#dnaEdit: Gender roles reversed

A silent gender revolution is underway. A recent report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank, has underlined how gender profiles in education have dramatically reversed. Across rich and some poor nations, girls are doing better than boys in both school and university. So significant is the gender reversal that it has generated talk of a ‘boy crisis’ among policymakers. “It is a problem that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Until the 1960s, boys spent longer and went further in schools than girls, and were more likely to graduate,” observes The Economist. 

Not any longer. The present data shows girls outflanking boys in nearly every scholastic index. Boys lag girls in elementary and high school grades, trail in reading and writing. Teenage boys — almost 50% of them — are more likely than girls to fail a proficiency test in math, reading and science. That’s not all. Boys — more than girls — tend to be rapped for behavioural problems. And they are also more prone to repeat courses and even drop out of school altogether.

Whereas girls making rapid advances in education have gone on to dominate in the universities as well. From a position where men were a clear majority in universities a few decades ago, women’s enrolment has now increased twice as rapidly as men’s. The “feminisation of higher education”, according to The Economist, “was so gradual that it passed unremarked.”

To understand this gender disparity in behaviour and achievement in the classroom, one may need to locate boys and girls outside of the classroom. The average teenage girl spends more time doing homework than boys who trawl the Internet or play video games. More girls than boys read for pleasure. Disdainful of school and education, boys consider them a waste of time. This nonchalance towards education is particularly noteworthy now when jobs for uneducated men are becoming more and more difficult to come by. One of the reasons for the way boys are dealing with education could well lie in the prevalent social endorsement of masculinity — and the culture of “boys will be boys”. 

Worried by the continual slide in boys’ academic record, the OECD is now urging parents to discourage the anti-academic masculinity that has become popular. If the present trend continues, countries across the world may have to grapple with an alarmingly large number of under-educated men. 

Social changes in gender relations, on the other hand, have encouraged more and more women to enter higher education as well as the job market. Later marriage and childbearing — combined with contraception and lesser number of children — have facilitated larger numbers of women joining the workforce. There is no doubt that social churning has played a key role in turning traditional gender-roles on their head. Yet, last-mile hurdles still dog the achievement of gender equality. 

According to America PayScale, a company working with income data, women still earn less than men, even when equally or better qualified than them. For women, the return on the investment in a college degree is less than it is for men. In addition, the glass ceiling, even if breached occasionally in some sectors, has by and large remained intact. Across the board, women are still underrepresented in leading organisational posts. The old argument of attributing this under-representation to historic gender discrimination is no longer convincing. The striking gender-reversal underlined by the OECD report punches yet another hole in that archaic argument.