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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I can’t tell if this is a troll or serious.

Unfortunately, I think they and the people agreeing with him are actually being serious. I wonder if this is something they picked up through their lived experience or if they're just stuck in some sort of bubble.

>"our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys." And these comments just strike me as strange especially in STEM. It's only recently that girls are being pushed towards this path, after decades of being actively pushed out and consistently told they are worse than their male peers.

If women underperform on something, society has spent and currently does spend a lot of effort trying to fix that. The goal is to make sure that women don't underperform on anything. If we phrase it differently, the issue becomes clear: The goal is to make sure that women perform better or equal in every aspect. Those attempts have been quite successful and here we are.

Now people are slowly waking up to the consequences, and it's clear that the trend is ever so slowly turning around.

I'll conclude by giving two examples to illustrate my point if you think I'm exaggerating. Both are from about 10 years ago. I honestly don't think it would happen the same today anymore. The first was that there was one (like a single) school where boys were somehow outperforming girls. They said in the press that it was weird because everyone knows it's usually the other way around and that it would be investigated what was wrong. The second was that there was a college entrance test (similar to sat) where men outperfomed women, and one of the criteria they had when redesigning it was closing that gap.

So for that second example, what questions were being asked, that men could consistently outperform women on? And doesn't removing those questions even the playing field?

For example, men watch a lot more sports than women (I don't know if this is true but for the sake of conversation let's just assume it to be the case). If that exam had questions that had a sports 'setting' then those who are most familiar with the sport would have an edge over those who don't. This isn't limited to just gender either. People from different cultures would also struggle if the 'common sense' in the question isn't something that they are familiar with.

I'd like to see which questions were removed and hear their justifications for it. This sounds like something that happened but the details got distorted into a simple take to push some form of agenda. "test makers are dumbing down questions so that women look better."

Do you happen to have historicals of the test you were looking at? The SAT results look pretty even from 2017-2022 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_226.10.a...

ACT point difference is even closer (~1 point difference each year) their site sucks but that data is from 1995-2010 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_155.asp

These are the two most popular college entrance exams and have longevity on their side.

I won't even begin to tackle the first point since there is just way too much that is unknown or anecdotal. I honestly do think you're either exaggerating and/or misinformed but if you can provide some sort of evidence to prove your point then I'm all ears. And I'm not saying this to discount your lived experience. You may truly have felt that the school system or various teachers really did want you to fail. If that's the case then you were done a disservice but the aggregate data just doesn't agree with you.

>The goal is to make sure that women don't underperform on anything. I'm really trying to be charitable on your intent but comments like these really make it difficult. If you look at the past couple of centuries, women have been treated as second class citizens. Their only duties relegated to being wives, mothers and homemakers. Not allowed to pursue intellectual pursuits despite being more than capable of doing so. The entire system was biased against them from the very beginning. Even when the laws gave them power to go after these new opportunities, culture continued to hold them back. The goal is and always has been to level the playing field, to reverse centuries of blatant sexism but if that sounds like 'setting up boys to fail'. Then I really don't know what to tell you.

I'm not saying the intentions were necessarily bad, just outlining how past perspectives and actions lead to the outcomes we are now observing.

The intentions weren't bad and the 'outcomes we are now observing' aren't bad either. Those changes were a net positive on society. There is still more work that needs to be done so that both boys AND girls have the same opportunities in school and have the freedom to pursue it without judgement. If some boys/men feel that a level playing field is setting them up to fail then I have zero sympathy, society doesn't need more second class citizens.

And the notion that boys are being set up to fail, especially by the school system is just ridiculous. In this day and age, students can post their questions and answers online. Any bias in grading can be quickly found out and if the issue is as broad and systemic as you are claiming then this will be incredibly trivial to prove. There would be millions of students complaining.

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