I do not understand how this achievement gap, as you call it, actually matters or is holding men back when men hold most of the advanced degrees, and wealth in this society.
Well, at the moment women are earning more bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and yes, even Ph.Ds than men. That doesn't immediately erase a pre-existing gap among the older generations, but it does tell us that in the future we still won't have equality -- we'll have simply replaced one gap by another.
The goal really ought to be to start raising generation after generation of kids where boys and girls are equal in educational opportunity and achievement. We've thus far failed at that goal, and I don't truly understand how someone can call themself "feminist" whilst thinking that's not something that "actually matters".
The prevalence of people who do call themself "feminist" and hold such beliefs is why I shelter in my warm, snug anonymity. Pointing out such contradictions does not typically result in calm discussions.
Because alleged "awareness campaigns" which focus on the least common risk factors (and there are many such campaigns) are a major annoyance to me: it's well worth reviewing the other study linked here:
And well worth reviewing other literature on results from screenings conducted quickly after a suspected assault.
Focusing on "date rape drugs" presents a vastly inaccurate picture of the real risk factors, not least because it creates an implicit assumption that alcohol and common recreational drugs are not the major risks, when they are far more common and plenty capable of reducing inhibitions or inducing unconsciousness all on their own.
Perhaps a good analogy would be to anti-terror campaigns: we are drawn toward the uncommon and dramatic events, and focus our attention and efforts on them, when far more could be accomplished from dealing with more common but less "flashy" risks.
(another example with rape is the focus on "stranger danger", which creates an implicit assumption of safety in the company of people one already knows, when in fact most rapes are perpetrated by someone known to the victim rather than by strangers who leap from behind bushes)
Firstly, the fact that you continue to use and insist on an overladen (with decades' worth of baggage) term that obscures what you're talking about, rather than just say what you claim to mean, is not an encouraging sign to me.
Secondly, if SRS is really a place where "serious conversations", as you put it, take place, then they certainly were adept at hiding it from me back when I frequented. After a while, one gets rather tired of the LOL DILDZ and LOL MRAS and wants to actually accomplish some good. Perhaps it's now a better place, but given how toxic the culture was I very much doubt it.
Imagine a patient with appendicitis who goes to a doctor, and the doctor just hands over a prescription for pain medication and says "no worries, this will make you feel better right away".
The pain meds will make the patient feel better for a bit, but really they're just masking a symptom of the underlying disease, which is still there. And sooner or later that appendix must be treated or got rid of, or the patient's going to die.
The pop-feminism practised in places like SRS, Jezebel, Tumblr, etc. is the social-justice equivalent of giving the appendicitis patient pain meds. "Smashing the patriarchy" will still leave the underlying disease of which it's a symptom (essentialism and roles assigned on the basis of gender) untreated.
Of course, that's an oversimplification, since the popular conception of "patriarchy" is deeply flawed in other ways (it lacks the explanatory power to say anything more glib than a 101-style "of course it hurts you too, sweetie" to men who are also being harmed by the deeper disease of essentialism, to take one example).
But I've long since given up trying to get this through to most people on internet boards, which is why I now do it under throwaway accounts.
Gender roles are pervasive, but are more obvious for women, who tend to get defined in terms of their wombs rather than any individual characteristics. Essentialists who hold traditional/conservative views don't really go much beyond that -- bearing and raising children is what women are for. Essentialists who hold progressive/liberal views try to hide this, but are still basically assuming that all women really want, deep-down inside, to be mothers above all other goals, so the discourse is all about how to do other things at the same time as that.
And that's a problem regardless of who's doing it or why. A developed civilization can remain viable without needing every woman to be a baby factory first and foremost, so why do we still push that attitude from basically all sides?
And although there probably always will be some life paths that are incompatible with having children, most of the ones that are incompatible today are not necessarily incompatible; they're only contingently incompatible as a consequence of how our society is structured (with its focus on career advancement and measuring one's worth in terms of titles and raw dollar values, and the resulting need to work insane hours). We could tear down all those assumptions, and have a society where everyone has the option of multiple ways to lead a fulfilling life, with raising children being one of those. But we don't do that, and even the popular incarnations of movements which claim to advocate for real equality of opportunity don't try.
I'm confused by what seems to be a non-sequitur. I'm talking about educational achievement, and there is an absolute, well-documented and undeniable gap there.
While it's true that within the highest ranks of Western society, gender plays a significant role, it's also true that socioeconomic background -- "class", for lack of a better word -- has a sunlight-to-candle relationship to gender in terms of getting into those ranks in the first place. Western society has drastically limited mobility right now, and the highest ranks are, unfortunately, more conservative in their views on gender.
And as an aside, there's a good example of a broader application of Kleinfeld's thesis there. Men dominate at the extreme high end, but also at the extreme low end. Efforts toward true equality need to address the root cause of that, which has more to do with rigid gender roles imposed on both men and women than with outright favoring of men over women.
Of course "feminism" isn't a unified lockstep movement.
But is there a thing, let's call it "pop feminism", which is widespread enough and whose adherents share enough basic ideas and positions, that we can usefully predicate things of it? Absolutely. And, well, that's the problem.
For example, when I see people use terms like "patriarchy" in earnest, I tend to grimace a bit. Not because I think they're crazy radical idiots, but because I think they're dangerously behind the times. The concept of unilateral patriarchy (i.e., a system in which most/all advantages based on gender accrue to men while most/all disadvantages based on gender accrue to women) is something like thirty years out of date at this point. We know now that the enemy is gender essentialism, which rigid, constrained roles and systemic advantages/disadvantages emerge from. We also know now that it's not a unidirectional oppression -- the resulting roles have aspects which harm people of all genders, and give at least some advantages to people of all genders.
But for every one person who gets this there are a thousand, or more, who just read sites like Jezebel, or feminism-related tags on Tumblr/Facebook, and end up imbibing pop-feminism ideas that are woefully out of touch with what we now actually know about gender in our society. What's worse, those ideas tend to reinforce essentialist gender roles rather than seek to overturn them.
The wage gap, currently being argued in the usual stupid way in another front-page thread, is actually a wonderful example of this. Research has shown, time and again, that much of the gap results from women being assigned, by society as a whole, a "childbearer/caregiver" role. And the consequences are clear. Women are more likely to work part-time, women who work full-time work fewer hours and less overtime, women actively seek out "child-friendly" workplaces, women start out with relative earning parity but it falls off a cliff once they have or start thinking about having children, a whole raft of stuff that adds up really really quickly.
A real solution to this would be to throw out the essentialism and the notion that child-rearing is "women's work". A real solution would seek to push women out of automatically assuming that bearing and raising children is a vitally important life goal, and would seek to push men out of automatically assuming their role doesn't involve caring for kids. A real solution would question basic ideas about what a successful life looks like and throw out any and all assumptions about "I am of this gender, therefore I should desire that"
But pop feminism doesn't do any of that. Instead it assumes that being a woman is mostly identical with wanting to have children and be their primary caregiver. So pop-feminist articles focus on how to "have it all", how to "balance" raising two kids with working 80-hour weeks at a law firm or running your own business, and argue that the important thing is to provide things like on-site day-care and generous maternal-leave policies to ensure women can keep right on performing the same rigid role they've had imposed on them for centuries.
What's more, we know these policies really don't work. There are countries which have implemented them, and they still see drastic drop-offs of women's lifetime earnings post-childbirth. What those policies do really well is make it easier to slide back into that role of "raising children is what I'm really supposed to do with my life".
But rather than attack the real problem, and ask the real, really hard questions about gender roles and how to overturn them, most people who identify as "feminist" just forward and share and retweet the same old pop-feminism drivel. And if you believe there isn't a relatively large group of people who identify that way and do exactly that, with relative ideological unity in terms of underlying assumptions, then I just don't know what Internet you're spending time on.
Books are tricky since the required funding/publicity tends to mean that only people with reactionary/highly-conservative viewpoints can break into that, and come with their own views on why we have this gap and how to address it. Mostly this is something you'll find in academic articles and published statistics.
The US Department of Education's June 2012 report on gender equity is a decent starting point:
What you'll find there is that the conventionally-assumed narratives don't hold; there's a lot more parity in enrollment for higher-level courses including sciences and many maths courses (and sometimes even a gap in the unexpected direction, as with girls outnumbering boys in AP science courses), for example. Girls are also more likely (and have been more likely for nearly 40 years) to be enrolled into programs for gifted/talented students, while boys are nearly 1.5 times more likely to be held back and forced to repeat a grade.
Judith Kleinfeld (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) has written a few articles -- though fully-cited and sourced versions are hard to find free -- arguing that a major component of perceived gaps in performance may also be from greater variability in boys; focusing only on achieving parity at the highest levels of achievement has meant that boys' original overrepresentation at the lowest levels has not only persisted but grown, and remains unaddressed.
A study at the University of Georgia published this year looked into why girls receive higher grades and lower standardized-test scores.
Girls and boys both persistently believe that girls "are cleverer, better-behaved and try harder than boys at school".
And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. But like I said, spend some time searching on relevant terms and you'll turn up a lot of research that may make you question what "everybody knows" about gender and education.
Sad that I need a throwaway account to talk about this, but such is life.
Spend some time doing searches on terms like "gender grading gap" and reading the recent research. What you find may surprise you, is consistent across multiple Western democracies, and can be summarized thusly:
* When assessment is left to teachers, there is a grading gap in favor of girls; girls receive grades that are inflated relative to their performance on non-teacher assessments. This seems to be partly due to teachers including factors like "engagement" or "focus" in the classroom, which is known to favor girls, and partly due to bias by teachers in favor of students of their own gender (and many teachers are women, meaning the effect is most pronounced for girls).
* By surprisingly young ages, girls in public school systems internalize "we're better than boys" and boys internalize "we're worse than girls" (one UK study estimated boys internalize this by age eight), producing a performance/effort gap similar to that associated with racial stereotypes.
* This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone. Boys and young men are increasingly more likely to be held back and/or disciplined/medicated in early school years, increasingly less likely to get into advanced courses in later years, less likely to graduate local equivalent of "high school" and less likely to enter college/university or earn a degree.
Well, at the moment women are earning more bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and yes, even Ph.Ds than men. That doesn't immediately erase a pre-existing gap among the older generations, but it does tell us that in the future we still won't have equality -- we'll have simply replaced one gap by another.
The goal really ought to be to start raising generation after generation of kids where boys and girls are equal in educational opportunity and achievement. We've thus far failed at that goal, and I don't truly understand how someone can call themself "feminist" whilst thinking that's not something that "actually matters".
The prevalence of people who do call themself "feminist" and hold such beliefs is why I shelter in my warm, snug anonymity. Pointing out such contradictions does not typically result in calm discussions.