Thursday, October 27, 2011

Are men imploding?

Manly Thor's day special
I got a response to one of my posts the other days saying just that. The thing is the commenter thought he was agreeing with me when my point was very much the opposite.

Men are not imploding.

Now I should acknowledge that it is entirely possible that men could collectively implode. Perhaps estrogen from birth control pills in the water system is turning us into a bunch of losers but it is extremely unlikely.

Here's a lesson in how statistics can be deceiving. Have a look at this Bell curve from a site I won't identify for a moment.


Now here is some extra detail: there are more men than women in the low performers and there are more men than women in the high performers.

Perhaps you are thinking but I haven't told us what the graph is a measurement of? It doesn't matter. Unless we pick something that boys just don't do much, say skipping, boys will tend to predominate at the top and the bottom levels of performance. (The actual graph above was used to make a point about teacher performance. I used to work with a program that awarded top teachers. Even though women outnumbered men in teaching by a large margin, there always was more men than women in the very top performers that were awarded each year.)

If, for example, you pick a random group of 3000 seventeen-year-olds, and make them all do a challenging math test, there will be more boys than girls in the hundred worst performers and there will be more boys than girls in the hundred best performers. Men are always more likely to be on the extremes.

So any study that focuses on failure can easily be made out to make it look like men and boys are in trouble. If you focus on only the very top performers, on the other hand, it will look like the system is unfair to women. Any field where competition is really tough (think CEOs) or where there are stringent entrance requirements that are applied neutrally (think firefighters) will be dominated by men.

Now imagine what happens that if we do the mathematics comparison as above but we simply go on the grades these kids get as opposed to testing them. If the grading system is fair, you will get the same result. If there is grade inflation you will have a system where average performers are given top marks and that is going to shift the balance such that the men who usually stand out at the top of the system won't anymore. And that is what is happening in high schools and universities as well as in employment fields where merit is being devalued in favour of other considerations.

So, no, men are not imploding. What is happening is political. We live in a society that has taken equality of result to be an important goal rather than equality of treatment. That has tended to bias some aspects of our society (think universities) against men. We also love in a society where the greatest job growth has been in fields where individualism and self-reliance are discouraged.

Neither of those things can be sustained for very long so they won't be.

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