8 EDUCATION
We (hopefully) all know by now that neither gender is more innately intelligent than the other. So what would you expect to see if you looked at graduation rates across the country? A level playing field? Not quite.Studies show a vast gender gap opening up in education; but not in the way your sexist great-grandpa would have supposed. In pretty much all measures of attainment, we men are trailing women by an embarrassing margin. Sixty percent of all Bachelor’s degrees in America are held by women with similar numbers in Britain. While this is great for the sisterhood, it leads to some shocking social consequences. The youth unemployment rate for black male dropouts, for example, now stands at over fifty percent, a number so large it’s unreal. So what’s causing this destructive trend?Well, you can put that down to our good old masculine expectations again. According to the LA Times, only about half of all boys expect to work in well-paid professional jobs when they grow up, compared to nearly three quarters of girls. In other words, we’re somehow teaching young boys that either learning is ‘girl’s stuff’, or that there’s no point in being aspirational. Either way, it’s a hell of dumb lesson.