Earlier this month, I got hung up on a New York magazine article by Hanna Rosin about New York City’s role in education’s “boy crisis”: magnet schools and gifted-talented programs have significantly more female than male students and standardized testing favors girls’ abilities over boys’, which ultimately leads to women out-competing men for spots at top universities. I don’t think we should dismiss this issue; at Jezebel, Anna North examined the reasons why it’s a genuine problem. But there is some unpleasantly chauvinist thinking here too, and even a liberal rag like New York couldn’t help perpetuating it:
But as [author Richard] Whitmire likes to point out, this is a future problem: Men not achieving in school means men not going to college means men with no job prospects means men rejected as suitable marriage prospects by smarty-pants girls.
Smarty-pants girls? How about intelligent, accomplished women? Why does Rosin resort to a tired old put-down that brands smart women uppity and unlikeable?* (To say nothing of her using the term “girls” to refer to adult women.) And why the hell are we still stuck on the retro, much-disproven stereotype that smart women don’t get married?
Never mind that gender inequality in education is a problem simply because, hey, it’s inequality. Or that it’s a problem because the educational system seems to heavily favor one set of cognitive skills over another, which is troubling even if you remove gender from the equation entirely. No, apparently the “future problem” here is that some day some women might not get married!
Nothing, gentle readers, is more alarming than that.
Of course, Whitmire believes the “future problem” is that women would be husbandless. It’s not that men would be wifeless—even though logically that’s what would happen, since Whitmire’s prediction means those less-educated men wouldn’t have enough less-educated women to marry once they were rejected by those of us with degrees.
More importantly, though, is this “future problem” a real problem? Only in a heteronormative, elitist world ruled by traditional gender roles. After all, not all women want to marry. Not all women want to marry men. Not all women need or expect to be supported by their husbands. Not all women believe a college degree is a measure of their partner’s worthiness. Not all men without a college degree are reduced to “no job prospects.”
Besides, the days of women choosing or rejecting partners based strictly on education or income are over. Those criteria made much more sense when marriage was the only way for women to gain financial security. Now that more women than men are in the workforce and universities—with a third of married women outearning their husbands—women are less likely to choose a partner based on his earning power. Future generations will only continue the trend.
Let me also point out the other hoary double standard at work here: in centuries past—hell, decades past—no one was hand-wringing over the fact that men married women with less education than them. No one felt that less education made women less desirable mates, since men out-achieving women was seen as the natural order of things.
But Whitmire seems to believe that’s still the natural order of things—that if women out-achieve men, there will be fewer marriages. His prediction of a “future problem” hinges on the idea that women will reject less-well-educated or lower-earning men because women still want men who will “wear the pants” in marriage. This also presumes that men are just as shallow and will reject woman who outearn or out-achieve them because they insist on being the one to “wear the pants.” Never mind that the data are already disproving this idea. As more women outearn their husbands, men have been much more accepting of it than our culture assumes. I think men are only more likely to accept—or even seek out—high-achieving wives a generation from now, when such relationships have become normalized.
The problem of boys’ educational equality deserves attention and action for many valid reasons. Paternalistic handwringing over whether it will leave a generation of women husbandless is not one of them.
* It may or may not shock you to know that this put-down was frequently lobbed at me as a kid.
I agree this is a completely manufactured and (still!) misogynist “crisis” but I reckon Hana Rosin’s “smarty pants girls” line was joking, and pitched to critique the schoolyard timbre of this debate.
That’snjust insulting to everyone…if I were a guy, I’d be pretty upset if someone suggested that the point of my education was to get me a wife.
Also, I find it extremely frustrating that race is so often glossed over when people discuss the “boy crisis”. White boys go to college at the same rate as white girls, and I believe Asian boys still outpace Asian girls. It’s with Black and Hispanic populations that there’s a large gender disparity in favor of girls. Yet people keep pretending that this is a gender thing and nothing else, which helps no one.
Strangely, my education was not compelled to help me find a wife, but to get a decent job and provide for myself. Education is not a prerequisite for marriage.
Who cares if there are more boys than girls in a “gifted-and-talented” program (a dubious distinction at best)? If, in general, girls are becoming smarter than boys sooner, then pretty soon the Larry Summers’ of the world will have to take their patriarchy and shove it up where the Sun don’t shine.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by D Drapeau and Anne Marte, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Chauvinism and the "Boy Crisis" In Education @ http://bit.ly/cG2rJj [...]
I agree that education is not a prerequisite for marraige, but it’s also true that people tend to date and marry other people who are in their respective socio-economic classes.
If there are a generation of stupid boys out there then, I suppose, more and more women will have to “marry down”, which maybe isn’t even such a bad thing.
Anecdotally, I’d like to ask the women here if they have dated men who clearly were not as financially/and academically successful as themselves and what the expereince was like?
Maybe it’s too soon to see the effect, but if it’s the case that girls are going to college in greater numbers than boys, how come that’s not reflected in the work world? Men still rule, and we have a long way to go to get close to parity.
Also, is it the case that our current educational methods never did work for the majority of boys, or is this a new problem?
Yes, both my sister and I have consistently dated men of different (“lower”) socio-economic class to ourselves. I think my sister has not dated anyone with a high school degree in a decade. (She has a masters degree and, additionally, speaking of traditional women’s currency, modelled professionally). The reasons for this are complex and if the convo goes that was I can get into it, but I think for the purposes of this post it is just germane to point out that powerful men have forever dated women who are younger and/or have less earning power than them. The result has typically been that the man’s career comes first, and the woman finds herself earning “too little” for it to be lucrative to return to work, etc. and finds herself in a domestic role whether she planned it or not. I am not mercenary enough to have gone looking for someone with less earning potential than myself outright, but I certainly make no bones about the fact that my career isn’t taking a backseat to anyone, and I have always been the breadwinner (pathetic given my salary, but still). My partner is supportive and willing to do more domestic labor. I don’t think these things are coincidences.
Char, my sister and her husband have a similar education level, but he’s a teacher and she’s a dotcom startup millionaire. Even though she’s a stay at home mom now, it’s the most equitable household in terms of housework or childcare that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if that’s because the money that maintains their lifestyle is “hers” or because the kind of man who can be happy living off his wife’s money is also going to happy pitching in. I know my brother-in-law catches some flack from some jackasses and I’ve seen instances where that’s gotten to him, but amongst his coworkers it’s mostly envy that he can keep teaching without ever worrying about making ends meet.
And JD is right, huge educational or earning potential disparities are seen as normal when it’s the woman who makes less. I’m one of those women for whom it doesn’t make financial sense for me to work outside the home and no one would ever even imagine giving me a hard time for living off my husband or using “his” money to finance my tiny (but beloved) part-time personal chef business. It’s just expected that he take care of my financially. In fact, when I quit my (boring, dead-end) banking job while pregnant with our first, his(80 year old super old fashioned)boss gave him a raise that year after telling him how glad he was that I was going to be home with our children. He was rewarded at work for our traditional gender roles. That would never have happened to my sister when she was the breadwinner.
@charlemagne: I really dislike the terms “stupid” or “marry down” with regard to men—or women—who are less educated or has less money.
To your point about personal experience: I have definitely dated men who earn less than I do; writers, musicians, civil servants, public school teachers. I never saw the income disparity as a problem as I don’t expect men to support me financially, even if we were married/cohabitating. The two men I dated who did not have college degrees had been in the military since age 18, and they were a hell of a lot smarter and savvier than a lot of highly educated men I’ve been with.
In none of those situations did I assume that because they earned less than me or had less education, those men were stupider or less capable than me, nor did I think I was stooping to date them.
And completely agree with JD and Avogadro that the whole notion of “marrying down” is never an issue when it’s the woman who’s less educated or lower-paid. I made that point in the post: it’s one of the most obvious double standards in our society.
@NN: “pretty soon the Larry Summers’ of the world will have to take their patriarchy and shove it up where the Sun don’t shine”
That phrase and accompanying mental image scratched an itch for me in the best way. Thanks!
But I think that charlmagne does point to what the article posits as a problem but what I see as progress — women now are more free to make love marriages, or choose not to, because they have the power to set the terms of their relationships (more frequently anyway than say 30 years ago). Less educational discrimination has led to women matching and in many cases outpacing men. I just fail to see the crisis. It all sounds really positive to me.
The unspoken problem that DOES exist, as other commenters have pointed out, is the massive dropout and unemployment rate among boys and young men of color. I’m interested in the gender dimension of this problem, and few mainstream journalists seem equipped or willing to analyze it. Are girls and women of color facing the same educational deficits as their brothers? I don’t know the answer (I’m sure some commenter does), but if there is a difference I’d be inclined to chalk it up, at least in part, to the prison industrial complex. In any case I think it is a much more interesting and relevant subject than some fake hyperventilating that is basically an updated version of telling a woman that getting a college degree will make her unmarriageable.
@JDRegent: I think one of the biggest problems is the decline in industrial/manufacturing jobs. That’s been well-documented as a cause of greater male unemployment/income decline. The men who held those jobs—and it was pretty much exclusively MEN—didn’t need a college degree to be assured of a steady income and good job security (especially if they were union jobs). Because the US economy is now a more white-collar and service-oriented, men without degrees have way fewer options than before. (And that reality feeds the prison industrial complex, of course).
I’m fairly sure that the “boys education crisis” is much more pronounced in minority neighborhoods, as Black and Latino girls graduate at much higher rates from both high school, college and grad schools than their male counterparts. So it’s probably an even greater crisis in those communities, although there are obviously multiple factors that play into that—racism, ESL, frequent moving, poverty—which don’t apply to the white, upper-middle class kids being hand-wrung over in this New York piece.
I’ve never wanted a partner that wasn’t an intellectual equal, and that has little to do with education and nothing to do with money.
Sometimes I have little patience for friends that are not intellectual equals either.
I think education disparities may be a new issue for women but a long standing one for humanity. How the couple deals with it depends on the couple, obvs.
I still don’t think that men and women DO have different cognitive skills!
It’s been shown that there may be some difference in very very early childhood, but even that doesn’t suggest that there’s enough to change how children are taught. I certainly don’t remember all the girls learning to read while the boys did not. Don’t the skills even out by the time the children are no longer toddlers?
If anything, it’s been proven that having different expectations of abilities becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you tell boys that it’s “natural” for them not to sit still, then they have an excuse not to sit still! I suspect these boys now that aren’t measuring up aren’t doing so because they’re being allowed not to do so.
it’d be nice if we could get some common sense back into this.
@Madaha: There’s some pretty well-documented science about how boys and girls differ in terms of behavioral traits and the timeline for which they acquire certain cognitive skills. But you’re right that it’s nearly impossible to look at the way boys and girls learn/behave in a classroom without factoring in social constructs/prejudices. Which I think is part of the reason we should always be wary when an educational system privileges one type of learning/intelligence over another. It’s almost never JUST about gender.
Someone asked anecdotally if anyone had dated someone less financially/academically successful then themselves and what the experience was – well my husband is considerably less qualified academically than me (and happy to admit it), in that I hold a better undergraduate degree than him and three MAs (I know i just can’t take the step to phd) and although he does have a university degree it’s from a much less prestigious college than mine and he’d be the first to admit that he scraped through it.
He’s financially successful it’s true but from a very different background to mine (he was the first person to go to college in his family) but actually he got the financially successful job which is related to finance after chatting to someone when he was working in a bar (yes, really).
Anyway the point of this long rant is that our difference in academic success and family background has never made a difference to us or our happiness – then again my husband might not care for academia but he loves to read so we’re ultimately not that far apart.
also I should add – I never thought i’d married down, he certainly doesn’t think he married up (although he does occasionally jokingly call me his bit of posh) and my husband and I earn roughly the same amount of money.
@Becky – “So it’s probably an even greater crisis in those communities, although there are obviously multiple factors that play into that—racism, ESL, frequent moving, poverty—which don’t apply to the white, upper-middle class kids being hand-wrung over in this New York piece.”
Definitely the factors that you mentioned but I’d also add in differing constructions of masculinity and race identity (i.e. I think in some populations the idea of education itself is identified as both “female” and, perhaps more importantly, “white” — the latter not without reason, certainly). Different models of success are presented as accessible and/or desirable to different populations and education doesn’t always play into those models.
@Av0gadro – I cannot believe your husband’s boss did that! Oh my god! Does he have female coworkers that are starting families? If so, I assume they didn’t get the same offer!
@baraqiel: Yes, I’m sure that’s true. Unfortunately macho cultures tend to de-emphasize education for boys.
This hits pretty close to home for me because I have male friends who struggle with their self-esteem because they aren’t “intelligent” in the way that society has defined intelligence. They don’t read well or remember trivia that they will be tested on, or know how to write papers and study in an academic sense. The same people have the skills and experience to build magnificent creations, or fix broken things with random material which is lying around the house, or convince people to write them a check for marketing services, but because they don’t have that validating piece of paper they feel like failures.
I think that the writer of the piece referenced may have mis-identified the problem, but there is definitely a problem. Our educational system is not preparing men or women to live in the world as it exists now.
@bella: So true. I am very good at the kinds of skills our current educational system values—verbal aptitude, attention-paying, standardized testing—and that’s made me very sucessful. But I know of many, many people who are way more brilliant than me who lack some of those skills and have been marginalized by an educational system doesn’t value or nurture their gifts because of it.
As to the anecdotal stuff, my boyfriend is both broke and “uneducated”; he was raised in a cult, home-schooled by said cult, and got the hell out of there when he was 18. No diplomas whatsoever.
I, on the other hand, come from a solidly middle-class background and am starting grad school in september.
He is no more stupid than I am. I have very little patience for stupidity, one of my lesser traits, and although we have very different strengths, there is no better and no worse.