Why Women Will Dominate The Media Future

Books that re-wire your brain

In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Nick Kristof ran a piece, “The Boys Have Fallen Behind“.

The focus of Krisofs’ piece was that across the boards, with the exception of math, there is an academic gender gap, with boys falling far behind girls in achievement.

¶The average high school grade point average is 3.09 for girls and 2.86 for boys. Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to repeat a grade.

¶Boys are twice as likely to get suspended as girls, and three times as likely to be expelled. Estimates of dropouts vary, but it seems that about one-quarter more boys drop out than girls.

¶Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent.

¶In federal writing tests, 32 percent of girls are considered “proficient” or better. For boys, the figure is 16 percent.

All of this comes from a new book, Why Boys Fail by Richard Whitmire.

Whitmire’s suggested antidote is to publish books about sports adventures and such that will temp boys to read more.

Maybe… but I don’t think so.

Ironically, Kristof’s article and Whitmire’s book dovetail almost perfectly with a book I read more than a decade ago by Len Shlain – one of my close friends (who sadly died last year).

Shlain was a neurosurgeon, but really a polymath with an incredibly wide range of interests.  The Alphabet v. The Goddess was the first book of his that I read, and I read it before I had ever met him.

On occasion in your life you will read a book that changes the way you see the whole world for the rest of your life, and Alphabet was one of those.  Shlain’s thesis was that prior to the invention of writing all cultures were image driven. Hence they were left-brain.  And all of those cultures were women-dominated. That is, they were goddess-centered. Women were the focal point of power, and often women had the political power as well.

With the arrival of text and writing, we shifted from a left-brain to a right-brain culture, and simultaneously, the power and position of women (and of images) was crushed.  We became male-based societies.  Our Gods became all men.

Perhaps the clearest example of this shift is in the Ten Commandments.  The Second Commandment is: “Thou Shalt Have No Graven Images”.

Crushing images for writing.

You will note soon after that that women become very much second class citizens.  In Catholicism and the Vatican, they pretty much cease to exist at all. Jews make them sit separately behind a curtain in the synagogue. Interesting stuff.

Writing culture = male domination.

Now we are coming full circle. With the rise of a screen driven world, we are increasingly becoming an image driven culture again.  And in so doing, we are also becoming a women-based society.

It is happening slowly, but it is surely happening.

Kristof’s column and Whitmire’s book are good independent confirmation of the rise of women in society across the boards. And ironically, all their scores are good, except in math.  Just as Shlain predicted.

As we move more and more toward images and away from text; as the web and iPhones and iPads continue to take our time and become the vehicles for our transmission of information and ideas, we are going to see a concurrent rise in the power and success of women.

This is no bad thing.

It is exactly what Len Shlain predicted a decade ago or more.

I am only sorry he is not here to see it.