Column: Plastic women vs. cardboard men

• Today's story is about what happens to women when men fail.
• Educators somehow overlooked the fact that boys pick up literacy skills later than girls.
• We're stuck with a system where many males end up l unprepared and unmotivated for college work.

Over the past decade, hundreds of articles and scores of book have chronicled "boy troubles," the odd phenomenon of boys flailing in school and men adrift in life.

That is so yesterday's story. Today's story is about what happens to women when men fail, and the storytellers are women. Look no further than The End of Men and the Rise of Women, by Hanna Rosin, and The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, by Liza Mundy.

Why shouldn't women be the ones to write about the world of failing men? Women actually read books (Checked out the men's vs. women's section in your local bookstore lately?). You can't argue with the market. If women are ruling our colleges and taking over fields such as veterinary medicine, clinical psychology and pharmacy, and well, pretty much everything other than plumbing, they might as well chronicle the demise of men.

Impact on women

Rosin and Mundy certainly get all the facts right about how this affects women. But I'm not sure they are right about what caused this dilemma.

A quick summary of Rosin's work: Plastic women and cardboard men. That means women are proving themselves flexible enough to bend with the fast-changing market forces, while cardboard-like men keep waiting in vain for the return of the economy that once favored them.

A quick summary of Mundy's work: Plastic women, plastic men. Mundy seems very sure that men really will adjust to their lesser status, that they really will start separating whites from colors as they do the family laundry.

Where I differ is that both writers leave readers with the impression that vast, immutable economic upheavals are the sole causes of these setbacks for men. My reporting, in contrast, points to a trigger that is reversible. Roughly 20 years ago, national leaders launched education reforms designed to steer more students to college. The first step was pushing stiffer literacy skills into the earlier grades. That made sense. The common denominator of any college class is the ability to read quickly and accurately and write quickly and accurately.

Tuning out

So how's that turning out? At the eighth-grade level, 37% of girls scored proficient or above in writing on a just-released federal test, compared with 18% of boys.

What happened? Educators somehow overlooked the fact that boys pick up literacy skills later than girls. When boys get slammed with early academic demands they can't handle, they tune out. They assume school is for girls, and they move on to more interesting activities, such as video games.

Now we're stuck with an education system where many males end up in their senior year of high school unprepared and unmotivated for college work. And we're surprised about the scarcity of males on the campuses of community colleges and four-year schools? We're surprised that college-educated women are taking over field after field?

Global economic changes truly are huge players. But if educators adjusted their early-grades literacy practices, a lot more boys would arrive in 12th grade ready to compete in the new economy. What educators have done can be un-done.

Education writer Richard Whitmire, a former editorial writer for USA TODAY and author of Why Boys Fail, is working on a book about Rocketship charter schools.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including ourBoard of Contributors.