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One part is that teachers are almost exclusively female in the early grades which sends an unequivocal message that education is a girl thing. Put that together with broken family structures and it means many kids grow up with no male role models which is harmful for boys and girls in different ways.

Unfortunately it will be another 30 years before the 'girls are disadvantaged in education' trope dies, but bad ideas like phlogestion and trickle down economics take a long time to die.

It's a much deeper problem than sending a message. Teachers are systematically sexist: they give girls better test scores than boys and treat them differently. This effect is so strong it's been studied and shows up statistically:

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

"I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school"

It also shows up in more anecdotal stories like this one, in which a teacher banned boys from playing with Lego whilst letting girls do it:

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/31/kindergarten-teache...

The problem is one of feminism. It's not that boys have somehow inexplicably got dumber over the past decades, it's that women have become radicalised and collectively concluded that it's OK to express explicit biases towards other women on the basis of gender, because progress.

I always thought it's weird how minimal favoritism + leniency can improve someone's performance, and over a long time, massively improve it. This works especially well on kids (but also on colleagues), while outright favoritism destroys any intelligence benefit faster than Facebook does.

> I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away.

Have to disagree; the sort of reading discussed in that study isn't conducive to positive educational outcomes, but rather is more of a social activity. (Yeah, I know reading is often thought of as a solitary activity, but reading fictional narratives may be better understood as desynchronized socialization.)

Don't get me wrong, children can enjoy an educational advantage from pleasure-reading early on, as an introduction to how to read. But after that, pleasure-reading is a largely wasteful activity, at least in terms of educational advancement.

Further advancement in reading may come from learning to read expanded English -- including [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), $\mathrm{\TeX}$, `(string)"source code"`, M+A+T+H, technical texts, diagrams, schematics, etc. -- but it's unlikely that reading young-adult narratives provides the reader with any significant advantages. In fact, I suspect that it's likely to correlate with negative educational outcomes.

David Epstein's Range has a great viewpoint on this.

He states that there are Kind Learning Environments. These are places like golf, chess, or classical piano. Here, the feedback is quick, the goals are clear, and relative ranking is knowable. To excel in these environments, it is all about drill-and-kill. Repetition and stick-hours are the name of the game.

This is in contrast to Unkind Learning Environments. These are places like tennis, business, or jazz. In the unkind world feedback is harder to come by, goals are unclear, and relative ranking is often not knowable. To excel in an unkind environment, Epstein states that you have to be an information grazer. Getting as many viewpoints and mental schemas as possible is the best way forward in an uncertain world.

Epstein's book goes much more into depth on this and has many very memorable examples. It's on Bill Gate's best books of 2020 list, despite being published in 2019.

So, I think that having more reading of any sort is then better for unkind environments, as it is a method of information grazing. Even terse dime-novels will often expose you to new ways of thinking, a new word, or a new idea. Though not the best method of information grazing (whatever that may be), it matters what boys replace it with, if anything. If they replace it with the kind learning environments of CoD or WorldofTanks, then that is not as good. If they replace it with foreign films and TV, that may be just as good.

Why is it difficult to get feedback at tennis? Also wouldn't the reasoning imply that the gender that reads more shd be better at business?

Epstein goes into this better in the book, but from what I (a non tennis player) can tell, it's that it is mostly a mental game and not a physical one, at least once you achieve the baseline fitness and skill. Again, I don't play tennis so I am simply parroting here.

I would think that any person that reads broadly should be better at business or other unkind learning environments, all other things being equal. Unfortunately, at least in most of the world's business environments I know of, when it comes to gender all other things are very much not equal.

It seems more likely that a third variable is effecting both reading amount and education performance for boys.

A shot in the dark guess could be that the attention industry (and the ad industry in general) is better at targeting boys grabbing them away from both homework and at home reading at a greater scale then the other genders.

I don't agree. You can learn to read complicated schematics and technical texts in a vocational/technical high school; I don't think they are linked to educational achievement as much as people think. Disclosure: I am an ex-voc tech student; most of the people who would go on to higher education beyond it were the ones who were bad at their trades and mismatched, and they were mostly female with some exceptions. (I chose it because i was fiercely bullied in junior high, and wanted to avoid the students who would go on to the college prep high school.)

You definitely need to learn to read schematics and technical texts to acquire an advanced education. It's basic literacy in academic and professional contexts; being unable to read prevents one from communicating and is a serious impediment to learning.

It is mentioned in the article, but I also have seen this anecdotally.

How often do school libraries have things boys want to read? In high school, even among those who did read, very few of us ever used the library because it mostly had fantasy novels, fiction, etc. My friend group wanted to read about history and economics, topics not really covered.

Supply side is an issue, but I don't think it explains everything. I think also some problems are that boys and men only like to read nonfiction and are too hyperactive to sit still.

Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all? We'd think it absurd right? But for some reason the idea men shun fiction is seemed as a truism. And if people would say "oh boys are too energetic, they can't sit still for a movie" we'd think they are nuts.

I'm not sure how it happened. I wish someone would research how this idea came into dominance

> Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all?

I couldn't find any research on this, but it would not surprise me if viewership skewed towards men for documentary.

Your school library was mostly fiction? That's bizarre. Our school library probably had more books under the 500 section alone (pure science) than it had fiction. I went to the public library for fiction.

And academic "performance" is often regurgitation.

Remember that "intelligence" is tied to success on standardized tests, at least in the view of educational administration, because that is the alpha and omega of getting funding and keeping your job.

Maybe I'm a bit out-of-touch with modern juvenille fiction but surely it wasn't that long ago that Rick Riordan was a bestseller?

There have been modern kids authors that focus on boys: Darren Shan's vampire series, Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider books, Rick Riordan, the Artemis Fowl series, etc. Jon Scieszka did his Time Warp Trio books for example. Dav Pilkey did Captain Underpants and various other series. There's the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and more.

However, the massive bulk of the market ends up being targeted towards women. It's something where you'd need to actually look on shelves for, as there's a weird dynamic where in female-dominated markets or places, you have male "figurehead" things while the rest of the market is dominated by and caters to women.

I noticed this in Christian fiction ironically. You will see a big author like Ted Dekker doing his spiritual action adventure/fantasy/mild horror for a wide audience, but the huge bulk of the books are historical/amish/mystery romance aimed at women, to the point where no male alternatives exist. Even the small religious science fiction market is female dominated soft romantic sf.

In this case it's milking established demographics, as the religion itself has a mild demographics issue (not enough men.) But go look at a young adult shelf sometime; even superhero books feature women protagonists and are targeted to them now.

When I was in elementary and middle school (early 2010s) his books were very popular. I remember reading Percy Jackson & the Olympians and later The Kane Chronicles and The Heroes of Olympus.

From personal experience, Rick Riordan's series had similar interest levels between girls and boys but later series (Hunger Games, House of Night, Fault in Our Stars) did skew towards girls. My reading also fell off as I got older so I'm sure I wasn't as in touch with what my peers were reading.

The main problem with fiction for children and young adults is that there just isn't enough of the good stuff. Rick Riordan is popular, and he has written many books, but an avid reader can get through everything he's written in one summer.

I'm not too worried about YA fiction specifically (as compared to children's fiction), since a distinction between quality "YA fiction" and quality "fiction" is less of an issue today (I feel like there used to be a sense of certain content being inappropriate for YA, but browsing a the local bookstore's YA section makes me think that's mostly gone).

> A big issue is that boys read less than girls overall.

Disagree. If you love to read fictions, doesn't help you at all to read tech books unless you're in it.

My hunch is, it is related with puberty. Biologically boys hit puberty late while that time girls are already on the way being matured. So it could be more about distractions during puberty. (But I am not expert in this field, need proper data to validate), May be it will be good to increasge age criteria for boys to attend school like marriage.

Another related point is, incentives in puberty. Simple thing like being good in sports make you popular in crowd. So it is more important to have proper incentives for boys for studies.

> Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more

Disagree. Many boys are in comics, manga, sci-fi reading than classic and fictions. In my experience, where academic curriculum is more focused on memorization boys trail behind. But they do good in competative exams where analytical questions play big role.

> Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts

This is somewhat true, specifically in states. One of the reason behind it is, marketing agencies started to target teen-age girl group heavily for whatever reasons recently.