Orientation Week has finished.  Hopefully all the new 1st Year students now know their way around the College as well as key areas in Hong Kong, hopefully they know what an Octopus Card is and how to use it, they know the difference between red taxis and green taxis, and they know how to use the KCR, MTR and KMB.  They have chosen their subjects, they have enrolled in a multitude of quan cai activities, they have opened bank accounts, they have obtained their HKID cards, they have gone away on an overnight camp, but most importantly, they have made many new friends from the representatives of 81 countries that comprise this year’s student community at the College - including for the first time, students from Cambodia and Iran.

Following a couple of conversations I had with students in the canteen this week, I was reflecting on the composition of our new student intake.  Some students commented that the proportion of Hong Kong students seemed higher this year – which it true, although not markedly so, as the proportion of the 1st Year intake from Hong Kong increased slightly from 43% last year to 46% this year.  This was mainly because a few National Committees were unable to find (or fund) suitable students this year.

On the other hand, many students seem to have overlooked the much more significant shift, which was the increase in the percentage of boys this year.  Last year, only 41.4% of our intake were boys; this year the figure was 46.5%.  The increase is significant, but the proportion of boys is still less than half of our student population, as it is in every UWC I think, and that raises several important questions.  Before posing those questions, however, some brief historical background may be helpful to provide a basis for informed understanding.

When the first United World College (Atlantic College in Wales) began in 1962, it was an all-male institution.  This was because the concept then (as now) was to form a deep sense of authentic global understanding among future leaders.  In the early 1960s, however, masculinity was seen as a prerequisite for leadership.  Furthermore, ‘leadership’ as a concept was viewed much more narrowly than it is today.  These narrow and male-centric views shifted in the late 1960s, and females began to be admitted to UWCs.  Because the chief criterion of selection for entry into United World Colleges was (and still is) “merit”, it was probably inevitable that the proportion of females would soon exceed the percentage of males, given that students are selected for UWCs at the age of 15 or 16, when girls’ maturity levels, verbal eloquence and ability to think in abstract ways is usually at least a year or two (on average) ahead of boys.

Reassuringly, though, despite the fact that the selection of our students is done in more than 80 different countries, the academic quality of the students selected seems to be remarkably consistent irrespective of gender.  In the May 2007 examinations, for example, the average scores for LPC’s males and females were almost exactly equal, being just a shade below 37 for both genders (compared with the world-wide average of 29.9 out of 45 for all IB Diploma students).

The so-called gender gap in education is often the subject of comment and analysis.  Indeed an entire industry has grown up over the past decade or two dedicated to improving the academic performances of boys. Often the strategies to enhance boys’ learning outcomes operate at the fairly superficial level of adjusting learning styles, providing more male role models, providing more activities such as sports, perhaps separating boys and girls in subjects where the self-esteem of either might be affected by their different approaches to learning, making assessment models more “boy-friendly”, and so on.  While each of these strategies may have some positive impact in some cases, ALL are treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause.  They ignore the big picture, which is what I have been reflecting upon this week.

A couple of weeks ago, on 24th August to be precise, Professor Roy F Baumeister gave an address to a meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco that posed some very provocative hypotheses that were pertinent to this issue.  The title of his lecture was the same as this blog: “Is There Anything Good About Men?”.  Perhaps surprisingly given this title, Professor Baumeister’s paper is not a short one!

Consider the following extract:

1. “How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” This is a fair question and needs to be taken seriously. It invokes the feminist critique of society. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.
   

2. Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favour men.  It must be great to be a man.
   

3. The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top.  If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too.  Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?  The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female.  Who’s homeless?  Again, mostly men.  Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs?  US Department of Labour statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men.  Likewise, who gets killed in battle?  Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal.  This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.
   

4. One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins.  An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women.  In principle, I agree.  But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don’t see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds.
   

We could add many other measures of male disadvantage to Baumeister’s list, one obvious example being the universally lower average life expectancies of men compared with women.  Quality of life does not mean much if one is not alive!  Baumeister’s claim that men tend to fill the extremes of most bell-shaped curves, whereas females are under-represented at both extremes, seems to have widespread, cross-cultural validity.

The extract from Baumeister’s speech quoted above caught my attention this week because of the statistically greater obstacles that males seem to have in entering United World Colleges.  Could it be that the challenges we face in admitting as many males as females to UWCs might mirror something bigger in societies all around the world?  Is there a general inherent disadvantage in being a male?

Baumeister claims that the disadvantages of being male extend far beyond the areas we normally consider or hear about.  The point of his speech seemed to be to expand our thinking beyond rigid, traditional boundaries.  At one point in his speech, he posed the question:  “What percentage of your ancestors were men?”.

Remarkably, he argues fairly convincingly that it is not 50% as you might expect.   He defended this by suggesting that the “single most under-appreciated fact about gender” is the ratio of our male to female ancestors.  While it is true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, he claims that the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing.  Quoting recent (2005) research based on DNA testing, he explained why “today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men”, claiming that “throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced”.

Baumeister explained this somewhat surprising analysis as follows:

1. “For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good.  Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things?   But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe.  The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies.   All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.
   

2. For men, the outlook was radically different.  If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children.  Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today.  Their lines were dead ends.  Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities.”
   

Baumeister’s arguments are certainly provocative and contentious (which is partly why they interest me!).  However, I do not think he is completely correct.  While his comments may be statistically accurate (and probably are) for humanity as a whole, like every individual alive today, I am, genetically speaking, descended from exactly the same number of men and women - 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on. Nothing else is physically possible.  Of course, this disagreement may simply reflect a minor problem arising from his perhaps imprecise expression - I think I understand that he was not referring to me as an individual but to humanity as a whole.

There are many more original ideas in the speech, but let me challenge you with Professor Baumeister’s conclusion in which he summarises his entire argument in his own words:

1. “A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards.  Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it.  Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways.  Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners.  Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
   

2. Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers.
   

3. Culture is not about men against women.  By and large, cultural progress emerged from groups of men working with and against other men.  While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish.  The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality.  Men created the big social structures that comprise society, and men still are mainly responsible for this, even though we now see that women can perform perfectly well in these large systems.
   

4. What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally.  Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values.  They have to prevail over rivals and enemies in cultural competitions, which is probably why they aren’t as lovable as women.
   

5. The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity.  This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological.  Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
   

6. The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women.  But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.
   

7. Again, I’m not saying it’s right, or fair, or proper.  But it has worked.  The cultures that have succeeded have used this formula, and that is one reason that they have succeeded instead of their rivals.”
   

I don’t know yet whether I agree with Baumeister’s arguments or not.  There seem to be sufficient bases in evidence not to dismiss his arguments entirely, and his ideas do explain many of the stereotypical male-female differences in very tidy evolutionary terms.  On the other hand, feminists and others will protest the very stereotypes that lie close to the heart of Baumeister’s propositions, either on philosophical or ideological grounds.

Why not read the article yourself HERE and see what YOU think!