As associate editor Gord Gilmour reports in the November 2014 issue of Country Guide, more women than men now attend our ag universities.
I’m not being alarmist — at least, I hope I’m not — and I’m not a zealot for absolute gender equality in every job or every outcome. I note the irony too that when we first contacted Mary Buhr, the University of Saskatchewan’s dean of agriculture, she was at a university-industry meeting in North Carolina where only five of the 50 participants were women. And I hope I appreciate at least superficially that women face myriad barriers on the farm as well, including pressures within the family.
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Still, there’s a point that needs sharing, even if we can’t make it with as much scientific rigour as we’d like.
Too many farms may be giving up too early on their boys.
Whatever the reason, our schools are better at educating girls than boys. Across the board, over 60 per cent of university entrants are women, which means that if you take a boy and a girl and enrol them in Grade 9, there’s a 50 per cent better chance that the girl will go to university than the boy.
I can’t help thinking there’s something biological about this. I have a side interest in local history, and when I pour over local school records from the early 1900s, the girls quite consistently outperformed the boys on high school tests. It’s just that the girls weren’t allowed to translate those results into careers.
Whether this aspect is biological or not, the truth does seem to be that it’s something of a vicious circle, not least because with fewer upper-school boys excelling in their studies these days, younger boys have fewer role models.
My own experience too is that girls are often raised with more of a sense of expectation, and that this encourages achievement.
Either way, our boys are left to find their own terms for what success looks like. At 16, 17 and 18, is it any surprise that this looks like a pickup truck and an open road on Saturday night?
Undoubtedly, there is something biological that hits the male brain in the teenage years, making their time too valuable to do anything with it but play the video games that have been designed to cynically exploit this particular weakness.
Higher function returns, but often not until the boys reach their early 20s.
If we give up on them too early, how much potential do we waste?
Farm parents can help by placing more responsibility and more expectation on their boys. But they can also help by realizing that if their boys seem listless, it’s an entire generation that’s showing the symptoms, not just their own kids.
I suspect it’s partly why a few years of off-farm employment can work wonders. Are we getting it right? Send me an email and let me know.
