Female Supremacy Articles - Page 28

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But much of this remains a resolutely middle-class problem. At the lowest end of the economic scale, women are still attempting to shrug off the yoke of oppression and inequality. Meanwhile for many men, their loss of status in the home and the workplace is twinned with a loss of confidence in themselves. Neil Oliver, the television historian who has just published Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, says that there is a conspicuous dearth of positive male role models. 'I grew up hearing tales of Ernest Shackleton and watching films like Zulu,' he says. 'The world in which I was a little boy was one of clearly defined roles for men and women and we don't have that any more, so men are struggling to readjust. Manly men have been hunted to near extinction in Britain and the concept of manliness has been outmoded. Yet the urge to be a man is a primal thing and still exists in boys today.'

In the classroom, too, boys are at risk of losing out on male role models. According to government figures for 2006, the ratio of newly qualified female to male teachers under the age of 25 was approaching seven to one. The introduction of coursework and modular exams is believed to play to traditionally female strengths ? girls tend to be more methodical while boys tend to follow high-risk strategies such as cramming the night before an exam.