As for the performance of boys in school let's remember that a couple of generations ago boys were outperforming girls in K12. The there were complaints that schools were biased against girls, all sorts of changes have been made to be "girl friendly" and "boy hostile" and suddenly we have girls outperforming boys. The changes to the schools are where we should start looking for the lowered performance of boys.
Oh and one of the things used to justify changing schools was the claim that boys got significantly more attention than girls. But what they hid was that the extra attention was *negative* attention.