NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: TV shows like ‘Young Sheldon’ disguise a scary truth about boys today.
These TV characters represent an extreme, but it’s one that’s resonating with the American public: Boys are increasingly feeling left out and left behind. In a world that is increasingly dependent on communication skills and collaborative work — skills that girls seem to master more easily — boys are becoming adrift.
For their TV counterparts, things eventually turn out well in business and in love. Extreme smarts, it seems, can make up for a lot of social problems. For average boys in America, it is increasingly hard to navigate today’s educational and professional worlds. Schools, as many have noted, seem like hostile environments to them. From zero-tolerance policies that discipline boys who turn their thumbs and forefingers into guns to reading lists that are devoid of adventure to playgrounds that are built to minimize risk to the dramatic reduction in recess time, there seems to be fewer outlets for boys’ energies or imaginations. Which may be why they are diagnosed with ADHD at twice the rate of girls.
Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “The War Against Boys,” predicted that “the gender gap favoring girls is threatening to become a chasm.” That appears to be coming true. In a recent piece in the Atlantic, Amanda Ripley writes, “Wherever girls have access to school, they seem to eventually do better than boys. In 2015, teenage girls outperformed boys on a sophisticated reading test in 69 countries — every place in which the test was administered. In America, girls are more likely to take Advanced Placement tests, to graduate from high school and to go to college, and women continue their education over a year longer than men.”
Boys graduate from high school at lower rates. They make up only 43 percent of college graduates. And they are outnumbered by women in graduate school — 135 women for every 100 men. The results are obvious in our workforce, where there are at least 7 million prime-age men who have simply dropped out.
Colleges and universities in particular seem to place more value on social skills — participation in extracurricular activities, leadership in school groups — as well as on “executive function,” the ability to manage and organize many tasks, rather than just being very good in one area of study. When David Brooks coined the term “Organization Kid” while watching kids in elite colleges, he was describing a skill set that is much more common in girls.