Went and dug a little deeper and it seems that for high-income nations, this trend of more women than men graduating in universities (as well as outperforming in school) has been going on for multiple decades now.
Apart of me wants to think its just right-wing hysteria because this was brought to my attention by some random podcast clip using this example as somehow proof that patriarchy doesn’t exist lol. Some articles I read did mention how other factors (particularly class and race) was a higher determinant of school/university success.
And I particularly do not like biological explanations anyways (too essentialist to my taste, but I can’t say for sure). I forgot which article in particular but it did argue it’s because men used to be able find jobs in more traditional blue-collar industries, leading to this present day discrepancy.
What do you all think?
You’re describing me, in many ways.
It is tough. I was lucky to have a few good role models at certain key moments.
I’d maybe make two observations.
First, people like Peterson are not necessarily as popular as they appear, but they get boosted by algorithms and funded by the bourgeois partly because they funnel people away from radicalism. (Well, left wing radicalism. I’d argue that what Peterson, especially, is peddling, is a right wing radicalism.)
Second, I think you’re right about that feeling of ‘it seem like everything would work out for them, and now it isn’t at all’ (emphasis added). But there are many in the previous generation for whom things did not work out. They went through the same struggles that our generation(s) are going / went through. This doesn’t change the feeling for young people, but it may help us explain it.
If previous generations of boys went through the same thing, or a similar thing, why is it that we think it’s only a modern problem? At some level I would think that this feeling comes from attempts to divide the workers in grounds of age.
This doesn’t change the stats, by the way, but it may require us to look for a different kind of answer than the one that we’re ‘expected’ to find. By this I mean, we might now ask, if working class boys had received the same level of education as do working class boys today, would we have seen similar statistics in the past as we see today?
I also am just thinking through the issues. I have no answers.
If the stats would be similar for boys in previous generations, maybe we’re looking, as you say, at the weight of maybe not neoliberal capitalism, but various forms of patriarchal capitalism. This gendered system sets up all sorts of unattainable goals and maybe some boys realise this but cannot articulate what’s going on or their reaction to it?