MIND INCARCERATION

Looking at incarceration rates by gender, there is no escaping the fact that men are imprisoned more than women—and it’s not even close. According to data released by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in March 2018, 93.1 percent of inmates are male, while only 6.9 percent are female.

There are several reasons for that, says Dr. Steven Saunders.

The genders process their inner worlds differently. Men often act out, while women shut down.

“There’s a private part of men that is only accessible by ourselves—it’s our own subjective understanding of who we are,” he says. “A man’s inner world is a collection of thoughts, good memories, and traumatic events of what has happened to him in his lifetime. They all connect and create a sense of self-concept. A man’s inner world can be extremely tortuous. They may have a series of traumas that nobody knows about, and they’re struggling with that or carrying it with them. It can be really difficult to manage and may force men to lash out.”

Men also commit a higher percentage of serious and violent crimes, such as murder, aggravated assault, and robbery. Moreover, he says, women often receive shorter sentences for the same crimes. “Men receive 63 percent longer sentences on average than women do, and women are twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted,” Sonja Starr, a University of Michigan Law School professor, writes in a research paper titled, “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases.”

“Even in a situation where you have a man and a woman who commit the same crime together, it’s the man who takes the fall for it,” Dr. Saunders says. “This is especially true if they have children together. The justice system takes it easy on the mother because they want her to remain in her children’s lives rather than have them orphaned. I used to work for the Federal Bureau of Prisons and saw this type of gender disparity all the time.”

Men lagged behind women seeking higher education for four decades, and the gap widens each year, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Females outnumbered males in U.S. college enrollment every year since 1979. NCES estimates for this fall show that about 11.7 million women will enroll in college compared to just fewer than 9 million men. Projections through 2026 indicate the number of women enrollees will rise at a faster rate than the men’s.

Locally, the University of Central Florida has the highest public college enrollment in the country. Current enrollment breaks down to 36,324 women and 29,859 men, including more women than men in graduate studies (5,163 to 3,563); the numbers in medical school are split about evenly, according to the school’s website.

International studies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development examined gender differences in education. One study suggests girls get an early advantage over boys in reading, and boys never catch up, leading to a general “anti-education” attitude that’s embedded well before college age.

Some male teens see college as a high-cost, low-benefit risk, and prefer to jump into the workforce and make money immediately. Many male-dominated vocations, such as electrician, mechanic, and plumber, are high-paying and don’t require college.

When they do attend college, men graduate at a lower rate (56 percent) than women (62 percent), the NCES reports as of 2015-16. Overall, about 34.6 percent of the female population in the United States had a four-year degree as of 2017, compared to 33.7 percent for males, according to statista.com.

During 2015-16, women also received 59 percent of all master’s degrees, and 53 percent of all doctor’s degrees, which include doctoral, medical, dental, and law degrees in the NCES classification.

Mass shootings have infiltrated American culture like toxic sewage. Mental health is often fingered as the main culprit. Interestingly, a 2013 Oxford University study found that women are 40 percent more likely than men to develop a mental health condition. Yet, between 1982 and April 2018, females initiated only three mass shootings.

So, why are most mass shooters male? One big problem stems from societal expectations of how men are supposed to react to stress. Men are trapped in an outdated model of masculinity, and they don’t know how to express how they feel being trapped.

“Our society has never been good at giving men a place to feel and express their emotions and the range of those emotions,” Dr. Saunders says. “Men are taught to suck it up and walk it off. I have an emotion chart that I give to men to help them identify how they’re feeling and name what these different feelings are.

The more you’re able to name your different emotions and feelings, the more access you have to them, the easier they are to control, and the more likely you are to express them. If you’re able to express those emotions, you are healthier psychologically.”

Historically, men have scored higher than women on IQ tests, but yet again, this is another changing trend. Women are scoring higher than men on IQ tests, according to data from New Zealand researcher James Flynn.

Based on a “substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores” from various parts of the world since 1930, everyone has been getting higher IQ points, but women are gaining faster than men. Evidence indicates it’s the result of modern living and women assuming larger roles in all parts of professional and home life.