From a Youtube comment.

I did an interview with Saachi Khoul of Buzzfeed News yesterday. I talked about boys falling behind in education from the primary school level onward, including:

  • teacher bias against boys exists (female elementary school teachers grade boys down compared to gender-blinded evaluators)

  • boys are aware of this bias (when third grade boys were asked to wager money on how good a grade they expected to get on a project, they wagered less when they were told the teacher was female and would know they're a boy than when they were told the teacher was male or that the teacher wouldn't know they're a boy)

  • both boys and girls agree that boys receive the bulk of negative attention from teachers in classrooms

  • because school at the primary level is dominated by women, and because of the above issues, and because boys might not have their first male teacher until grade 8 math, they are likely to internalize the message that school is not for boys

Her response to that was to first ask if the boys were white.

I was like, "Uh... this affects all boys, including minority boys."

She then said, "But CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are overwhelmingly male."

I was like... WTF? So I say, "what does what's going on among 50 to 70 year olds in the top 1 tenth of 1% of the population have to do with how boys are doing in elementary school?"

She says, "well, men are still dominant."

I said, "those male CEOs were boys in elementary school 40 to 60 years ago. What does that have to do with what's happening now in elementary schools? You have to realize there's a bit of a lag at work here, and if you look at age cohorts from oldest to youngest, you find women and girls catching up and then surpassing men and boys as you track backwards from older to younger cohorts. Single women in their 20s in cities now earn 8% more than their male counterparts. Your entire argument here seems vindictive--like you're happy to see boys punished because men are still dominant in the top 1% at age 50."

"So MRAs are complaining about women catching up, is what you're saying."

I said, "women had parity in post secondary enrolment in the 1980s."

She comes back with me not being intersectional enough. "Yes, but women of color earn much less compared to white men."

I said, "Not to get all intersectional on you, but the gender gap favoring women in post-secondary attainment in the US is largest in the black community."

The producer interrupts and tries to get us back on the topic of bias against primary school boys and asks her to clarify her counterargument. She replies that she thinks her point about the dominance of men at the top of Fortune 500 companies is an adequate rebuttal. (WTF!!!????)

Honestly, it was like talking to a brick wall.