Thread by @_its_not_real_

Where Are Our Boys?
They're not in Boy Scouts. [0]
They're not playing football or sports in general. [1][2]
They're leaving Greek life in college. [3]
This applies to both genders but boys dropout rate surpasses girls.
But, what if we found an org with increasing membership?

https://twitter.com/_its_not_real_/status/1840210578855338364

It would be an anomaly in this post-Bowling Alone world. Enter the National FFA Organization (formerly the Future Farmers of America). It boasts 1,027,273 members in 2024, an 8.6% from 2023.

It is also primarily an rural youth, with 60% of members living in rural areas. [4]

Until 1969 it was an organization for boys only when the gender requirement was removed at the national assembly. Until recently female participation was very low compared to male, for example, in 2006 girls were only 38% of the members. [5]

The FFA is a bit of a unique organization. It usually involves both a class within the school and extra curricular activities, something in between a pure extracurricular like sports and a class like home economics.

They raise animals, grow food, participate in live stock auctions, judge animals, and some do volunteer work. The standard uniform is somewhat formal with an FFA jacket.

The original inspiration for this story came from my parents. My mother is a principal at a rural school, over the elementary but it is a small school so she interacts with the high school principal a lot, all on the same campus.

Recently their high school principal left so she was helping the superintendent with some of the high school stuff. She was complaining about the high school girls being mean in the FFA class to the teacher.

The girls got into a physical fight and locked the teacher out of the classroom. She thinks the girls are trying to run him off. I asked what the boys thought and my dad said the majority of boys had quit.

"Why?" I asked

He thought they were tired of dealing with high school girl drama and wanted to avoid it, pointing at the fight as evidence. He further talks about animal dress up shows, making claims that there are now alternative live stock shows involving costume contests.

I could not find any evidence of this being an official FFA sanctioned activity but seems like a growing trend that is adjacent to FFA participation. Some photographic examples. [6] [7] [8]

Look at links [6] [7] [8], hardly any boys participating. Boys who are participating all look <16 yrs old to my elder eyes (could be wrong). Two of the links are from FFA related orgs/pages. So while not an official FFA event it is a clear shift in the FFA culture.

I was surprised that boys were dropping out of FFA in a very conservative rural area. When I was in high school (2004-2008) FFA was not just male coded, it was redneck as hell. The boys there went hunting, muddin, and dippin (Skoal). It was dirty.

It wasn't high status in any sense of the word. It wasn't looked down upon either, but it wasn't something you did unless you really really enjoyed that sort of thing.

Was this a wider trend or a weird isolated event in the area I grew up? Were boys being squeezed out of another historically male space?

Hard to find specific membership numbers every year, but in 2000 it had approx 450k members and by 2010 it had 509,735 members. [9] In 2017 the membership total was 669,989. [10]

As recently as 2017 the FFA was still majority male at 54%. Female membership had jumped from 38% to 46% in 11 years. [10]

In 2022 male membership no longer was a majority coming in at exactly 50%. [11] That same year the "FFA Strategic Plan" was rolled out. [13]

The FFA Strategic Plan was an effort, "to seek and promote inclusion and diversity in its membership,leadership, and staff to reflect the belief of the FFA in the value of all human beings."

This came after previous weaker diversity pushes, such, with press releases such as, "FFA Encourages Inclusion and Diversity in Agriculture" in 2019. [15]

Or the use of the classic equity meme on Facebook. [16]

Western Region Vice President Lyle Logemann made social media posts in July 2020 during BLM in the wake of George Floyd and was removed after student revolt. [14]

Then in 2023 male membership finally dropped below 50% to 48%. [12]

At the same time Corey Flournoy was named National FFA Executive in Residence for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. [17]

FFA adult staff are 61% female. [18]
FFA also has student government. I started to go through and document the state level government for every state. This was too time consuming to manually compile. I managed (in alphabetical order) to make it through Georgia before I gave up.

The trend was clear, out of the 217 offices I checked, 150 were held by female students, 69.12%. At the national government level it is 50% boys and 50% girls. [20] The candidate pool for the national offices were 23F/14M. [19]

You can check my work on the state level student government by going to each website in alphabetical order and compiling the data. They're all listed here:

Each website is different and I had to open them one at a time but I figured if the gender ratioffa.org/state-ffa-asso…

of state level offices in Alabama 77% girls then it probably isn't going to change much in other states.

So where are our boys?

I don't know. I don't think they're okay. Dropping out of society, squeezed out of spaces traditional spaces, not going to college, they're even dropping out of the work force (63.9% 2003 -> 56.6% 2023 labor participation rate). [21]

Where do we go from here? What are the recommendations? I have none. I don't know what to do except just talk about it and hope to generate some ideas. This all dovetails with demographic collapse.

https://x.com/_its_not_real_/status/1730434806062711059

I was hoping to go much more in depth with this write up but I just don't have the time. Maybe someone else will pick it up and run with it. There are a ton of these types of organizations out there experiencing seismic shifts in how many people are participating and who.

Forgot my last post with sources!

[0]reddit.com/media?url=http… - This is original research but as far as I can tell compiled from the correct data sources.
[1]forbes.com/sites/bobcook/…
[2]forbes.com/sites/bobcook/…
[3]whitmanwire.com/news/2022/04/0…
[4]ffa.app.box.com/s/lgrbxeltnzsn…
[5]nytimes.com/2006/11/16/us/…
[6] facebook.com/groups/1427419…
[7]facebook.com/photo/?fbid=69…
[8]gadyf.com/single-post/20…
[9]files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ122…
[10] agri-pulse.com/ext/resources/…
[11] resources.finalsite.net/images/v169581…
[12] ffa.app.box.com/s/lgrbxeltnzsn…
[13] ffa.app.box.com/s/bnzeoupuy22k…
[14] change.org/p/national-ffa…
[15] ffa.org/diversity-incl…
[16]facebook.com/photo.php?fbid…
[17] ffa.org/press-releases…
[18] zippia.com/national-ffa-o…
[19] facebook.com/photo/?fbid=84…
[20]ffa.org
[21] bls.gov/emp/tables/civ…

I think @PstafarianPrice @shlevy @braverius were interested in knowing when I posted this. Apologies if I remembered wrong and have tagged you into a gender discourse you did not want to see.

https://x.com/kitten_beloved/status/1648034078577537026

oh yeah I think @knrd_z was interested too.