A thread started by a man to throw a few things around.

[Sanjeev]

Gents (and anyone else who is interested), here is where we can carry on this the discussion from this thread;

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1465960-AIBU-to-treat-male-and-female-posters-differently-on-feminism-threads?msgid=31694784#31694784

So, who wants to go first?

Plenty of similar jokes about teenage girls on this site. And it is different joking about your own kind and another group of people you don't belong to.

I think a little bit of pulling up the drawbridge but more not being willing to recognise that they have had to overcome additional stuff because they are woman. It hurts to recognidse you are treated differently or face additional barriers because of something you have no control over - your sex. race, etc.

These women to achieve what they have, will have very strong sense of themselves, strong self confifdence and belief in their own abilities to get where they are. To suggest that there are things that do make things harder for them and thus make them vulnerable ie. their sex, is a hard thing emotionally to hear. So it is easier to deny it, say well if I did it anyone can if they are good enough

garlic- Yes teenagers push boundaries. But in terms of behaving well enough at school to learn stuff and pass exams, ime girls are more likely to do that than boys

like i say, quotas are problematic becuase of the merit your supposed to be promoted to the board on
but the fact is , board members are not placed on merit as it now stands anyway, it's entitlement sometimes of birth. public school boys waveing their dicks around and watching each others backs, perhaps allowing one women into the club for their PR and then calling her a 'honerary male' .

Is behaviour the problem though? It's lack of engagement.

I have sat on Boards as the honorary women. No it is not based on merit.

Similarly with MPs. Some of the male MPs I have known I have been about - really chosen on merit?? If we don't have positive discrimination we will get anywhere in tackling these issues

Yes it is behaviour. There is this discourse that boys are not being engaged or interested enough. Yes good teaching increases engagement, but at some level kids have to value education and be prepared to work through the boring bits or less exciting bits. Badly behaved kids generally do not

how did you react to being called the honerary woman? eats? just curious

Of course I wasn't actually called that, it just became clear I was.

"Oh we have a woman on our board..." they would happily tell others - except we won't listen to her at all

tokenisem

damn i wish i could spell!

Yes it was. But also showed me first hand that certainly not all Board members are chosen on merit.

MrMag, I am not sure what constitutes 'engagement'. My kids go to school to learn. They are there to sit there during lessons, keep quiet and let the teacher do their job. Of course some teachers are better than others, some care more and some go through the motions. However, I will not tolerate them disrupting, answering back or acting the fool. If they have a problem with a certain piece of work, we will cover it at home. If this keeps happening, say in a specific subject, then I would address it with the school. I don't know if I am out of touch with more modern methods and attitudes within teaching, but the default position is that the child shows respect to the teacher. I don't see why this should be different between boys and girls.

I agree Sanjeev. But not all parents do

Sorry to go on, but this is a favourite rant of mine. Teachers teach, they do not bring up my kids. We (Mrs Sanjeev and I) do all that groundwork. Anything else is an abdication of responsibility.

Its your thread Sanjeev - rant away

The board I was on ended up 50% female which is very very rare but even there I am not sure appointments were just on merit but nebulous other reasons.
I don't drink, have lots of sleep and prefer to come home to bed than socialise with people. I know that that of course has an impact and that does not matter as working for myself earns much more than many part time board posts pay so I do not see it as a problem. However there certainly is a need to be like others to be considered in the frame in some sectors (by no means all).

If you hate sport and don't drink those are other reasons that can have an impact.

As for what Sanjeev says I would hope most of us want the children to respect the teacher. I am terribly lucky where I live that our private (and state) schools are populated by children from cultures where respect for teachers remains high (and I suppose in class terms too perhaps there is more respect for teachers in private schools, traditional values etc).

The biggest issue is that women have pin money jobs and marry men who earn more. If women tended to marry men who earned half what they do because they wanted a fit man 8 years younger who works out a lot and looks good but is never expected to earn much you can bet your bottom dollar it would be the man not woman in those couples giving up work when babies came around.

I'm a teacher, so just wanted to talk about the education side. In school, coursework or exams, girls are outperforming boys. It extends across all subjects now too. Theories abound as to why - some of them have been mentioned on this thread already, I'd add the theory that questions these days are more evaluative, rather than information-based as they used to be. This supposedly appeals to the female rather than the male brain (should you believe such things...)

Personally, after having worked with hundreds of teenagers, I would support that girls are generally still more socialised to conform to rules and regulations. They are socialised to work hard and listen - to be "good". This works for them at GCSE but does mean that further up the educational ladder - undergraduate degree level and beyond, men's willingness to be risktakers (which I also would say is socialised btw) leaves women behind.

Could I just say that it may be true that course work favours girls, and there may be research to show that, but I am not wholly convinced. The reason I say is that I am probably older than many on these boards and took the (then) universal 11+ exam in the mid 1950s.

At that time the pass mark to "go to the Grammar" was set several percent higher for girls than for boys. The reason for that was that the schools were set to have a 50/50 sex ratio. But if they awarded place on marks they would have ended up with more girls than boys. Now, I know that to a degree you could coach for the 11+ but in essence it was a sudden death exam and there is no reason to think girls were coached more than boys. Yet they still passed the exam in greater numbers. Again, maybe 10/11 year old girls are more mature than boys of the same age and that may have been the reason for their success. But it certainly wasn't coursework. I don't have the source of the figures to hand any more but I recall looking it up a couple of years ago for a similar thread so the findings are still out there somewhere via Google. And of course it was openly admitted by educationalists and schools at the time.

I agree also with Xenia about the need for girls to have high expectations rather than expecting to look for a bread ticket. One thing my husband and I always drummed into them was "every jug should stand on its bottom". It worked.

Yesk, they always had to skew the 11+ in favour of boys. Then it has just steadily crept up - the ages at which girls do better than boys and now many more girls to go university. Previously lots of them came from homes where boys were educated and girls got married but now some of that bias has gone girls do better. Women also earn more than men up to age 26. It stops and totally reverses - many more men end up earningm ore than their wives because women marry men who are older and/or earn more as they seem still to loko for good providers. Therefoer when they have to decide which of a couple will give up work the clever girl with the Oxford degree on £40k finds she has married the man on £150k who is 5 years ahead of her at work so she gives up work. She tends not to marry the boy 7 years yonger who has just graduated and earns £20k who might well bke the logical one to give up work.

Only when you reverse it - I earned 10x my children's father - do the calculations which are more about money than sexism issues - reverse too. As more and more women in their 20s earning a lot will find fewer men earning as much to marry they will find their husbands are on the same or a lower wage and be less likely to give up work

Xenia - could that be because the boy who is seven years younger is likely to want a family later than the woman?

I agree with you and have posted elsewhere that age difference at marriage is a factor, though the average gap is dropping, at least in the US and probably UK too.

I have just asked DH why he thinks teenage boys don't do so well at exams - he replied "watching too much porn and wanking all day". I, however, thought it might be down to playing things like Call of Duty all day long.

Xenia, I am not sure where you get your stats about wage differentials? The Gov ONS survey shows that men do earn more than women at all ages, although the differences are larger in the 40-60 year age group.

www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ashe/annual-survey-of-hours-and-earnings/ashe-results-2011/ashe-statistical-bulletin-2011.html#tab-Earnings-by-age-group

Also this link takes you to information on the differential in pay in a list of occupations between men and women. Although there are a small number where women are paid more than men, in most men are paid more than wome. And that includes some low paid jobs such as shelf filler.

www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/08/international-womens-day-pay-gap

I can't believe I'm about to agree with you Xenia , but I think you do have something re. the marrying up. In addition to the things you said, I feel there is the cautionary idea that if you earn more than your husband you will have trouble in the marriage. That was certainly the case in my marriage. I was scared all the time of making XP feel that he was inadequate.

The norm of the older man / younger woman definitely has something to answer for re. the pay gap.

I agree it is an issue, but I don't agree it totally explains the pay gap. I think it is 1 contributory factor

Yeah definitely not the whole picture. Just read those statistic links. Made me feel v depressed at the idea that I am very unlikely to get the earning power I had back.

Sorry, wasn't trying to depress you