Or did girls actually get better?

Or are things actually more the same than we would like to admit?

As mentioned in my Anne of Green Gables article yesterday, people are really making a stink about boys not reading as much as girls and not having the same language skills.

Which was kind of funny to me because when I was a youngster, boys not having reading and writing skills at the same level as girls was basically considered a fact. Boys were good at math and girls were bad at math. Girls were good at reading and boys were bad at reading. Gender determined skill sets just made it so easy!

It was a typical example of ridiculous pop culture so-called knowledge. But it remains the same, girls were already ahead of the boys (in reading), even twenty years ago. So why the focus on reading as an area that boys are “falling behind”?

Probably because if you looked at any other area of education and tried to state that boys were falling behind, you would look… well… not so bright.  Even as women make gains, men are still ahead when it comes to the sciences and mathematics in university and college levels. More girls may be attending university, but men still make up over 80% of engineering undergraduates.

And girls being the majority on campus apparently isn’t a new thing either. According to this New York Times article, women have been outnumbering in the lecture hall for over 25 years now. Not to mention the fact that men are still doing better than they did in the past when it comes to success at the post-secondary level.

It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.

So men really aren’t falling anywhere, amongst themselves they are actually getting better.

Don’t get me wrong, it is something to look into. Men should have just as much success in post-secondary education as women, but it’s not exactly a crisis. Both genders are succeeding and getting better, we don’t need an overhaul, we need a few tweaks. So why is it a big deal now?

I would like to say it’s because we care about the children, but given this is a trend twenty-five years in the making… I’m betting it’s backlash against the amount of campaigning that has been done to improve access for women in the sciences… and you know… sexism.