I went to college and it kinda kicked my ass for a while.
I mean....I would rather have the natural intelligence than not.
But refusing to do the required work just out of laziness and a kind of perverse kind of pride is...not great.
This is probably accurate but I'm not sure I'd dismiss it as administrative detail. The graded assignments might be substantive and valuable. Girls also tend to be better about turning homework in on time, following the instructions, etc. These are important work habits, so I'm not opposed to rewarding them to some extent, but maybe the pendulum has swung too far in that direction
Not sure how much you can generalize from this but: At Oxford your entire degree grade is based on a ridiculously stressful week or so of final exams. Literally nothing you did before that week in all the years of your degree matters directly. Men significantly outperform women (percentage getting firsts etc.). Both are presumably equally bright but men on average seem to perform better in high stress competitive situations that reward daring more than diligence (as is the case with Oxford exam that reward the highest grades only for very brilliant original answers, not mere mastery of the material).