<p>Why are our women more academically advanced than our men? There’s a historical reason for this. Most of us have a Southern agrarian background. This meant that help was needed to work the farms that many of our ancestors lived on, whether as owners or as sharecroppers. Men could do better at the back-breaking physical work than women could, so that’s where many of them stayed, and so traditionally were used to physical labor. That ethic stuck with them during the Great Migration when they began working in factories instead. </p>
<p>Women were less useful on the farm and so many were packed off to get whatever schooling they could. That especially happened in big farm families. Unmarried and uneducated women, as in many traditional societies around the world, were a liability. </p>
<p>Flash forward and you see how we ended up here. Black women have the tradition of schooling, black men don’t. And now that blue collar work has shriveled up in the cities (look at Baltimore, or Pittsburgh, or Chicago or Detroit) it’s the sisters, with their education, that have the advantage. The brothers have to learn a whole new bag of tricks while the women don’t.</p>