Gender without ideology

Is that too much to hope for?

From The Nation, “Are Men OK” cover story. See here.

I woke up this morning trying to remember how long the Gender Policy Council lasted after President Trump took office. As I thought, it was less than a day. I criticized the Council, set up by President Biden, for failing to address any gender gaps disfavoring boys and men. But I wanted it to be reformed and expanded, not abolished. But abolished it was, on Jan 20th by a Presidential Action titled: “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

As I perused the order, I noticed that it also lists a number of documents that were to be immediately rescinded. Many of these are ones that you would expect the new Administration to dislike, such as:

• The White House Toolkit on Transgender Equality

• U.S. Department of Education Toolkit: Creating Inclusive and Nondiscriminatory School Environments for LGBTQI+ Students

• Supporting Intersex Students: A Resource for Students, Families, and Educators” (October 2021)

• Confronting Anti-LGBTQI+ Harassment in Schools: A Resource for Students and Families” (June 2021)

But there was one publication that seemed like a perfectly reasonable paper which no Administration, regardless of political hue, should have a problem with:

• Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students

This was produced by the Department of Education in June 9, 2021, as a result of an Executive Order from President Biden which instructed the Department:

To deliver a report as soon as practicable on the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on students in elementary, secondary, and higher education, including those attending historically black colleges and universities, and Tribal colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions.

Seems fine, right? I suppose you might roll your eyes at the specific call out of minority-serving institutions, given that these were unlikely to be forgotten in the Biden Administration. But the basic task of examining the “disparate impacts of COVID-19 on students in elementary, secondary, and higher education” is perfectly sensible.

So, what’s the problem here?

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DIGRESSION: The Nation magazine cover story this month, titled “Are men OK?” (from which the header image is taken), is a profile of yours truly by Eamon Whalen, which does a great job of explaining my mission (and that of AIBM), as well as gathering some really thoughtful criticisms of that approach. I’ve swerved to mention it here because it correctly describes my goal of being “proudly boring”. So if you get bored as you read on, remember it’s all part of the plan. And check out Eamon Whalen’s substack.

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Anyway, back to my excursion into the recent history of gender politics. I looked up the apparently inoffensive report with the pretty inoffensive title, “Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students”. It announced itself as “a data-driven account of COVID-19’s disparate impacts on students”.

The problem is, it wasn’t. It had data, sure. But the driving force of the report’s account was not information, it was ideology. The Executive Summary of the report is based on a series of key Observations. Some of these related to K-12, some to both K-12 and postsecondary, and some just to postsecondary. I’m going to focus here on postsecondary, so I’ll list here are all the relevant key messages from the report’s summary (Observations 6-11). You can skim if you like but I didn’t want to cherry-pick:

OBSERVATION 6 (K-12 and postsecondary): Nearly all students have experienced some challenges to their mental health and well-being during the pandemic and many have lost access to school-based services and supports, with early research showing disparities based on race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity, and other factors.

OBSERVATION 7 (K-12 and postsecondary): Heightened risks of sexual harassment, abuse, and violence during the pandemic, including from household members as well as intimate partners, and online harassment from peers and others, affect many students and may be having a continued disparate impact on K-12 and postsecondary girls and women and students who are transgender, non-binary, or gender non-conforming.

OBSERVATION 8 (K-12 and postsecondary): Identity-based harassment and violence have long had harmful effects on targeted students and their communities. Since the pandemic’s start, Asian American and Pacific Islander students in particular have faced increased risk of harassment, discrimination, and other harms that may be affecting their access to educational opportunities.

OBSERVATION 9 (postsecondary): COVID-19 has raised new barriers for many postsecondary students, with heightened impacts emerging for students of color, students with disabilities, and students who are caregivers, both for entry into higher education and for continuing and completing their studies.

OBSERVATION 10 (postsecondary): Many institutions of higher education that disproportionately serve students of color and students from low-income backgrounds have seen declines in enrollment since the pandemic began. During the 2020-21 academic year historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) also had declines in enrollment that in some cases far outpaced enrollment declines in their predominantly white peer institutions. Higher-education institutions also reported a sharp drop-off in enrollment in 2020 of students graduating from high-poverty high schools compared to pre-pandemic numbers.

OBSERVATION 11 (postsecondary): Students with disabilities in higher education are facing significant hardships and other barriers due to COVID-19, threatening their access to education, including through remote learning, and basic necessities.

The only mention of gender in the Executive Summary is with regard to the potentially negative impact of COVID-19 on girls and women, specifically with regard to harassment and abuse.

But here’s the thing: the impact of the pandemic in terms of postsecondary educational metrics was much greater for men than for women. The report actually says as much, somewhat in passing, down on page 34:

According to recently released data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, by fall 2020, enrollment by men had declined by 5.1%, while the enrollment by women was consistent in prior year-to-year declines (0.7%).

This is a big disparity. The college enrollment rate declined seven times more for men than for women. In fact, the initial decline for women was not very different to the drops seen in recent previous years.

This seven-fold difference is bigger than any of the other gaps highlighted in the report. There was a significant difference, for example, in the enrollment drop for students from high-poverty and low-poverty schools: 3% and 11% declines respectively. The fact that enrollment declined four times as much in poorer schools as in more affluent ones is very important, and it was quite right for the report authors to draw attention to it in their main findings. But this makes the absence of any mention of the even bigger gap by gender even more mystifying.

Now, these were just initial findings: as the pandemic wore on, female enrollment declined more too. And one big reason for the male decline is that they are overrepresented in courses which require in-person teaching, especially vocational degrees and certificates at community colleges. But now we’re into the “why” of the gender gap, not the fact of it.

The report also quite rightly draws attention to some big race gaps in enrollment. But it is important to add a gender lens here too. By Spring 2021, the declines were bigger for Native, Black and Hispanic men than for white men. But the drop was nonetheless bigger for white men than for any group of women:

By this point, you might be wondering what I’m doing nitpicking over a report from 2021. I mean there’s boring and there’s boring. But this report is just one example of a general failure on the part of the Biden Administration to pay any attention to the issues of boys and men, to the extent of going out their way to avoid even acknowledging them. Because I was looking at the trends already, I happened to notice that big gender gap in the initial enrollment declines, but I can assure you that almost nobody else did, and no wonder. It was nobody’s job to notice, it seemed.

These sins of omission were unfortunate from the point of view of making sure policymakers were as well-informed as possible. But it was also bad politics. If you don’t want people to think your “data-driven” report has been warped by ideological priors, all you have to do is make sure that ideological priors do not warp your report. As C.P. Scott, the founder of The Guardian, my old employer, said:

Comment is free. Facts are sacred.

Conservatives critics of this kind of report have a point, even if the resulting reaction is disproportionate. And it is a point that is needlessly conceded. Drawing attention to the huge gender gaps disfavoring men didn’t necessitate ignoring gaps by race, class, disability status and so on, as well as issues disproportionately impacting women or girls. As you may have heard me say before, this is not a zero-sum game.

In recent years we ended up in a place where gender has become ideological for both sides. One where Democrats came to believe that gender can only ever be about women and girls or LGBTQ people and Republicans came to believe that any consideration of gender, in either direction, is woke nonsense.

I’d like to see a world where Democrats and Republicans could agree the following:

• Gender gaps matter, in both directions.

• Other gaps matter too, especially those of race and class.

• Government-sponsored studies should be driven by data not ideology.

• Data is vitally important to all efforts to improve opportunity for all.

You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.

What I’m Reading

This is a new section of this newsletter. Enjoy! Also do sign up for AIBM’s newsletter.

Older Dads. This paper shows that while Dads are older today, they used to be back in the pre-Baby Boom days too. Is it good or bad? Probably a bit of both. Older Dads tend to be a bit less healthy (and have somewhat less healthy sperm), but they also tend to have more money to invest in their kids. The chart is striking:

Father Time, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. I’m not finished yet but this is a superb book from a preeminent scholar. One finding that I simply love is this one about what causes oxytocin to rise in Moms and Dads:

Post-birth upticks in maternal oxytocin tend to be correlated with affectionate contact, as when a mother gazes into her infant’s face or luxuriates in the feel of her baby’s warm body nestled against her own—the tender behaviors mothers are best known for. Oxytocin upticks in fathers, however, are more likely to coincide with other behaviors, such as the bouts of stimulating play that Western dads are famous for.

This is awesome. Next time you see a Dad throwing his toddler up in the air to shrieks of delight, often on both sides, know that this is every bit as bonding as a child snuggling up with their Mom

Policy Options to Improve Insurance Coverage of Vasectomy. Why is female sterilization three times more common that vasectomy in the U.S.? Why are vasectomy rates so much higher in Canada and the UK? One answer: money. Female contraception is covered without cost by Federal law. Male contraception is not. So couples are incentivized to choose a worse, less safe option. And the law continues to send the message that contraception is women’s work. For AIBM, Adam Sonfield has some ideas on how to fix this disparity.

How Hollywood is failing men. A Slate interview with Fergus Navaratnam-Blair, a research director at NRG on their report on male role models. Interesting. The report says that Hollywood needs “to create space for diverse models of aspirational masculinity” and warns the industry against focusing “too heavily on critiquing previous notions of masculinity instead of constructing healthier visions of the future.” To which I say: yup.

News and Musings

AIBM has a new Comms Director! Raman Preet Kaur comes to us from Brookings, where I worked with her a little before. She’s just brilliant. Watch her put rocket boosters on brand AIBM….