So googling that idea has been floated.
Not endorsing it. My own belief is with rare exceptions stick to the birthdate. And this from a short male who was one of the youngest in his grade throughout.
Or we could even it by putting blindfolds and ear plugs on the girls and having have to wear mittens to make up for their maturational advantages!
Maybe it’s time to reclaim the term.
I just heard about this on the news yesterday:
Yeah, I’ve left auto dealers that were waiting for my husband to show up, and there are auto repair places i won’t use because they don’t respect me.
Auto-related shops seen the worst. I do fine at hardware stores, with plumbers and electricians, etc. (i have better luck with plumbers and electricians than some of my female friends, though.)
Yeah, it is.
This is probably true too.
It’s not that I think it’s not true, it’s that it gives a misleading impression: people rarely share when something is going well; very few women are starting threads to say how great their partners are (occasionally someone does it explicitly to counteract this effect). And it would come across pretty unsympathetically to post in the other threads to say how great things are for you.
It’s well established that boys are more active than girls at all ages. And the UK government says boys do better in exams, while girls do better in teacher assessed coursework. I think I’ve posted this article with suggestions to help increase boy’s achievement before, and these would probably help girls too, to a lesser extent:
I’d like to see all kids start later, but that’s mostly a UK thing. Children who’ve just turned 4 should not be in school, even if it is mostly play for the first year. We know it doesn’t boost educational attainment, because other countries that start formal learning later get just as good results. Starting only boys later sounds like a terrible idea. Imagine how much more awful PE would have been if the boys were a year older as well as naturally bigger and stronger!
I assumed it’s intended to be at least somewhat disparaging. And it can’t be very important, since the left continues to use terms they came up with, even when they have unfortunate connotations and/or regularly cause misunderstandings.
I’m sure it’s not universal (what is?), it’s just a pattern I have observed.
Their specific partners, and they were frequently encouraged to leave them by other participants.
Not into those threads, it would have felt insensitive. I may have mentioned it when posting about other issues.
And no, that isn’t how forums work, and in some ways it’s nice that they bring together women from different walks of life who are all going through the same experience.
Yeah, this stuff is clickbait unfortunately, but I already muted that subreddit and some others. Reddit’s hardly the worst social media site/app for outrage bait, though.
Lol. I’ve heard of Gell-Mann amnesia, but not of a self-discrediting article.
It’s great you have those skills. I always find social interactions stressful, and it’s not like salesmen simply ignore my questions; they answer if I ask them something. I just prefer not having to hold up a conversation with a stranger while I’m trying to evaluate and make a decision.
You just reminded me of when we went on holiday to Egypt, and didn’t manage to buy any souvenirs because the men (all men) running shops or market stalls just would. Not. Leave us alone long enough to look at anything. It’s easily the country that made me feel most uncomfortable and unsafe.
I went to a new mother’s group for a while. It was all female. It was in person, not online, which might be a critical difference. It was not like what you described. There was a lot of talk about trouble nursing, kids picking up language (sometimes naughty language), dealing with diapers… Husband didn’t come up all that often, and when they did, reports were mixed. Many of us had helpful husbands who were good with babies.
But mostly i feel awkward and out of place in all-female groups, so i doubt have menu other experiences with them.
I had been planning to go to some in person groups, but while I was busy giving birth, they shut the whole country down. 
The health visitors were pretty much the only people we saw in person for the first couple of months. It was a strange and difficult time for everyone.
I don’t want to give the impression these maternity/parenting forums were nothing but complaining about partners. There were lots of posts on many different topics, including all the ones you mentioned.
I always immediately go into roll eye mode every time I read an “it’s well established…” statement, always translating it into “I have no actual basis to say that …”
To the degree it is true “it is well established…” to be based on expectations, biases in how similar behaviors are interpreted, and the fact that girls mature faster across the board.
But avoiding dueling “well established” factoids, school never has been, and rarely will be, a place to run around in class. It has been and will continue to be a place where children learn how to behave in groups, how to work well with others, follow rules, follow instructions, wait for their turn to speak, and learn skills and information in both didactic and experiential ways. Girls get there faster on average. But whatever the difference in the means may be the spread within each group swamps it. Individualizing education to each child’s ideal learning style would be nice but is unrealistic; preordaining that an individual child’s ideal learning style is, heh, X or Y, based on which second sex chromosome they have, and simply expecting that a boy can’t learn the basic skills of being in a standard classroom environment and needs a remedial one, not so nice. I think recess is good for all kids. I think the push to master reading in KG is dumb. Male role models in early grades, books that engage different kids various interests is always aimed for. With varying success.
School has not suddenly changed to disadvantage boys
Where on earth are you getting the idea I want kids to be able to run around in class? I’m very much opposed to tolerating disruptive behaviour that stops other pupils from learning. And I’m hardy likely to think learning styles are preordained by chromosomes: for one thing, learning styles are a myth, and for another, I already said I don’t fit these stereotypes myself. Like, at all. Half the reason I think schooling should be improved is that it didn’t work well for me, either.
It’s very odd to assume no positive change is possible, and any suggestions must mean disorder or lowering standards or some Harrison Bergeron dystopia.
Obviously not, the change has been gradual. When I was at school, boys were still ahead in science and maths, now they are behind in all common GCSE subjects. What else could explain this, other than changes in schooling?
But why do you think it’s not very important for the right to do it when you think it’s important that the left does?
It’s possible that you’re not describing the same phenomenon. If the salesmen do respond to you directly when you do speak up, they may just be properly paying attention to the person who appears to want to interact with them, while leaving alone a person who’s giving off “leave me alone” signals. That’s not the same thing as insisting on talking with one of two people while it’s the other one who’s trying to talk with you.
Changes in socialization of the girls, so that they’re not told over and over and over again that girls are no good at math and science?
Changes in attitude of the teachers, so that they don’t write off the girls as bad at those subjects and therefore don’t try to teach them and/or don’t allow them to respond in class and/or sneer at them in class and/or respond to surveys that the girls of course don’t do as well?
Changes in classes offered to the girls, so that they now can take math and science subjects without being advised not to and without being harrassed if they insist on showing up anyway?
I mean, to some extent, yes, that’s a change in schooling. But is what you are saying that the boys can only succeed if the girls are held back? Because I don’t think that’s a good solution.
And for that matter, I don’t see any reason that we have to try to set things up so that the boys can be better at math and science than the girls. I don’t think boys are essentially so constructed that they can’t learn that they can be good at something even if somebody else is also good at it. Or even that they can’t learn to be good at something even if somebody else is better – after all, boys on male sports teams will praise the boy who’s unusually good at, say, making baskets, and want him on their team; even if they know that he’s better at it than they are.
ETA: Maybe we should stop classifying in this fashion, and try to sort out what the children of all genders who aren’t doing well have in common, and try to figure out how to better teach the children who can’t sit still, who can or can’t visualize well, who can or can’t easily read letters or combine them into words, who have trouble studying at home for any of a batch of reasons, who need a lot of natural light, who need to be outdoors a lot, who aren’t comfortable with other people, who are being told by adults in their lives that they’re bad at something, who are being told by adults in their lives that school, or the particular subject, isn’t important . . . et cetera.
I own a couple of old copies of “the injury fact book”, which was compiled after analyzing tons of CDC injury data. More boys than girls die of accidental injury starting at about age 2, basically, as soon as they can move independently. That was true of every type of injury death except fire, where girls used to be over-represented (the difference diminished over the years these books covered), something the researchers attributed to “more bouffant clothing”.
I don’t know if boys, on average, are more active than girls, or less attentive to hazards, or more inclined to take risks, or… But most of the plausible hypotheses for the underlying difference (on average) would translate into a lower propensity to sit still and pay attention to a potentially dull class.
As with most gender-linked traits, I’m certain the variation within each sex is greater than the variation between them, and that there is substantial overlap in the behavior of individual children.
I bought my first car this way. I didn’t even know how to drive, so I went with a male friend who was a mechanic. The salesman only talked to my friend, but any time there was some kinda of pitch, like “this one comes with a sunroof” Barry would turn to me and say “do you want to pay for a sunroof?” and I’d say “nope”, and then Barry would turn to the salesman and say, “she’s not paying for a sunroof”. It was sort of like having a translator, and sort of like tag teaming a mark, and I found it amusing (so did Barry). I ended up getting the sunroof at no extra charge, as well as a lot of other extras I refused to pay for.
Also possibly that they were more likely to be doing the cooking, while wearing that clothing.
This is hard to reconcile with this:
But factually there definitely are learning styles. We each have different strengths and weaknesses.
As to this:
Reality is girls have always been ahead in school. Boys haven’t dropped (not counting pandemic impacts) but given less unequal expectations girls may have moved up more.
Despite the stereotype that boys do better in math and science, girls have made higher grades than boys throughout their school years for nearly a century
Families though were more likely to invest in the son going to college even though the daughter had better grades.
Girls, not women.
Men are also over-represented in injury deaths, both intentional and unintentional. Except for strangulation, where the victim is now often a woman.
Girls IME started doing some cooking about as soon as we were tall enough to reach the stove; well before fullgrown. Even in the 50’s, let alone sooner.
Are the statistics you’re looking at talking primarily about very young children?.
Huh, also from that article:
The study reveals that recent claims of a “boy crisis,” with boys lagging behind girls in school achievement, are not accurate because girls’ grades have been consistently higher than boys’ across several decades with no significant changes in recent years, the authors wrote.
I’m also going to chime in that i believe people have different learning styles. I help teach a square dancing class, and we try to recognize that some students learn largely orally, some kinesthetically, some by watching, etc., and provide instruction accessible to a variety of learning styles.
They are broken down by age. Also, by 1970, men and boys are more likely to die from for it burns than women or girls. It was only prior to ~1965 that women and girls were over-represented.
“Until the 1960s, clothing related burns were an important cause of death among young girls, whose nightgowns and bouffant dresses were easily ignited…”
The graph shows deaths per 100k for children age 5-9, and in 1950 it’s 4.5 for girls and 2.7 for boys. The line for boys bounced around an average of perhaps 2.5 from 1950 through 1980, while the rates for girls plummet, and are mostly a tad below the rates for boys from 1970 though 1980.
Fire -related death rates for both boys and girls are highest below age 5. They are lowest for males around age 10 and then climb (staying well about the rates for females for all ages over 15) and the rates for females are lowest from 15-40, then climb, but stay well below those for men.
The discourse around learning styles IME is vastly oversimplified. For a long time it was popular to declare that some people were kinesthetic learners, others visual learners, etc. Then some metaresearch a decade or so came along showing that “learning styles” had basically no evidence to back them up, and it was popular to throw them out entirely. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
I think pretty well in an abstract way, as long as I can use symbols; but take out the symbols, and I’m on the struggle bus. I once had a martial arts teacher who would demonstrate a move and expect me to do it. I’d try to put it in words – “Wait, so I move my left foot in front of my right foot, then–” and he’d impatiently cut me off, telling me to just do what he did. I was completely hopeless, and ended up quitting the class, because he was unwilling to let me translate the moves into abstractions like words, the only way I could understand them.
Other folks are the opposite. Explain until you’re blue in the face, they won’t get it; but they can watch the move once and replicate it fine.
A good teacher doesn’t look at me and refuse to demonstrate the step, or look at the second group and refuse to explain it. A good teacher couples an explanation with a demonstration. As you say, a good teacher will
I am also skeptical of the discourse around sex differences in learning. I think it tends toward an astrological explanation, only instead of saying “Leos are like this and Capricorns are like that,” it says, “Boys are like this and girls are like that.” It is, at best, a vast oversimplification that bears little relevance to real-world practice, and at worst is an actively harmful promulgation of gender stereotypes.
Yeah, there are some kids that need some wiggle time after lunch if they’re going to focus during math class. A good teacher recognizes that, and takes the class out for five minutes of recess before math. A bad teacher takes nobody out, or takes only the boys out.
Yeah, the idea that there are visual vs auditory vs kinaesthetic learners is what has been shown to be untrue. It’s sometimes claimed boys are more likely to be kinaesthetic learners, but as I understand it, everyone learns best by doing, then by listening to a teacher, and worst by reading. The ease of using each method is in inverse order, however.
When I talked about teaching styles, I was thinking more about different strengths, weaknesses and motivations. Ensuring schools allow/include reading material that appeals more to boys is related to the latter, for example. Performance on tests/exams tends to be a strength for boys, while consistent performance in class and on coursework is more often a strength for girls.
That’s interesting, but it’s also about school grades, which are assessed by teachers. In the UK girls had a small lead in GCSE results when they were introduced, and that gap widened each year until Michael Gove, intending to make GCSE’s more difficult, altered them to reduce coursework and make them less modular. Then during the pandemic exams were cancelled, and the gap widened since teachers gave girls higher grades than boys. After exams were brought back, the gap fell again.
Another point in favour of this conclusion:
Note for @thorny_locust: these are statistical averages only and definitely not universals. I performed dramatically better on exams than coursework when I was at school, and also did far better in maths than English, despite being a girl.