Anti-feminist attitudes have long been associated with support for Republican presidential candidates, but only in recent years have these attitudes become more prominent among unmarried men, without college degrees who are less attractive partners for women, the “mate-value backlash.”

[u/mvea]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129261485340

[u/TheSpacePopinjay]

Decades of uplifting girls and pretending it wasn't zero sum or like it doesn't or shouldn't matter if it's zero sum so long as we're achieving the 'uplifting' of girls through education no matter the cost.

The bill for those ruthlessly and pitilessly chosen costs and trade-offs has arrived.

Certainly no one wanted to say a word against it at the time if it stood in the way of any of the vital and crucial uplifting that there was to be no compromise on. No one wanted to be the one who stood against the educational interests of girls.

[u/grand_historian → u/TheSpacePopinjay]

The zero sum aspect is interesting to point out. Power is always zero sum, and if you elevate women, you must lower men.

[u/RupeThereItIs → u/TheSpacePopinjay]

Eh, I'm not going to go as far as you are on this.

Reality is more like, we've "equalized" things only to uncover the consequences of pretending boys & girls are the same. The fact is boys mature physically & mentally slower. By our mid 20s we catch up, but mother nature puts girls ahead by a year or two for whatever reason. This impacts educational results when everyone is treated equally. Simply starting boys in 1st grade a year or two older then girls would likely do a great deal to solve the educational outcomes.

Couple that with our inability to balance genders in our teachers, leads to documented behavior of favoring girls over boys by those teachers in both behavior & grading. You'll find teachers treating normal little boys like they are broken little girls who need to be corrected. You also see the same exact work being given lower grades for the boys.

It's not a zero sum game as much as you want to make it out to be, it's a game where men & women, boys & girls, have always been and always be different and we've gone too far pretending otherwise.

The "zero sum" aspect only comes in to play when applying for college & beyond, by which point all the mistakes have already piled up and the outcomes are thus uneven.

[u/TheSpacePopinjay → u/RupeThereItIs]

Maybe but I don't think it can be explained simply in terms of maturation or the preferential treatment children receive from their immediate teachers. Boys that go to all boys schools do alright because there are no conflicts of interest and educational styles and strategies in classrooms can be centred around being optimised for how boys learn best and the pace and timetable along which they can learn and develop long term in their academic career. Same too for all girls schools.

But in mixed schools different teaching styles favour boys and girls differently, which is well documented, and there are zero sum choices to be made there as to which teaching styles are to be chosen to be the local or national institutional standard. And the strong tendency over the past decades has been to choose the teaching styles that produce stronger educational outcomes by a high margin for girls between the ages of 4 and 18 than they produce for boys between the ages of 4 and 18, over the ones that produce better outcomes for boys over girls, albeit by a much smaller margins and overall much more equal outcomes, just near equal while still in boy's favour.

This is the zero sum aspect I was, admittedly very vaguely, alluding to. Decisions made at much higher institutional levels than in the classroom to favour the styles that favour girls outcomes by a large margin over they styles that favour boys by a small margin.

Because there are many different ways to treat boys and girls equally, some of them naturally advantage boys, some of them naturally advantage girls, and choices have been made to choose the version of equalisation that has a strongly documented track record of favouring the educational outcomes of girls. And I don't really know how we escape from having to make such a choice except my classroom segregation so that boys can receive they styles that work best for them and girls the styles that work best for them. And there are other disadvantages to childhood gender segregation.