Summary: The war on boys has run for a generation. Each week brings new victories, such as these test results. See feminists’ power in our indifference to the crushed boys.
“Girls beat boys in a major test of tech and engineering skills
– and the gap is growing“
By Jenny Anderson at Quartz, 1 May 2019.
“On one major standardized test measuring proficiency in technology and engineering, there’s a gap in scores favoring girls. And it’s growing.
“Eighth-grade girls outperformed boys in every single category of the 2018 Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL) exam, including content-focused areas such as design and systems and technology and society, and “practice” areas, such as understanding technology principles and developing solutions and achieving goals. …
“The report is yet more bad news for boys, who lag girls on nearly every measure of academic success, with massive gender gaps in reading as well graduation rates in high school and college. One extensive study by Stanford last year found that the gap in favor of girls in reading exists in every grade, every year, and every district (it examined 260 million state tests given to students in grades three through eight in 10,000 US school districts). Girls, on average, outperform boys by about a half a grade level in fourth grade, but a full year by eighth grade. …
“If girls are performing better on tasks like this, it should bode well for employment later in life, since being able to work with technology while also communicating and collaborating effectively is more versatile than having tech skills but no social ones.”
Ms Anderson shows not a trace of sympathy for the boys who have fallen so far behind girls. Just glee that girls have moved on top of boys. The only graph shows girls’ superior scores over boys. They show no graph of girls scores increasing, because that is less important to them.
This milestone resulted from years of work by the Left, expressed through their dominance of the social sciences and the educational institutions. It is a stealth revolution to change American society, conducted ruthlessly, coldly, and patiently.
The waves of feminism
These are broad descriptions of complex social dynamics. They overlap.
- First-wave feminism (1880 – 1950) – working for equal rights under the law for women: suffrage, right to own property, work in all fields, etc.
- Second-wave feminism (1960s to 1980s) – working for equality in the family and workplace, and gain the right to abortion.
- Third-wave feminism (1990s to 2000s) – working for freedom from cultural patterns of women’s behavior.
- Fourth-wave feminism (2010 to now) – the open pursuit of superiority over men in all aspects of society.
The open war on boys is a defining event in fourth wave feminism, as is feminists’ open glee at the crushing of boys and at their poor prospects for life. It shows to any who care that the gender wars have begun. That we do not care about the wrecked boys left behind shows who is winning.
Here is the playbook for the gender wars.
Feminism as social engineering
Trust me. I can build a better society for America!
Feminism has been to a large extent driven by use of government power to change the basic rules of society. It is pure social engineering. As the Swiss doctor Paracelsus said, sola dosis facit venenum – the poison is in the dosage (more about this here). A society can easily tolerate a small steady stream of social engineering, especially if done after careful experimentation. But disaster becomes likely after frequent large doses, as we tinker with social dynamics beyond our understanding. This is especially likely today, when so many on the Left hate western civilization and America.
The gender wars are part of a wave of social change sweeping through America.
For a description, see A new, dark picture of America’s future.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about society and gender issues, about feminism, about social engineering, and especially these …
- Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?
- A better answer to “why women outperform men in college?”
- Women are moving on top of men in America.
- The Economist proclaims that men are “The Weaker Sex”.
- Women on Top, chapter 10: the growing gender gap in education.
- Victims no more: the revolution puts women on top of men.
- Raising boys to live in the coming matriarchy.
- Mao goes to high schools: a new front in the war on boys.
Books about the war on boys
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men
The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
Too late. It’s gone bicoastal: A woman designed the PLAN’s eighty Houbei Class missile ships and China’s first native Nobel Laureate, Tu Youyou, is the woman who discovered artemisinin and prevented millions of malaria deaths. Ms. Lu Yutong designed the world’s fastest computer, Mme. Wang Shufang designed the advanced Beidou GPS system and Ms. Liang Jianying invented the next generation of maglev trains. A third of entrepreneurs are women and they own the majority of new Internet companies.
Twenty percent of venture capital partners are women, eighty percent of VC firms have at least one women partner and an increasing number of women head their own firms. Ninety percent of the world’s richest self-made women and eighty percent of the world’s self-made female billionaires are Chinese. Zhou Qunfei, the most famous, was raised by her blind father in rural Hunan, dropped out of school at sixteen to work making watch lenses for $1 a day. She invested her savings in a startup to make touch screens, went public in 2015 and became a multi-billionaire. The glass ceiling is higher for female business executives, too.
Sun Yafang chairs Huawei, the world’s biggest telecom, Jean Liu is President of Didi Chuxing, the world’s biggest ride-sharing company, Rachel Duan is CEO and President of GE China and Dong Mingzhu is CEO of the world’s largest appliance manufacturer, Gree.
Mao insisted that the first bill he signed into law was what we later called the Equal Rights Amendment, and it’s been down hill ever since.
We’re screwed.
Godfree,
Your comments are entertaining. Bizarre and delusional, but fun to read.
Nothing bizarre and delusional – plain truth. Nothing wrong with women outperforming men. Only goes to show the “glass ceiling” is the lie propounded by lazy, backward, non-liberated Western women.
“Nothing wrong with women outperforming men.”
It is how that was achieved that is objectionable. That’s the point of the “war on boys.” Drug them, deny playtime, tell them they are toxic, etc – with lots of special programs for girls, etc.
You’ll find a look at the books mentioned to be enlightening.
It is going to be an interesting next 20 years.
Sven,
Interesting, as in the curse “May you live in interesting times.”
That is not a Chinese curse, but it is nonetheless valid.
If this is accurate, it’s just a disaster. It looks like a desperate cry for help in an environment where absolutely nobody will listen.
Kingfisher,
(1) Thank you for flagging this. Here are some articles about it.
Petition: Help Dr. Vengalattore Get His Physics Laboratory Back.
(2) Academics in the physical sciences have watched the Left gain power, but felt secure in their Ivory Tower. Now they learn that they too are affected.
(3) Note the racial aspect. The above video shows the blond white girl accuser. Here is the accused professor, Mukund Vengalattore. As is so often the case …
Kingfisher,
I read through the timeline and probably need to read it again and watch the full video. Was he sleeping with her? Was he her advisor? The timeline says,
If so, it appears she was using what was between her legs to get Vengalatorre to write her dissertation for her. She admitted to her own feelings of incompetence in some of these excerpts. My experience with STEM Barbies is that these feelings were probably well-founded.
Men come here from China and the Subcontinent unaware of the games women play here and become ensnared. For example, I saw a video of another Indian at USC who was charged with sexual harassment who was exonerated by bar footage showing the woman throwing herself at him and practically dragging him into her dorm room. I think she was Indian herself.
The truth is, it’s already too late for Vengalattore. He’s lost probably the most productive decade of research he would’ve had unless he found another lab and place to do research. The educrats are never going to give him what they promised and the bureaucratic strategy is to stall and tie you up in the courts forever. They have time and money on their side.
Were I a PhD advisor, I’d never take a woman as a PhD candidate or grad student. Of course, I’d probably get sued or denied tenure for failing to support DIEVERSITY and INCLUSION and would never get tenure. It matters little. Science is grinding to a halt because the university is now a monoversity of groupthink, feminism and cultural Marxism. Corporate research is slightly better, but grinding to a halt as well.
Foreigners should be told the true story of America’s institutions before they invest their lives in them.
Bryce Sharper,
Was he her advisor? Yes.
Was he sleeping with her? More complicated since you can’t prove a negative here absolutely. But, IIRC, several years of texts and emails were examined finding no romantic/sexual relationship. So weigh the possibility that a “secret relationship” produced no text, email nor social confirmation against no such relationship in fact. I think it enormously conspiratorial to believe in a “secret relationship”, especially give other details.
I agree its a situation where all avenues for success have been sequentially closed off for men here. Vengalattore has a tiny chance at a diminished future at best. The extremely brilliant have many other choices and quickly will go elsewhere, to Europe or China. We’re supposed to believe that the vast prosperity from centuries of discoveries almost exclusively by men in physics and physical sciences will continue now that women are being force selected. You don’t have to completely understand that gender difference to know it exists for some reason, and systemic patriarchy is not why.
This will be a disaster for the US even in the unlikely event there is an immediate backlash and recognition of the problem.
This is a crappy case. I met the accused on a few occasions and more importantly, knew several of his colleagues and grad students in his department at the time of the events in the allegations. By their accounts, he was, to his grad students, a harsh, insensitive, and unreasonable leader who repeatedly ran his team past the point of breakdown, and couldn’t figure out that something was going wrong until it was too late. This is not to say whether or not the specific accusations of sexual impropriety are true, that I do not know. It was all some time ago now, I imagine things have changed. What I can say is that it was a traumatizing experience for all involved, not to be taken lightly, and the whole of it probably had to do with the tenure decision. The mysteries of the university’s internal processes, and the pressures imposed by the tenure process, do not help matters, but that is not for me to comment on.
Don’t need those books – ahead of them – been engaged in the debate ever since age eleven, as the youngest member of the Dutch feminist organization, which my mother and I and thousands of other progressive, i.e. right-wing, idealists abandoned when it was taken over by Marxists in the 1970s (a fate that befell all other NGOs such as Green Peace, Amnesty International. WWF and such).
Let me, run-of-the-mill sinologist, who reads American, British, French, German, Chinese, Hong Kong, Belgian, Dutch newspapers every day, enlighten yóu: WE, we Europeans and Americans and Australians and Canadians and so, we Caucasians, are no longer the “first world” – case in point: Singapore – have a look at Singapore GDP: as poor as black Africa in 1960, now richer than Europe and quickly overtaking the USA.
The average IQ of the Confucianists (Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, even including the 1,3 billion PRC Chinese only freed from socialist dumbing-down for a few decades) now stands at 105 (vs. 100 for Caucasians and 70 for Negroids) – i.o.w.: Untergang des Abendlandes (Oswald Spengler, 1918!).
The debate about feminism or any other topic raging in the Western world is now as interesting to those first world guys as the debates carried on in Africa or Latin America are to us: OBSOLETE. We’re in the 21st century, the “pacific century” – Western civilization, dumbed down by the feminization of education (and the judiciary, and …) is on the way out.
The twenty guys (all of them engineers, all male) who lord it over the increasingly prosperous and successful 1,3 billion PRC Chinese, take (liberal-libertarian, capitalist, progressive, right-wing) Singapore, this planet’s most successful nation, as their model, not us. The women in the Confucianist world don’t need the sexist women-pampering policies WE sanctimonious Westerners have succumbed to to get ahead. Thát was the point of mr. Roberts’ comment.
Thank you for elaborating. Competition is always a good thing, the power of progress. That is a foundation belief in western social systems.
(1) “The average IQ of the Confucianists …now stands at 105 (vs. 100 for Caucasians …”
Even assuming that such cross-cultural comparisons of IQ are valid (color me skeptical), there is little reason to assume that 5% makes any substantial difference in national competitiveness. There are a host of other factors at work. Especially social, political, and economic organization.
Also, that IQ difference of 5% between East and West was probably also there in 1700. But the West triumphed decisively during the next three centuries, nonetheless. We can only guess who will do better in the next round (“win” isn’t a useful term in this context).
(2) “Singapore, this planet’s most successful nation”
I too admire Singapore, one of the great success stories of the modern age. But your extrapolation — predicting that all of the East will do as well — is too speculative for my taste. Also, a better comparison is Singapore (population 5.6 million) vs. the San Francisco – San Jose metropolitan area (population 8.9 million). Compare a star to a star. Neither looks so extraordinary by comparison with the other.
(3) In America we focus on doing better and watching for threats, rather than self-congratulation. This was best expressed by Andy Grove, who built Intel into a giant: “Only the paranoid survive.” As for your triumphalist conclusions, I’ll leave you with some Western wisdom – from Proverbs 16:18 in the Bible.
Thank you for your reply.
Please comment again! Provocative comments from other perspectives are rare and greatly appreciated.
About Singapore: In Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel Moonraker, MI6’s secret agent 0011 vanished into Singapore’s “Dirty half-mile.” James Bond, agent 007, was glad it was not him. Today Singapore citizens consider US cities to be as crime-ridden holes compared to their well-run city-state.
Also, you might find it worth a minute to glance through our posts about China, and especially these…
<
ul>
Just one thing: not “triumphalist”, but extremely sad – saddened by the Marxist-led deterioration of Western society, in all its aspects, not only the (extremely important) gender issue. (Unlike most sinologists) I’m not a China-lover or advocate of Confucianism – the Western values of liberalism (in its original sense, i.e. the ideology of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) and the Christian ethic of love of all mankind and thus of UNIVERSAL human rights are morally superior to that authoritarian ideology. (But combine Confucianism with liberalism and see what you get: highly successful plus humanitarian societies such as Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea.) It’s the other way round: not triumphalist at all, but extremely worried by the deterioration of (feminized) education in our Western world – education, the very basis of civilization. Just take a look at your average Singapore, Taiwanese, South-Korean etc. student, then compare them to your average American or European millennial … are you not alarmed?
“but extremely sad – saddened by the Marxist-led deterioration of Western society, in all its aspects, not only the (extremely important) gender issue.”
Me, too. Nicely said.
“Just take a look at your average Singapore, Taiwanese, South-Korean etc. student, then compare them to your average American or European millennial … are you not alarmed?”
Sounding the alarm is one of the two goals of the FM website. The other is to help find solutions. We are experiencing broad systemic failure, expressed as dysfunction of core institutions. Since 2003, when the project began, the dire situation has become obvious to more people. Unfortunately, apathy or resignation appear to be the most common reactions. So the second goal has become more important.
Personally, I have little interest in analysis that provides no operational insights. That is infotainment, the modern “opiate of the masses.” (I got a sound education in Marxism from Cornell in the early 1970s).
You might find of interest this summary statement of America’s condition: A new, dark picture of America’s future.
And again: thanks for your extensive reply (10:16 AM).
Western IQ scores have been going down (the Reverse Flynn Effect). This is obvious, even to the most casual observer.
Taiwan and Singapore are amazing and everyone I’ve worked with from there has been superb. Unfortunately, they do not have children. Lee Kwan Yew even remarked that educating women led to low fertility.
Veering back to the subject of the post:
Well what do you expect? You design an environment from the ground up that is antithetical to boy nature, you drug them, browbeat them, hold them back and teach them that they are defective. It would be a miracle for it not to work. Bear in mind that women, most with hefty agendas, own and manage the public education system.
What really bothers me about these articles is their openly gleeful tone, as though it were a form a of payback. You can imagine the authors doing a little victory dance, repeating as a mantra what they heard a thousand times in grade school “Girls rule; boys drool.” Amazing that people can take joy in the deliberate sabotaging of half of humanity.
It boggles me to think that there are those who think that thousands of years of history, up to the very recent past, are somehow invalid, or a fluke, or perhaps evidence of a malign conspiracy. Oh yeah, patriarchy.
Notice that the study was done on pre-puberty kids. Historically, post-puberty, male performance soars and surpasses girls in pretty much every area. Hmm. What to do about THAT?
Scott,
“Well what do you expect?”
That is the key question. I expect Americans to defend their system. If not that, to defend their children.
“The weird thing is: People stood by and let this happen.”
There was a piece in the NYT last year – “In the #MeToo Era, Raising your Sons to be Good Guys” – written by a father who had swallowed the the whole poisonous anti-male narrative. The article and the flood of supportive comments was stomach-churning. My comment was not quite so supportive.
Scott,
I agree. But then, female genital mutilation is done by women to each other.
Also see the spreading epidemic of cuckolding. Salon and other leftist websites overflow with guys talking about letting their wives screw other men. Not so many by women vice versa.
Until recently, I did not realize that the fences a culture builds to prevent deviant behavior were largely punitive in nature (e.g., against out-of-wedlock births, grossly weak behavior by males). I believe this lesson for the West will be expensive (Life is an open-admission school, but its lessons are not free).
Editor
There was interesting research that I remember being quoted in an interview on boys’ reading ages. I don’t seem to be able to find it in Google so it has to be anecdotal.
The researchers found that by swapping the source material for a reading age comprehension test from the standard novel to a factual text on spiders, there was a massive improvement in boys (two grades was mentioned) and a slight drop for girls.
In a test, context is everything. Engaging boys in stuff they are interested in does show marked improvement. Anyone who has had boys knows that.
It is known there are similar cultural bias issues for IQ tests. Could the same be present for the these tests?
Undoubtedly there is a bias against boys in these tests. They’ve also found that high grades for women in STEM doesn’t pan-out into success in the STEM world. The female brain is much different than the male brain. I am a father of 3 boys. Male attention is like a powerful laser that can be directed only at topics boys find interesting.
I read that article in USA Today too, and if you drill down they weighted “collaboration” and “works well with others” more heavily than actual engineering knowledge, so as stated previously, what would you expect?
I don’t know how true this is also, but if I recall correctly, the pedestrian overpass at Florida International University that collapsed in March 2018 was designed by an all-female engineering team. I can’t seem to confirm this via web search, but again, what would you expect? If true, they sure collaborated well, and no doubt they “believed” their design was functional and, of course, superior.
That female design team may have been a issue in the collapse
https://www.eurthisnthat.com/2018/03/19/all-women-engineering-team-gets-side-eye-for-collapsed-pedestrian-bridge-designed-by-them/
but it is more likely there is more than a hint of bribery and corruption to the actual build.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article205425354.html
I think the official report would shed a lot more light on the issue. It is very unlikely that the designers being women was a significant contributing factor.
STEM Barbie is completely useless for engineering tasks. They tend to go into management where corporate risk-aversion is rewarded. The real story behind the increase in women in STEM is the dumbing-down of standards and scientific progress.
kingfisher,
Avenues for men are very tightly controlled in both those places. Feminism is as bad in Europe and on the rise in China where masculinity is in a crisis. It’s good to be a man in Latin America and Islamic countries and some AFrican countries. The corporate globohomo urbanization seems to lead to a rise in feminism. Places left untouched by this phenomenon or especially violent or religiously-male dominated are ok for men though they have a host of other problems.
We need to decide we’re not going to be serfs and cooperate for reforms. This will require great sacrifice.
I can offer only my experience with this, not my perspective — I don’t know why this would be the way it was:
We had, some time ago at an east-coast university, a full six-person graduating class in 1988 (one female); then, by 2010 we had 44 graduating students (28 female); during those latter years, on the top, there was always a mix, while on the bottom were mostly the “boys.” And that were the engineering undergrads.
The grads somehow reflected the same; however, with a lag — it took some time for the females to get there, I guess. Their personalities changed as well; from rather shy and careful ladies (mostly from south-east Asia) to a fully assertive ones (also mostly from there).
Yet the smartest people I had the honor to ever work with were almost exclusively men — one Nigerian, a couple of Chinese and a couple of East Indians; well, there was one exception — a Caucasian, even a local! That is in time-frame of some 23 years.
As I said, I don’t know why, but I don’t think this had anything to do with North Americans’ “war on boys” — you see, nowadays, most of graduate work (I.E. research) is done, at least in most Canadian universities, by south-east Asians.
Does that mean we, the boys, should fight it, or should we accept it as the unfair way of life? Or should we perhaps regard this situation as an invasion of the eastern hordes??
While contradicting my premise, I think the future is coming and it is, from the east, whatever we do…
I’d say we’d just kick their asses (I jest) but I live in a state dominated by beta males so that ain’t gonna happen.
Race and gender-based physics.
There are unique problems that boys and young men face in the world but places like this site have nothing valuable to offer them. It’s literally just PUA/MRA toxic bullsh*t and whining about commercials making men look dumb. If you just admitted that you’re a sad old man that wants to commiserate with other sad old men about how the world no longer looks fondly on your entitlement it would be so much more tolerable than you pretending this self-indulgent nonsense is actually concern for what young men face.
Bruce,
Try reading some of these posts. Your summary does not represent the material here, probably because you are blinded by your hate.
Bruce,
“ It’s literally just PUA/MRA toxic …”
Please don’t lie. It is bad for your soul. I’ve frequently written about the futility of both.
“whining about commercials …”
Take some courses at your local community college. You’ll learn that a culture is reflected in its media, which is why sociologists and psychologists study commercials.
Hers one on runaway feminism: “USS Truman Master chief retiring after telling his sailors to “clap like we’re at a strip club” during Pence visit.“
Do mothers carry any of the blame for how poorly boys are doing? Apparently 5 year old boys are even behind 5 year old girls when they start school.
David,
Worth some thought. Especially since single women are raising most children.
Pingback: A major victory in the war on boys! – Boy Initiative Testing Site
Pingback: A major victory in the war on boys! - The Boys Initiative