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ORIGINAL: NakedOnMyChain

Here's my attempt at rephrasing what I stated above: Why must it be, if a woman is accepted to a particular position and a man is rejected from the same position, that accusations of unfair treatment for the male must always be leveled? Is it not enough that perhaps the woman was better suited and qualified for the position?

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Why must the accusations typically insinuate that the playing field has been "leveled" for womens' benefit? More often than not no one is being slighted unfairly. I for one, would not want a leg up that someone else wasn't receiving. (Also, I would make this argument if the genders were in the opposite situation. However, for the sake of this discussion they are not.)

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Edited to add: I know this great joke about an IU student, a computer monitor and white out... [:D]

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Now, I come from a systems background, and I know that often when you try to fix a complex system, 11 times out of 10 you break something else in the process. I'm just wondering if in our zeal to improve the educational experience for girls (which I wouldn't want to undo), we perhaps neglected the boys in the process, or maybe made some other cultural change that has affected them negatively.

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I think that our public educational system doesn't work well for most kids unless they have parents/guardians/families that can spend time helping them with school work and advocating for them at the schools. I've worked in various capacities at inner city schools, suburban and now at a big 10 university, and the kids that "make it" are either incredibly gifted and resilient or have a lot of support. The odds are heavily stacked against low income kids who usually have crappy schools with few support services. When I think nationally about our education system I'm most worried about those kids, whether male, female, white, African American, Latino, etc. Privledge doesn't know gender or ethnicity, but it certainly knows wealth.
As far as our culture and gender issues, I don't think we pay enough attention to children as children , meaning all children need a ton of love, affection, affirmation and support. In my opinion that means helping boys as well as girls understand what it means to be a "man" in our culture and that men and women have complimentary strengths, not neccessarily the same.