Man, oh, man, girls are beating boys

By Daniel Akst

Newsday

The latest round of test results are in for America’s shoolchildren, this one from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and there is the usual good and bad news.

American kids, for example, are doing better in math than they were in 1990. On the other hand, the gap between white and minority students remains large — except for Asian students, who got their own category this year and beat everybody.

But I noticed something that never seems to change much. Although girls do about as well as boys on the math part of the test, the boys lag badly in reading. On the fourth-grade test this year, girls outscored boys by 7 points. By eighth grade this gap had widened to 9 points. This is part of an unfortunate pattern.

As Hannah Rosin wrote last year in the Atlantic Monthly, “Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools — for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women.”

Hot commodity

None of this is such bad news at my house, which I share with a couple of high school boys who read plenty. Since colleges know that letting their gender ratio get too far out of whack will repel girls and boys alike, guys like my sons are a hot commodity on campus — in every sense of the word.

But if the future looks like paradise for a couple of nerdy boys, it looks a lot less bright for the society in which they will live. In economic terms, men have been doing horribly for years, and their economic prospects — particularly for blue-collar men — are increasingly bleak.

Brookings Institution researchers Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney reported in March that among males who’d graduated from high school only 57 percent hold a full-time job, versus 79 percent in 1970. They add, taking account of all men, not just those with full-time jobs, “the median wage of the American male has declined by almost $13,000 after accounting for inflation in the four decades since 1969 (a reduction of 28 percent).”

The economic downturn hit such men especially hard, devastating employment in construction, the one traditionally male bright spot during the past decade, as well as manufacturing, a field in which jobs have been dwindling for years. The impact of this long-run man-cession is rippling harmfully through society. The diminished earnings power of blue-collar men is a major factor in family instability, for example, which is surely no blessing for children. It also exacerbates income inequality and darkens the nation’s fiscal picture, since men who earn little can’t pay much in taxes. It’s bad for women, too, who could once count more reliably on male earnings in raising kids — and who will face tougher competition than ever for a desirable mate.

Small difference

Men still outearn women, but mostly because men work longer hours, accept more dangerous and inflexible work, and choose more lucrative careers. Without those factors, the difference is just a few percentage points. Men are also more likely to be jobless.

It’s easy to over-extrapolate from current trends. Personally, I am a little dubious about the future economic value of formal education. Auto mechanics and plumbers, whose work can’t be exported to China or India, may be the job-market royalty of tomorrow.

Still, the world has changed in ways that have seriously impaired male earning power, rendering their size and strength of little value compared to the skills — such as reading — at which women excel.

Daniel Akst, a columnist for Newsday, is the author of “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess” from Penguin Press. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.