You don't consider girls being encouraged to succeed by their teachers and society at large while boys are not (a common situation in schools today, and a stark contrast to as recently as 10-15 years ago) as "endemic, institutional sexism"?
Or you haven't seen any evidence that this difference in societal attitudes is causative in better female school performance?
I can accept the latter, though there is in fact experimental data that suggests that boys do better with more encouragement...
Even the people holding the strings are puppets.
>I haven't seen any evidence that it's the result of endemic, institutional sexism against men
Apathy is its own form of sexism, which is to say: if selecting based on sex indicates educational disparity, then sexism must exist somewhere in the system.
>(For productivity reasons, this'll be my last comment on the subject, but I'll read your response if there's one— Just wanted to say I dug the civil exchange of ideas. Stay cool.)
Same here--thanks to you as well! I especially appreciate that you qualify this as civil; I know I go for the throat sometimes, and sometimes I think HN wants us to be more polite than effective, if you follow.
But I have to say, at this point I'm not sure what you want from me. I'm advocating for the rights of other people according to my personal idea of what's right. That women are outperforming men in school is worrying from an educational standpoint, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's the result of endemic, institutional sexism against men— unlike that which evidence suggests still exists towards women, which, while very much improved in the last decades, is still real and dangerous. If someone thinks that it's gone because of one metric in which women have surpassed men, then I'm going to speak out against that. I'm going to speak out against that pretty loudly.
I'd be saying the same thing if someone thought that Obama being President means that no one ever gets stopped and searched for DWB, or that gay marriage in New York means no one in high school is going to call someone else a faggot until they kill themselves. We've come a long, long way. We're not done.
(For productivity reasons, this'll be my last comment on the subject, but I'll read your response if there's one— Just wanted to say I dug the civil exchange of ideas. Stay cool.)