WE have known it for a long time.

New data, therefore, serves to reconfirm it: Jamaican women are likely to have attended schools more regularly, do better in their exams and are, generally, better educated than their men.

But dominate in a few areas– in the work-force, in crime and in the prisons.

“Males are in serious trouble,” says Claire Bernard, who heads social security and welfare research at the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), whose latest data have served to further underline a problem over which Jamaica has agonised for years — the status of men in the society and their likely contribution to Jamaica’s development.

Bernard and other PIOJ officials outlined at some of the latest data at a forum Portmore HEART Academy last week as part of its Dialogue for Development 2002 series, where it hopes to get feed-back from the public to factor into its policy planning and recommendations.

A previous forum on the theme Education and Gender – performance of boys and its impact on sustainable development was held in Manchester on June 27 and a third will be held Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland on August 15.

Bernard pointed out that while male/female population ratio was close to 50:50, the adult literacy rate for women remains significantly higher than for men. For instance, while the adult literacy rate it 79.9 per cent, the literacy rate among women is approximately 86 per cent, compared to 74.1 per cent for men.

There is a logical reason. More girls than boys are enrolled in the island’s primary, secondary and tertiary schools and girls attend classes more often than boys.

Islandwide, Bernard explained, there are significantly fewer men than women in the classroom as teachers, especially at the early childhood level. In St Catherine last year, for example, less than 10 per cent of all teachers at the primary and secondary level were men. In Manchester men were better represented, but still accounted for under 22 per cent of the parish’s primary and secondary school teachers.

In the national and regional exams girls tended also to outperform boys, Bernard said.

Last year the average scores of females who sat the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) were eight percentage points higher than males in four out of five subjects. Only in social studies did boys do better than girls.

Male achievement at the secondary level was also generally lower in both the Caribbean Examinations Council’s (CXC) ordinary level (CSEC – Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate) and advanced level (CAPE – Caribbean Advance Proficiency Examination) exams.

Part of the problem facing the society, it seems, is that boys drop-out of school more, and earlier, than girls don’t re-enter the system. Some girls do.

Take St Catherine, the most populous of the 14 parishes, it painted a dismal picture for boys in terms of repetition and school drop-out rates.

Up to grade five the repetition and drop-out rate was almost twice as high for boys as for girls and about equal at grades six and seven. At high school, the drop-out rate, on average, is about twice as high for boys until Grades 10 and 11 when the situation reverses. The drop-out rate for girls in those grades is twice as high.

“This could be as a result of pregnancy,” said Bernard.

But yet women outscore men by over seven-to-one in terms of enrolment in tertiary institutions.

For instance, in the decade up to 2001, tertiary enrolment in Jamaica moved from 6.3 per cent of the population to 14.5 per cent. Over that period enrolment by males moved from 4.6 per cent of the population to 10.6 per cent, while females moved from 7.8 per cent to 18.2 per cent.

“We are building a society with more academically qualified females than males,” Bernard said.

Labour statistics, however, showed males in a favourable light. A larger percentage of men than women were involved in the labour force in all the parishes last year. In fact, islandwide figures showed that unemployment rate among females was 22.3 per cent compared to 10.2 per cent for males.

But men dominated the crime scene, both as offenders and victims.

Bernard drew attention to an analysis of 1,216 major crimes reported islandwide last year. Close to 50 per cent of that number was from South St Catherine. Five hundred arrests were made and nearly half of the arrests were made in Portmore. “In all instances the person arrested was male,” Bernard explained.

The problem is deep particularly among young men.

In St Catherine males under 25 accounted for more than 50 per cent of major crimes for which arrests have been made over the past year.

Similarly, in Manchester, Bernard noted all arrests for major crimes reported last year, and since January this year, were committed by males. Of the total, 63 per cent were committed by males under age 25.

“These findings show that a large group of males are not equipping themselves to contribute significantly to the development process and this has serious implications for the future,” Bernard lamented.

For some of the people who attended last week’s forum the problem has to do with how Jamaica socialises its boys as well as its slavery past.

“From slavery, men have been stripped of our position,” argued Robert Cover, vice-president of the Vendors Association of Jamaica, who also runs a programme called Enchanted Youth Development. “It’s a colonial legacy and it (the solution) can only start with remedial education.”

“We men are not weak,” said another participant. “We are just not motivated enough to take up some of the challenges.”

Corrine Richards, a special educator, who commented at the Mandeville forum urged the government to review the ways boys are taught.

“Boys learn differently from girls,” she insisted. “They think differently, they develop differently. Therefore, the method to teach boys should be different. We have done it in special education and it works.”

On the subject of crime, Richards said that there was credible research indicating that most boys involved in criminal activity have learning problems.

“Enough is not done in school to deal with learning disability,” she said. “A lot of these boys go to school and are failing from day to day. Yet, we keep passing them up the system. By the time they get to adolescence problems are bound to kick in.”

Other speakers at last Wednesday’s session gave what they thought could be possible solutions to the dilemma. They called for more compassion and love to be shown to inner-city youth; that boys be given more responsibilities in the home and that poor parenting practices islandwide be immediately addressed.

Past studies done locally on the topic of male achievement have already highlighted these and other factors which they say are contributing to male under-achievement in the island. A well-publicised research done by Dr Maureen Vaughn-Samms of the University of the West Indies on male and female students in a number of secondary schools, revealed last year that teacher-student interaction was generally biased against boys.

This is compounded by widely held stereotypes of gender behaviour throughout the society, partly as a result of which boys adopt an anti-academic identity, said Pauline Knight a PIOJ director who also spoke on Wednesday.

“There is a feeling that… (boys) shouldn’t be too studious, they shouldn’t be learning and this certainly must militate against good performance in school,” said Knight.

Knight argued too, that there was an over-emphasis on testing and screening at the primary school level which was not good for the boys.

” Boys are slower in their development and this over-emphasis on testing and screening turns them off,” she said. “There is de-emphasis on exploration of ideas and problem solving which they tend to be better at. So we’re into this rote thing which the girls cotton onto but the boys don’t. So they are perceived as failures and they act it out.”

Some of the recommendations of past researchers have been to raise teachers’ awareness of the gender effects of the teaching methods that they are using and to develop guidelines for a gender fair environment and to make the school curriculum more attuned to boys’ interest.

Whatever the applicable method, the PIOJ’s director-general, Dr Wesley Hughes said, Jamaica for its development had to develop what he called Generation E.

These, he said, were young people who are “educated, entrepreneurial, ethical, e-mail linked, English speaking, enlightened and entertaining”.

To accomplish this, Hughes said, society must embark now on training young people to acquire these characteristics for generations to come.

“Anybody in the world who have or meet these characteristics or criteria will make it anywhere in the world,” he said.