In September of 2021, an article in the Wall Street Journal, “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College,” bemoaned an ongoing drop in college enrollment for young American men. “In the next few years,” the Journal wrote, “two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues.” This development isn’t new—women have been earning more college degrees than men since the mid-1980’s—but as of 2019, women have made up a majority of the college-educated work force for the first time in American history. We could soon be looking at a vastly different economic and educational environment in the next decades if these trends continue. In fact, the article tells us, some colleges have begun to favor men’s applications over equivalent (or slightly more favorable) applications from women in order to balance the scales.
Since its publication, the Wall Street Journal article has been highly publicized, reposted and responded to; the New York Times issued a rejoinder within the week, reminding us that, despite current educational and economic trends, men still fare better than women financially. This is an important point, certainly, but as Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution Fellow, said in in The Atlantic Monthly’s response on the gender gap, “If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.”
The Atlantic article focuses on an important question: is the problem that the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up with the changing world? Here, I would like to add: does this ideology of masculinity include ideas of who is supposed to pay attention, especially to bookkeeping tasks like remembering to do assignments, study for tests or fill out college applications? That is: are we teaching girls and young women that it is their job to pay attention to work, which may in the past have been considered secretarial (and may in the past have been overseen by a mother or female teacher) while we do not do the same for boys and young men? And if so, are young men suffering the consequences of this gendering of attentional skill?
High school girls outpace boys educationally at almost every marker—from literacy skills to grades to graduation rates. But, while these factors influence college performance, the imbalance in admissions does not stem solely from from these differences. In fact, the imbalance in college arises, in great part, from an application imbalance. In other words, far fewer boys are applying to college—girls submitted nearly a million more Common Applications than boys in the 2021-22 school year. And for those boys who do apply, according to the WSJ article, the applications are frequently incomplete. According to representatives at Baylor University, now 60% female, “girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered” (emphasis mine).
Very interestingly, Baylor’s solution to this conundrum is to turn to—who else?—women. They’ve initiated a “males and moms communication campaign,” in which they ask mothers to remind young men to turn in all the components of their applications. This begs a very interesting question: why the mother? Why not the father or another male figure? Or why not simply the gender-neutral term “parent” or “guardian?” Why is it a female figure that needs to do the reminding, a female figure who needs to model the act of paying attention?
We see examples like this throughout articles on the gender gap. The WSJ article describes two major threats to young men’s education as “porn and videogames” without explaining why these distractions don’t also threaten young women’s attention. These assumptions are false. Girls also watch pornography. And they play video games at about equal numbers to boys. Assumptions about the attentional behaviors of young men and women seem to be based more on cultural mythology than neurological fact. An earlier Washington Post article describes the author’s female students taking notes while the male students stare out the window. The writer argues that this is because of differences in male brains (which, he argues, are not suited to sitting still and paying attention) and female brains (which, he argues, are). There’s not a lot of science to back this up.
There is much to be said about the differences, or lack thereof, between the male and female brain—but biology is certainly not all that’s at play here. There are some morphological and developmental differences between male and female brains, specifically during the late teens and early twenties, but it’s unclear how many of these changes are brought about by socialization and learning. This is to say, the concept of neuroplasticity— if you’ll forgive the quick gloss—teaches us that much of the shape of the brain is decided by how it is used over time, not how it was “born.” A person who plays the violin every day will have a brain shaped by that practice. So, too, might a person who is in the practice of note-taking or keeping a calendar, have a brain shaped by those practices. Not every brain can be trained to do everything, but gender seems to have very little impact on what brains can be trained to do (on the other hand, gender seems to have a great deal of impact on what brains are trained to do). Additionally, there appears to be more difference in learning styles within genders than between genders. All of this to say, as any professor will tell you, it is not impossible for young men to learn how to take notes or to pay attention to deadlines, and it’s insulting to young men (and to young people of all genders) to insist that this is the case.
Clearly, the gender gap is a multifaceted problem—one which cannot be attributed to only one cause. What I’m proposing here is a question about one possible factor in a complex web--but I think it necessitates research: are we teaching young women to pay attention, especially to tasks gendered as “female” and not teaching young men to do the same? What impact might this have on achievement, engagement, retention and learning for all genders, especially if women become more reluctant to do these tasks for boys and young men? And what can—and should—be done about this?
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