Wake-up call: Boys are falling behind in school, college, careers

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a recent ranking of the states on women’s equality, Maine garnered high marks for a relatively small gender gap when it comes to college degree attainment. But these high marks are misleading: The education gap in Maine is small because too few men have college degrees.

WalletHub, which ranks states based on many different sorts of data, ranked Maine sixth in the country for gender equality based on three measures: workplace environment, education and political representation. The education ranking included two subcategories: the percentage of residents over age 25 with a bachelor’s degree or higher and math scores.

Maine tied for first with Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota and Vermont for the smallest gap between the percentage of men and women with bachelor’s degrees or higher (these states’ gaps were actually negative, because more women than men have degrees). All of these states boast percentages of college-educated women that beat the national average of 28.7 percent, according to 2013 census data, which WalletHub used for its comparisons. But in three of these states — Maine, Alaska and North Dakota — a below-average percentage of men have bachelor’s degrees. In Maine, 26.9 percent of men over 25 have bachelor’s degrees, compared with 29 percent of women. In 2013, the national average for men was 29 percent.'