Updating the stuff for the German election. As noted: The Left Wing party is the strongest party among the youngest voters. However, our Nazis from the AfD are the second strongest. And looking into the exit polls by gender, it shows this:
Basically, the left wing party is so strong because of young women, but the AfD Nazis are so strong because of the young men.
And thinking of some of the studies I have read on BlueSky I cannot help but think about how young men do not want to go to university because that is a "girl thing". Just as those studies also found that it is not that "universities make you left wing", but rather "left wing people are more likely to go to university".
And of course we kinda know why this is. Because young boys spend too much time listening to those Joe Rogans, and Andrew Tates and what not. But I really kinda wonder how the fuck one can reach those kids.
I mean, we know also that those right wing and toxic masculinity shit stuff makes men unhappy. Because they are being told they need to reach this one ideal, that right now is pretty much impossible for them to reach.
An ingenious study explores grading bias against boys
By: Steve Stewart-Williams
Published: Mar 5, 2025
Do teachers exhibit gender bias when grading students’ work? If so, in which direction does the bias go? Are teachers more likely to favor boys or favor girls?
These are the questions explored in a fascinating 2020 paper by Camille Terrier, published in the Economics of Education Review. Terrier compared children’s marks on gender-blind national exams with non-blind marks given by their teachers. The findings revealed a persistent marking bias in favor of girls. Although the effect wasn’t huge, Terrier found persuasive evidence that the bias contributes to boys falling behind in school.
Below are some excerpts from the paper. You can read the whole thing here for free.
Background
Boys are increasingly falling behind girls at school. This disadvantage has important consequences: boys who fall behind are at risk of dropping out of school, not attending college or university, and/or being unemployed. In OECD countries, 66% of women entered a university program in 2009, versus 52% of men, and this gap is increasing. In Europe, 43% of women aged 30–34 completed tertiary education in 2015, compared to 34% of men in the same age range. Because this gap has increased by 4.4 percentage points in the last ten years, there is a growing interest in identifying its roots.
Method
I use a rich student-level dataset… that follows 4490 pupils from grade 6 until grade 11. To quantify teachers’ gender biases in math and French, I exploit an essential feature of the data: it contains both blind and non-blind scores. An external grader without knowledge of student’s characteristics provides schools with blind scores. These scores are presumably free of teachers’ biases. Teachers provide non-blind scores for in-class exams… This data allows me to study the effect of teachers’ gender biases on pupils’ progress, schools attended, and course choices.
Quantifying Teacher Bias
[D]espite the commonly held belief that girls are discriminated against, teacher biases favor girls…
Figs. 1 and 2 display the distributions of blind and non-blind French scores at the beginning of grade 6… [G]irls’ average score is 0.434 points higher than boys when the score is blind and 0.460 when it is non-blind.
[ Figs. 1 & 2. Test scores for each sex are standardized such that 0 represents the average score. ]
[T]he story is different in mathematics. Figs. 3 and 4 show that boys outperform girls when grades are blind, but the opposite is true when teachers assess their own pupils: girls’ average score at the beginning of grade 6 is 0.147 points lower than boys when the score is blind, but it is 0.170 points higher when the score is non-blind.
[ Figs 3 & 4. Test scores for each sex are standardized such that 0 represents the average score. ]
Knock-On Effects of Teacher Bias
This favoritism, estimated as 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…
For two classes where the achievement gap between boys and girls would be identical in 6th grade, quasi-randomly assigning a teacher who is 1 SD more biased against boys to one of the classes decreases boys’ progress in that class relative to girls by 0.123 SD in math and by 0.106 SD in French. Over the four years of middle school, teachers’ gender bias against boys accounts for 6% of boys falling behind girls in math…
Moving to other outcomes, I find that having a teacher who is one SD more biased in math increases girls’ probability of selecting a scientific track in high school by 3.6 percentage points compared to boys’. Teachers’ average bias in math reduces the gender gap in choosing scientific courses by 12.5%…
If teachers’ biases are mainly driven by statistical discrimination, we might expect end-of-year grades to be less biased (and the variance to be smaller) because teachers acquire information about students during the year. On the other hand, if teachers’ biases are mainly taste based, bias should not change over time.1 In that case, end-of-year in-class grades should produce similar bias variance than first-semester grades. The mean and variance of the bias are very similar at the beginning of the year and at the end, suggesting that gender favoritism is mainly taste based.
--
I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls in their evaluations. This favoritism
Abstract
I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls in their evaluations. This favoritism, estimated as 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. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school. Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys.
==
That is, biased marking puts individuals on a science track who would otherwise not qualify, while removing individuals who otherwise would qualify. This is the same situation as Affirmative Action, which artificially altered the natural/unbiased class composition, and which was struck down as unconstitutional.
Some years ago, the very accurate point was made that mean intelligence between males and female is the same, so there's no reason to think girls are any less capable than boys.
Now that the education gender gap has inverted, a common excuse for doing nothing is that, "girls are just smarter than boys." That is, we've pivoted from "all disparities are discrimination" to "these disparities are not just normal but good, ackshully," and we're being gaslighted to pretend we forgot that mean intelligence is the same, even though we've known for years that sex discrimination by teachers is a real thing.
A panel of prominent female scholars took to the stage recently at one of the nation’s most prestigious STEM universities to debate the fiercely contested topic of sexism in science.
“It’s 2025, not 1970,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, author and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who argued against the need to close an alleged gender gap in STEM.
“Look around,” Sommers said at the April 30 event. “The educational landscape has changed. Women have not merely closed gaps in key areas of STEM, they’re doing better than men.”
The debate, hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance and MIT Open Discourse Society, had the scholars debate the resolution: “We must close the gender gap in STEM.”
Systemic barriers prevent greater female involvement in STEM and must be torn down for women to enjoy financial independence and for America to maintain supremacy in an increasingly technological world, argued Pamela McCauley, dean of the School of Engineering at Widener University, and Jennifer Roecklein-Canfield, chair of the Department Chemistry and Physics at Simmons University, who took the affirmative position.
“As we enter into this new era of global competitiveness and artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, clean energy, and many other areas, every brain will count,” McCauley said.
“Closing this gender gap in STEM is a strategic necessity for the United States,” she added. “It will unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in economic growth, supercharge innovation and business success, and strengthen our national security. It will also secure America’s leadership in the global race for innovation and progress.”
Sommers, along with Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director for the Adversarial Collaboration Project, argued the alleged systemic barriers decried by McCauley and Roecklein-Canfield were abolished decades ago.
What differences remain in STEM fields result from differences in the aptitudes and interests of males and females, they said.
“One of the most robust and broadly true findings in psychology is that girls and women are relatively more interested in people and boys and men are relatively more interested in things,” Clark said.
“Women tend to be attracted to organic fields of study such as social sciences, humanities, biology, and medicine,” she said, “and men are relatively attracted to inorganic fields of study such as engineering and the physical sciences.”
“When educational and career opportunities opened to women decades ago, they made rapid progress and have surpassed men in the disciplines that interested them and [in] most disciplines, in fact,” Clark added.
Sommers cited how women currently make up the majority of college graduates, graduate degree recipients, biology and chemistry degree recipients, and medical students, while also completely dominating the social sciences.
The affirmative team did not attempt to refute these claims, but instead highlighted that men still make up the majority of students in mathematics, physics, engineering and computer science.
Clark acknowledged these disparities, but held that they were likely accounted for by men and women having different interests and making different choices regarding their academic and professional careers.
The reason women have not reached parity with men in physics and engineering, Clark said, is “not because sex barriers were held up in only these disciplines while they crumbled in all other disciplines, but because women on average have less interest in these disciplines.”
“Even among men and women in the top 1 percent of mathematical ability, where they all have the competence to pursue any discipline in STEM they want…women are still more interested in disciplines involving people,” she said.
Moreover, Clark said, “mathematically gifted women are also more likely than mathematically gifted men to also be verbally gifted – they’re more balanced, which is a typical female advantage.”
“These women,” Clark said, “are more likely to change their major – leaky pipeline – out of math and science into other disciplines.”
These choices, she said, should not be viewed as a deficiency in women nor as a societal tragedy that needs to be corrected.
Sommers at one point joked that this might “solve the mystery” of why her “mathematically precocious granddaughter” chose to study film.
Moving beyond the formal proposition of the debate, corollary topics were also discussed, such as why males are showing deficits in literacy, school attendance, college graduation, and workplace participation, as well as why certain segments of society do not seem to care.
“The gender equity movement deploys an unusual logic,” Sommers said. “Gaps favoring men, those are evidence of invidious discrimination. They demand massive attention, including national legislation. Gaps favoring women, no matter how large, no matter how momentous … those go unmentioned.”
Additionally, on multiple occasions, the negative side questioned whether the larger debate was about ensuring women have a fair opportunity to pursue careers in STEM or about achieving statistical parity in every STEM discipline, which Clark argued could only be achieved through “top-down social engineering that is a mix of soft coercion against women and illegal sex discrimination against men.”
The entire debate can be viewed on the MIT Free Speech Alliance YouTube page.
==
The gender gap in higher education is greater now than it was when Title IX - which demonstrably didn't actually change anything - was passed.
The fact that our primate cousins exhibit the same sex-typical things-vs-people preferences and behaviors as we do means that trying to act like humans alone are blank slates whose tendencies, behaviors and preferences are shaped by an invisible conspiracy-without-conspirators of brainwashing rather than millions of years of reproductive and survival pressures is as much supernatural evolution-denial as Noah's magic zoo boat.
Fundamentally, advocacy is about helping others, rather than helping yourself… to look good.
And my god, I know, the things I post on this page, certainly do not look good.
No, these issues will not look good on your social media feed, I doubt such discussions will make you many friends at parties either or win you top marks at your next class presentation.
There are no prizes, brand deals, coupon codes, or rounds of applause at @thetinmen.
No book deals. No invites to speak at conferences. Or photo ops with politicians.
You will not be thanked, likely shunned, and will probably find yourself uninvited to that next social occasion.
But these issues are real, and incredibly important.
That’s what advocacy is.
It’s about doing good, not looking good.
And the cult of wokeness has clearly lost sight of this.
Self-serving, self-centred, and painfully virtuous, the SJW guardians of equality have skipped past the area of men and boys' advocacy; clearly unwilling, or uninterested in examining their own failures, or in accepting their own portion of accountability, and would rather keep the self-aggrandising circle jerk going a little longer.
It is a mess.
A backward situation where the people who are doing harm, are not only unaware of said harm, but actually believe they are part of the solution, each of them the hero of their own story.
So, who will stand up to the cult of wokeness run amok?
Who will put their head above the parapet?
Because sadly, if change for men and boys is to arrive, many more of us will have to be sacrificed upon the altar of social justice.
Mary Curnock Cook:
https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/head-of-ucas-expresses-concern-as-recent-data-reveals-gender-gap-in-uk-higher-education-is-widening-a6799081.html
If your issues need to be spoken about in hushed tones behind closed doors, you're not the "oppressor." If you can demonize and shut down other people by calling them a name or accusing them of some imagined bigotry, you're not "marginalized," you're the hegemony.
For some reason, we're not supposed to notice this, but it's indisputably true. Yes, I see you.
When you get angry, call me a name or expect me to apologize for posting this kind of information, you're telegraphing and admitting that you believe you have the cultural and societal power to do so, and you're not the powerless victim you pretend you are.
Women today are 15% more likely to get an undergraduate degree than men – just one statistic revealing how millions of young men today are s
By: Lee Cowan
Published: Nov 12, 2023
At the University of Vermont not long ago, it was move-in day for the class of 2027. About a thousand incoming freshman were meeting their roommates, finding their dorm rooms, and getting settled on campus. At first glance one might have thought this was an all-women's college – 62% of this year's class are women, a gender gap that has earned Burlington, Vt., a nickname: Girlington.
"You see six or seven women for every three or four men," said UVM's vice provost for enrollment Jay Jacobs. His job is all about student diversity, and these days the male/female divide is now part of that equation. "Sure, I thought about racial and ethnic diversity," Jacobs said. "Sure, at a public flagship in the state of Vermont, I've thought about geographic diversity. Never gender diversity like that. That's where we are."
UVM is hardly an outlier. Nationwide, women make up almost 60% of college undergraduates.
In 1972, when Title IX was passed to help improve gender equality on campus, men were 13% more likely to get an undergraduate degree than women; today, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, it's women who are 15% more likely to get a degree than men.
"We have a bigger gender gap today than we did when we passed laws to help women and girls; it's just flipped," said Richard Reeves, a former Brookings Institution senior fellow. He says, no one really has been able to explain why so many men are so absent in higher education. What is known is the gender disparity starts as early as kindergarten, where girls are just generally the stronger sex in academics.
Reeves said, "If you look at high school GPA, and those who are getting the best grades in high school, two-thirds of them are girls. Those with the lowest grades, two-thirds of them are boys."
It's been theorized girls and women today are just fulfilling their destiny – that once the limitations on their achievements were lifted, they soared. Reeves, who's just launched the American Institute for Boys and Men, fears that things have changed so quickly, it's left many boys and men struggling to catch up, not just in the classroom, but at work and at home, too.
"What does it mean to be a successful man today? That was a question that was pretty easy to answer a generation or two ago," said Reeves. "But actually, what is the answer today? A lot of these guys just don't know."
In short, he says millions of boys and men don't understand how or where they fit anymore, and their reaction is to generally disconnect. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, men's participation in the labor market has dropped more than 7% in the last 50 years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 21% of men report binge drinking (almost double the rate of women), and men account for nearly 80% of suicide deaths (four times the rate for women).
Reeves said, "The two most commonly-used words by suicidal men to describe themselves were useless and worthless."
But even to suggest there's some kind of male crisis is perilous these days, said Reeves: "Merely raising it will cause people to eye roll, and say, 'Really? Ten thousand years of patriarchy, and now you're worried?'"
After all, women still earn only about 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man (according to Pew Research Center). Only a fraction (10.4%) of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. And women make up just a quarter (28%) of the members in Congress, and (so far) zero U.S. presidents.
Those numbers leave UVM students Sarah Wood and Maxine Flordeliza pretty skeptical that men are barely treading water. "I think it's very interesting that there is kind of a big fuss about – not a fuss, but it's a conversation that people are having," said Wood. "But I don't think it's necessarily a problem?"
"I think that just the fact that the playing field has been a bit more evened out, shouldn't be the reason as to why men don't really know where they fit," Flordeliza said.
"Sure, do we need to do more to encourage more women into politics and into board rooms? Yes," Reeves said. "But meanwhile, can I not see that one group is struggling here, and another group is struggling there? And if I can't do that, we're in really deep trouble."
And those in the most trouble, he says, are working class and African American boys and men.
Von Washington Jr., executive director of community relations with The Kalamazoo Promise in Michigan, said, "Before it used to be, you graduated high school, 'Goodbye, you're on your own.' A lot of people said, 'Hey, you're outta my house.' Or 'It's time for you to go.' But we're understanding now those supports need to continue."
The Kalamazoo Promise program offers high school graduates in Kalamazoo scholarships covering up to the entire cost of in-state college tuition. The impact? The number of Kalamazoo women getting a college degree has increased by about 45%. But the number of Kalamazoo men getting college degrees didn't budge.
"We're working with them, we're talking with them," said Washington. "We're trying to find out what is it that, even with this opportunity, you have some of the same challenges as someone in another community that doesn't have this opportunity."
One solution that seems to be working is making sure those men who are struggling have a place to freely admit they're struggling. Staffers with The Promise are tracking down those men still eligible for the scholarship, finding out why they never used it, and helping them get what they need to finally do it – like Daniel Jaffari. "I just started wandering around in life and doing random jobs, getting tired of doing random jobs," said Jaffari. "And now I'm here!"
He joined with dozens of other men at what the Promise was calling their Males of Promise event. Another participant was Denis Martin, who graduated high school six years ago. He said, had the Promise not tracked him down, he might not have realized he was ready for something more. "I feel like now I have the discipline to be in a five-year program or a four-year program," he said. "As a kid I feel like I was still bouncing off the walls, and my mind didn't know what exactly was out there."
Back at UVM, administrators have changed their marketing and communication strategies to reach out to men, especially those who might not think they want to go to college at all. The college is also hiring a diversity coordinator to focus specifically on helping men.
Jacobs said to Cowan, "The world is built for people like you and me to succeed, so why do we need to help men succeed here on our campus even more? But I think once people start to understand the nuances and challenges that we're talking about here today, people understand that all students need support."
UVM junior Lucas Roemer doesn't see it as a sort of affirmative action – putting the finger on the scale for men. He sees it as a way to help anyone who's been hanging on and feeling left out. "I think there's ways to promote both femininity and masculinity on campus equally well," he said. "I think there's definitely a path forward that could be beneficial to everybody."
The coordinator of the Men and Masculinities Program will be housed in the Women & Gender Equities Center – ironic to some. But it's also a recognition that men's problems can co-exist with those of women. "You lift the edges up, the center will be lifted up as well," said Jacobs. "And here, the edges include men."
It's the kind of reaction to the very real problems of boys and men that Richard Reeves says needs to be the rule, and not the exception: "This is not a made-up crisis of masculinity. This is an actual hard fact. There is real suffering here, and if we don't address real suffering, then what are we here for?"
==
Let's address a couple of throat-clearing, hand-wringing statements the author inserted - or perhaps, was obliged to insert - to apologize for the rest of the article:
After all, women still earn only about 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man (according to Pew Research Center).
The key word is "earn." No serious economist takes the gap seriously, as it's accounted for by hours worked, maternity leave, choice in occupation, changes to occupation, length of tenure, tendency for overwork, and dozens of other variables. Not the "goddidit" of "tEh PaTrIaRcHy." The Equal Pay Act was introduced 60 years ago in the US, and any legit complaints of unfair pay are actionable.
Only a fraction (10.4%) of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. And women make up just a quarter (28%) of the members in Congress, and (so far) zero U.S. presidents.
This is called the Apex Fallacy, or more formally, the Ecological Fallacy.
Ecological Fallacy
(also known as: ecological inference fallacy)
Description: The interpretation of statistical data where inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inference for the group to which those individuals belong.
For starters, male variability is greater than female variability in a number of ways. You'll find far more men at both the higher and lower ends - 80% of homeless are men, 80% of suicides are men, majority of unemployed are men - than for women. If you want to talk about the president, be prepared to also talk about the homeless, unemployed and suicides.
And secondly only 45 people have ever been the US President. This includes no atheists, no Muslims, no Hindus, no openly gay, no Asians, no Hispanics, no trans. No electricians, no plumbers, no mobile app developers, no chefs, no janitors have ever been the president. And only one nominally black (half and half) president. It omits that 51% of voters are women. If women wanted a president based on her being a woman, they would easily vote one in. They have not. So perhaps ask women how they decide who to vote for. If that feels like a stupid question to ask them, then it's a stupid argument to make.
As well as the fact the 2016 runner-up and the current second-in-line to an 80 year old president are both women, both beating out men and women for those positions. Being unsuccessful is also a part of equality, and something hundreds of unsuccessful male candidates have had to accept.
And those in the most trouble, he says, are working class and African American boys and men.
It's disturbing that people can't care about half of the population without framing it as, well, if you help men and boys out, then you'll help black men and boys. Which is like saying "you have to take the good with the bad." You should want to help people who need help because they need help.
This topic really causes the sociopaths to come out of the woodwork and into the light.
While it may be true that for every additional $10,000.00 in annual income makes you 2% more likely to vote republican, it may also be true that every book you read makes you 1% more likely to vote democrat.
Bridging the AI Gap
#learning #ai, #artificialintelligence #elderly #reality #fake #learning #education #zsoltzsemba #digital #innovation #mentalhealth
How Older Generations Can Keep Pace with the AI Revolution
Listen up, folks! We’ve talked about outdated teaching methods and the need for digital innovation in education. Now, let’s tackle another pressing issue: how middle-aged and older people can keep up with the lightning-fast world of AI. Trust me, it’s not just a young person’s game anymore.
The AI Learning Curve: It’s Steep, But Not…
