Before I begin, I know what you are thinking, boys. -.-! (Whatever makes you happy?)
When I was in high school, a male teacher (can’t remember his name) told my class that those days Form Sixes are dominated by male students, but today situation has changed. Universities, Elite Classes, Curricular Competitions and Grades are dominated by females.
If you look at the Employment Field, many females are white collared compare to males, but the fact is (referring to today’s, 05 October 2010 http://www.msn.com/ main page topic) female employees are still less paid at average compare to male employees.
Very often, we read people blame the education system not being fair to the boys and female employees are paid low because of their maternity.
Based on my experience as a male student who comes from the background of all-boys schools, I did see there is a lot of difference between having many male teachers around and having few or none. When I was in primary, we had many male teachers in my school. For us, those were the great days. People say about fatherly love often is the reason why having male teachers around could give some impact on the boys’ academic performance. It is not about fatherly love. We boys like to be rough and act macho and immature among us. When we need to be motivated, we need a male teacher. When we do sports, we need a male teacher. When we are fighting with our schoolmates, we need a male teacher. And I mean a real ‘MALE’ teacher. We need somebody who can pull down our egos, discipline us, and make us to be serious in studies but at the same time to provide us fun (football, basketball, hockey) when we are bored of studying. In short, we need somebody who can make boys remain boys while excelling. If a female teacher wants to do these, she must be the dominating type and not many female teachers can do so. So to handle the many number of boys, supplies of a few male teachers are not enough.
This may look like some excuses to cover the decreasing grades and performance of the boys, but it is true that psychological readiness is important for male students to face challenges like boys. Schools are the basic platforms for whatever types of males we are producing for this country.
But to be fair to girls, the current education situation is gradually firming their potentiality. It will be not fair to them if we go back to what the education system was. Somewhere the system must draw back the boys into its runway.
For the employment part I will leave it first.