Comment by fzeroracer
2 days ago
People are going to misread the article and go off in their own direction but the problem is clearly capitalism. It's always been capitalism. Lower income boys have drastically less access to male mentors than higher income ones and the article even states this.
Low family income means less options. Most of your mentors at a young age are going to come from schooling, which still generally has a gender tilt towards women for multiple reasons. But lower income schools are going to be more resource starved with larger classes and less time for teachers to interact with students individually.
edit: fixed wording to better emphasize what I meant
Low income families skew nonconventional/single parent which fractures the extended family unit, less likely to have uncles etc around to step in as a mentor.
Smaller family sizes over the previous generation have also contributed to this.
I have 9 uncles in total (including all my aunts' partners). My kid has one.
Also, if you grow up in a household that rents (moves often or is surrounded by neighbours who move often), you are less likely to have long term reliable neighbours available to form adult-child relationships with.
Yes lower income boys are hit way harder, but it's not like the issue disappears at the higher end.
> 72 percent of boys from households earning $100,000 or more reported having a male mentor for schoolwork.
> A similar trend appeared regarding relationship advice. Only 45 percent of boys in the lowest income group had a male mentor for relationships. This compares to 67 percent of boys in the highest income group.
Even 30% of rich kids don't have access to a proper male role model, those are terrible numbers!
Is the assumption that 100% - or even close to it - of boys need a male mentor? How much of the remaining 28% have a female mentor?
Also, that specifies "for schoolwork." Surely there's many boys that have a male they can turn to for other things if not necessarily schoolwork
$100,000 isn't even 'rich' nowdays, that's below middle class especially if we're talking about an actual family unit. I can guarantee that if this research further stratified things into $100-200k, and $200k+ you would see the results continue to improve as people cross the threshold into middle class.
This survey can be seen as comparing people in poverty level income vs everyone else.
A lot of the lower income kids are from single parent homes (which is why they can't cross the $100.000 threshold), those will obviously have less access to a male role model.
If you correct for that the numbers would likely get closer, not further apart.
2 replies →
When you say "capitalism" you mean poverty?
I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?
What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken. But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes, and you have those problems in socialism, too.
Ah yes, the answer to the problem of inequal income distribution is of course capitalism.
> People are going to misread the article and go off in their own direction but the problem is clearly capitalism. It's always been capitalism.
Of course it is, because as we all know capitalism only affects males /s