I’m bringing up the topic of underachieving young men again, because it has come up in the news. An article in the Wall Street Journal Nov. 6 describes lack motivation in boys and young men, who aren’t applying to college in satisfactory numbers.

The author, Richard Whitmire, was discussing a Civil Rights Commission announcement that it will investigate whether colleges are discriminating by having lower admission standards for men. The issue: underperformance by men.

It’s evident in statistics such as these, cited by Whitmire: “This summer the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University published the results of a study tracking the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. Their conclusion: For every 167 females in four-year colleges, there were 100 males.”

What could be causing this situation? Whitmire doesn’t know. “The real issue is the flagging academic interest among boys, a phenomenon that dates back only about two decades. It’s a new issue to most Americans but hotly debated in countries such as England. So far, nobody has solved the boy mystery, but some countries are years ahead of the U.S. Australia has had some success with literacy-boosting programs for young boys.”

In a post not long ago on this blog, I described a 2007 book written by Leonard Sax, MD, addressing this issue. In the book, Boys Adrift, Sax identified five contributing causes to the underperforming young male in Western culture. One of those is an estrogen, BPA, used to soften plastics, notably the plastics used in soda and water bottles and to line tin cans.
The other four factors in the epidemic of men who don’t grow up named by Sax are:

* Education system changes. Kindergarten has become a very frustrating time for boys, who are expected to sit down and learn to read. They aren’t ready, and as a result they learn to hate school.

* Video games

* ADHD medications

* A scarcity in our culture of traditions for transition to manhood.

The Wall Street Journal article Nov. 6 got a response in the form of a letter to the editor from Prof. James W. Bovinet of the University of Phoenix Online in Monmouth, IL. Bovinet’s underscores the seriousness of the situation. “Young women are the first to notice this lack of ambition. The marriage rate in this country per 1000 people is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Single women are the fastest growing segment of the home-buying industry. Women are simply not going to wait to build a life–wait until males decide to put down the Xbox controller, the cold beer, and exit their parents’ basement.”

Bovinet identifies the situation as something much larger and more important than the Civil Rights Commission’s concern about equal treatment in higher education admission. The US is in the midst of the creation of a “matriarchal economy,” he says. Women influence the purchase of 80 percent of all goods and services.

Going back to the Nov 6. WSJ article, Whitmire says this female domination is bad for the economy because women are less likely to take the risks needed for successful business ventures. “…Women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business start-ups or to grind out careers in isolated tech labs. Revenue generated by women-owned businesses remains less than 5% of all revenue. And while the number of women taking on economically important majors is rising, women still earn only a fifth of the bachelor’s degrees granted in physics, computer science and engineering.”

It’s definitely time to ditch bottled water and soda, and address Sax’s four other concerns too. One of the things you can do is get a great home water filter like Multi-Pure and put it into stainless steel bottles when you go out.