The New Gender Gap
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THE NEW GENDER GAP
This article talks about the educational, environmental, and social gap that has been
created because girls are becoming a bigger part of the world today. It starts out by discussing a class of 2003 that had voted in their high school leaders. Everyone had voted in a male as senior class president. But after taking office, he quickly instructed all of the female members that he was the one calling all of the shots. Once the girls realized they out numbered the boys, they quickly impeached him and voted in a girl as class president.
From the beginning of time women have been told they need to do their job, which was bearing children, taking care of the house as well as tending to their husband. That became an education base for teachers. Except this all changed when women took the place of their husband at work while they went off to war in World War I. A movement started to take place. Soon you started to slowly see women working. Mothers, caregivers, and educators began to make girls see that the opportunities for growth was great, and all they had to do was grab it. With each achievement a woman made, others praised them. The drive for women to succeed only became so great that more emphasis has been put on females, which leave the male gender lacking. It is shown there are 133 girls getting their BAS for every 100 boys, a number that is expected to grow to 142 women 100 men by the year 2010. While girls have better grades, are more thorough in their essays, take tougher classes and present better qualifications in an application process, men seem to be declining in the workforce, as well as decreasing their right to vote. It was proven that Presidential votes among men have fallen from 72% to 53%, which is twice the rate of decline among women. Even as girls are eagerly working their way to the honor roll at graduation, boys are more likely to be bulking up in weight rooms, playing games such as Playstation, or downloading music. All the while he is 30% more likely to commit murder and six times likely to kill himself. Universities and research centers sponsored scores of teacher symposiums centered on girls. “All of the focus was on girls, all grant money and university programs were to get girls interested in science and math,” says Steve Hanson, principal of Ottumwa High School. “There was no similar actions for reading and writing for boys.” When boys were asked, some said that schools have become boy-bashing laboratories. The gender gap also has a history of expectations for boys. In 1970 boys were more likely to receive a college degree. Today that anticipation has decreased dramatically. There is even a sense, included among the privileged families, that todays boys are a sort of payback generation. The one that has to compensate for the advantages given to males in the past. Over all a new world has opened up to girls and an effort must be made to boost boys to raise their interest and expectations.
How the decline of boys interest affects our culture today depends on how you look at it. From a boys first day of school, he is two years behind a girl in reading and writing. Yet he is expected to learn at the same rate and in the same way as a girl. The growing educational and economic imbalance could create social upheaval, alter family finance, and create empty working families. Men are dropping out of the labor force, fatherhood, and life in