Why Johnny Won T Read: Gender Stereotypes

For multiple years, young boys and men have struggled to keep up with society's mental image of what a man should look, act, and be like. From the minute they are brought into this world, boys mostly always already have an idea of what they should be as they get older. They are brainwashed with the mentality that they have to be this rugged, strong, fit persona. And most boys will do anything it takes in order to achieve that attribute to feel some sort of acceptance by society. Having these ¨manly¨ attributes is not always what determines a boy from having the label of being a man. A boy can be a man without having to live up to these standards. Following up on the idea that boys will do anything to achieve what they may believe is some

In Why Johnny Won't Read by Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky, they state, ¨From 1992 to 2002, the gender gap in reading by young adults wid­ened considerably. In overall book reading, young women slipped from 63 percent to 59 percent, while young men plummeted from 55 percent to 43 percent.¨ This shows that although girls did decrease by a slight percent, boys were still below them. It shows that boys have a disadvantage when it comes to education because they may be concentrated in other things such as sports for example that they don't portray the same amount of concentration that they have on the sport onto their education status. In addition, in Mind Over Muscle by David Brooks, he states ¨In high school, girls get higher grades in every subject, usually by about a quar­ter of a point, and have a higher median class rank. They are more likely to take advanced placement courses and the hardest math courses and are more likely to be straight-­A students. They have much higher reading and writing scores on national assessment tests. Boys still enjoy an advantage on math and science tests, but that gap is smaller and closing.¨ To clarify this means that girls have always had a slightly bigger advantage than boys when it comes to education. Since boys were always told to be masculine and girls were always put to read they probably would have thought education was not masculine enough which later led to a result in showing that boys are not as smart as girls later on in the