This was especially true in grades 1-5. I frequently watched female teachers of this age group play teams with male and female students, always favoring the girls and helping the girls to one-up the boys. Should I be upset that female teachers were openly approving when, at lunchtime show-and-tell in the 3rd grade, a girl shared with the school “Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider. Girls go to Mars to get more candy bars.”? It was common sentiment among the girls that they were smarter than the boys. Such sentiments were frequently lunch time conversations.

Many times I watched a teacher scream at a young student but I never watched a teacher scream at a young female student. Girls loved the teachers, frequently giving the female teachers hugs. Boys in grades one through five, when you had the same teacher all day long, always hoped to be one of the few lucky enough to have a male teacher so they could be free of the typically oppressive environment. It was in these years that far more boys than girls learned to resent and harbor disdain for school.

All the boys who were lost students up to fifth grade continued to be lost students through high school. They were the “sped” (special education) students, the ones in detention, in the lowest level courses, the ones drugged with stimulants, the ones who started smoking pot and didn’t go to college. There were lost female students, just not nearly as many.

Feminist attitudes among teachers became more apparent to me around middle school and high school. Boys were frequently targets of messages telling them it is their sex responsible for the world’s crime, wars, and discrimination against women. Virtually all forms of male success were attributed to the oppression of women. Men make more money, are most of the doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, and the only ones who become president because men oppress women. It is for these reasons that only girls have a day to go to work with their parents and why only girls had special initiatives and events for math and science.

The negative impact such messages could have on boys were not adequately taken into account. How are boys supposed to grow up when the only thing they can grow up and become is an oppressor? Why should boys look up to male adults when male adults are oppressors? Girls can grow up and be anything they want, boys just better make sure they don’t grow up and oppress women.

In social studies the textbook asked, “How can it be explained that in almost every country in the world women live longer than men?” and my female teacher responded “Because that’s the way it should be” The girls in the classroom all laughed. Between sixth grade and college the shorter life expectancy of men was used on many occasions to denigrate male students since the topic arose in multiple subjects.

One such example, in college I took a communications course on relationships for the easy ‘A’ and to fill a breadth requirement. The course was anti-male in general, dealing with family topics. But the way the teacher told the mostly female class with a big smile – like it’s a big, juicy, gossipy, secret – “Did you know that by the time you get to 80 years old there are 5 times more women alive than men?!” absolutely infuriated me. If the same sentiment was uttered about gaps in life expectancies between blacks and whites this teacher would have been fired.

I felt denigrated and cheapened, especially because the teacher’s comment was meat with laughter from female students and I was one of three males in the class. It would be one thing if a positive inquiry occurred like how to improve male life expectancies, what are the causes, etc. But this teacher used the example only to belittle and denigrate males in a nearly all female classroom.

These types of experiences make me wonder, is this the reason why breast cancer and female-specific diseases receive several times more tax payer dollars for research than male-specific diseases? It’s apparently OK to have disregard for male well being. A gap in funding for health research is a slap in the face when you realize a higher rate of the deadliest diseases among males accounts for most of the shorter male life expectancy.

In college the student body was 60% female. When presented with this information during orientation the girl sitting next to me said “Is it really that bad? Boys are f—ing stupid!”. It was surprising to me that she said this, because she was also a black woman who given history I would think should know better. She did not fear any repercussions for -or even realize she had made- an openly, generalized, sexist statement.

My dorm was covered in fliers about rape, sexual assault, and redefining masculinity. “Men Rape”, “1 in 4 Women will be sexually assaulted in college”, “Men cause violence against women”, were just some of the messages planted all around me. The “1 in 4″ statistic turned out to be a complete lie and was being used because somebody though it sounded good. The university has to by law publish in a public place (its website) its crime statistics. In any given year there were 2-6 sex crimes on a campus of 14,000. Even assuming most crimes are not reported “1 in 4″ is an irresponsible exaggeration by the university.

It amazed me that posting such fliers all around campus and in all dorms did not constitute creating a hostile learning environment for male students. It is unethical on the university’s part to hold all male students accountable for the actions of a few and to saturate the academic environment with fliers and messages holding all males accountable because they are male. I particularly resented the mandatory sexual harassment seminar during orientation. It was evident by the examples chosen that the seminar’s only function was to demonize male students. Respect should be the only thing directed at male students (and female) until they actually commit a crime. Instead, males are held in contempt from the moment they arrive on campus.

College ended mercifully fast and I am now a working professional. I’ve only provided a handful of examples of the various forms of discrimination and denigration I experienced as a male student. I am happy to say the real work world is more condoning of males than the US educational system (maybe that’s why men do better after school). These kinds of experiences were close to daily occurrences, especially if I include denigration of men I saw in the media at the same time as being part of my world experience (another topic worthy of discussion). I believe strongly the reason why teachers are now 93% female in the US has nothing to do with pay. I believe most males had such miserable experiences in the American school system that they never want to go back.

My question: Do disposition examinations at teachers’ colleges selectively remove males (and male-friendly females) from the pool of potential teachers?

Women tend to dominate fields that women have always tended to dominate, but now perhaps they dominate more than before…what is lacking is the gap in enrolment in math and science fields at the university level, other than biology and psychology, wher women dominate…

How does technology play into this trend? How has it changed what it means to be successful today? If future opportunities for gainful employment are in the engineering and tech fields (as I have read) then women are still left out in the cold, so to speak. They are riding a rise in enrollment, but not necessarily in areas that will be the “hottest” areas of the near future. It becomes not a matter of percentages enrolled, but percentages enrolled by field of study, and how those differences spell out the potential for social and/or economic success.

to quote…”When more than 75 percent of undergraduate degrees in the highly paid fields of computer science and engineering are awarded to young men, the majority of them white, the idea that we no longer need focus on these issues for girls and for students of color does not hold up.”

I wrote my lit review on female under-representation in STEM fields and although I do not deny there is such a thing as a boy crisis, I cannot help but think that within this machista society, with all things equal, females get the short-changed.