Slashdot Mirror
Why Girls Do Better At School
An anonymous reader writes "A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.' Cornwell went on about what effect this has had now that education has become more pervasive: 'We seem to have gotten to a point in the popular consciousness where people are recognizing the story in these data: Men are falling behind relative to women. Economists have looked at this from a number of different angles, but it's in educational assessments that you make your mark for the labor market. Men's rate of college going has slowed in recent years whereas women's has not, but if you roll the story back far enough, to the 60s and 70s, women were going to college in much fewer numbers. It's at a point now where you've got women earning upward of 60 percent of the bachelors' degrees awarded every year.'"
"You tread heavily, but you speak the truth."
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
When it comes to girls learning, their styles of learning tend to be more aligned with the school structure we have in our current education system. Boys have a tendency to "Like Learning" later in life, once they have a better understanding of their physical world. This does not mean Girls are smarter than Boys, or the other way around, but they are just Different from each other, just as a Apple is Different than an Orange, and we should not try to do a one to one comparison.
Last year my son (diagnosed with mild autism) was required to spend 1/3 of his time doing group work in math class and consistently was graded poorly for these activities. In my mind doing group work in pre-algebra is of questionable value and useless for boys.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I teach highschool math and physics, and by far, a disproportinate amount of my "better students" are female. I will not go as far to say that they are more or less smart (choose whichever difinition of smart that you like) than the male students, but the results among myself and teacher friends from across the region do not lie. The majority of female students I have can solve the assigned problems more accurately, and quickly than the their male counterparts. Is it attention span? Hormones? I can't say. It's merely an observation.
They don't have penius that is thinking "boobs,sex,boobs,sex" , very hard to study when you have something like that in your life.
I should probably read TFA, but this is Slashdot. So, uhh, if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?
Let me guess. This is all going to come down to some kind of thing where when the girls underperform, we change the school, and when the boys underperform, we change the boys.
To try to keep a rant short, let's see why boys do so poorly. Could it have anything to do with rampant gender discrimination at the primary level and being forcefed feminist nonsense and guilt-tripping at the secondary level?
Jeebus. I remember many times when we did projects in class in elementary that the girls were given more options for what they could do than boys. Why? Well, everyone knows girls are more responsible than boys. One year even it was a school-wide policy that during indoor recess, the girls had the option to go to the gym to play basketball or volleyball, but the boys had to stay in their classroom.
Hell, I even remember one teacher I had who once decided to punish all the boys because of a few in the back who were acting up. Why? Well, we had it coming. I challenged the teacher about how it was fair to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong, and I'll never forget the response. "You're just as well-behaved as a girl, but it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the boys if I let you off." Holy shit.
How about if we just get rid of gender stereotyping and discrimination? How about if we stop imprinting girls with math phobia? How about if we stop treating boys like they're already rapists and thugs?
Or is that just asking too damned much?
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Before even clicking on the link, I knew this was an American study. Schools in the US, especially elementary schools, are massively dominated by women. Boys do generally have more difficulty sitting still for long periods, and need to use up their physical energy. This used to be handled by recess periods and sports. They could run around, play games, be competitive, get a bit tired - and be ready the next period of sitting still.
This is no longer allowed. Competitive sports are out, even pretty tame things like tag or dodgeball. Playgrounds have to be ultra-safe, which means utterly boring. Because virtually all teachers and administrators in elementary schools are women, there is very little understanding of boys' needs. They are expected to behave like perfect little...girls.
Is it any wonder they do poorly in school?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
There was a survey a while back that I heard some NPR commentators bantering about a while back (few years ago, tried to find a link but nothing is popping up)
We all know the standard stereotype is that men are threatend by smart/hard working women, look down at them, don't consider them good mates etc....
What they were finding was that these attridues were becoming less common in younger boys, and younger boys have been,more and more, indicating that they find intelligence and hard work attractive in women and don't really see just a "housewife" as a woman's place.
Leading me to remember an old quote about scientific theories and thinking it may apply to social ones:
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I can tell you that many of the best GPA students at my school were some of the dumbest in the class. They were good at regurgitating data, but their comprehension was horrible. That's why they scored low on tests that required logical analysis. They just couldn't take the leap from one thought to another.
It's like an old co-worker of mine that a week after passing his Network+ certification, he truthfully asked me what a router was. He had no clue. He was just good at memorizing questions, and he spent a few weeks memorizing a ton of practice tests. He gamed the system. I pity any one who hires him thinking that he has any of the skills he's certified for.
There are many reasons I see girls do better in school on the whole. I think one of the main reasons though is that the majority of teachers tend to be women. These are women who took getting an education seriously, and often times know what worked for them to learn the subject. I think those teachers are often able to reach those that are similar to them. The interesting thing to me though is that I think competitiveness rises for the top spots in classes frequently from the boys still. They'll do anything to be number 1, and sometimes that hard work pays off. Often times though you see a couple boys clustered in the top ten still, with a significant portion of girls following that before more boys. I think the last 6 years of valedictorians in my school district have all been girls.
With only two other male teachers at the junior high campus I teach at, a science teacher and a PE teacher, I really do think that a lot of boys get left behind in learning styles.
When I was young all-boy and all-girl schools were going away. The feminists argued that it was discriminatory against girls.
Then later the feminists started arguing that girls had to be separated from boys in class because they were intimidated by the boys.
Frankly I think single sex classrooms would be better. Taking away some of the sexual distractions. At the same time there is something to be said for mixed ed sex. Maybe what I would do is build all-boy and all-girl schools next to each other.
What about men like me, who swear they were born a lesbian trapped in a man's body?
Seems like I get the best of both worlds, I'm smarter than all the women, but have all the natural rule-following traits of actual women.
Plus the added benefit of being heterosexual gives me tremendously more opportunities to pass my traits on to future generations :)
I had a 2.8 GPA in college and did a presentation on Smalltalk based mainly on the "blue book" for a programming languages class. Our de facto departmental valedictorian, who had pushing on a 4.0, was exactly what you described in terms of the waterworks and charm. She had to get someone to teach her Python because she couldn't learn it in a 1-2 week period well enough to write even basic code in it (same girl who after a whole semester of C++ took several hours to implement the most basic version of "cat" in C).
Sure, because everything you do not agree with is trolling. The poster has a strong opinion about something that is different of yours, which he is entitled to have. Argue against it or stay quiet. You are the troll here.
The economist in me says: "If the market could truly bear women being paid 20% less than men, then employers would only hire women." All businesses are looking for any means to cut costs.
No, I'm not saying women should be paid less or do an inferior job; I'm saying that old statistic is grossly over-used and over-applied.
If the genders were reversed on this topic, it would have been labeled as sexist. But since it's the guys on the short end of the study, it's okay.
Maybe I should start support groups, activist organizations, and demand equality?
I disagree with quite a bit with what the GP said, but I do agree with teachers cutting them more slack. It's like speeding tickets. It's been my observation that females are a lot more likely to get a warning instead of a ticket from a cop than a guy. Girls are more likely to get emotional over the grades.
Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress), or maybe it gives them additional incentive to use emotional manipulation. It's hard to tell.
At what point is writing an inflammatory post with nothing to back it up (his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so") trolling?
If it's just an "opinion" then there's nothing to argue against, because he's quoted no actual facts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It doesn't seem terribly smart to me to destroy your own future because you don't follow the rules and don't work harder.
This is not a fair statement to make about children. Kids do not have the ability to look that far into the future. Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.
The best students are the ones whose parents do a good job of instilling values which will help them later in life. Almost any kid left to their own devices is just going to want to play.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Are you serious? GP's post is almost entirely blatant, over-the-top sexism. Replace female and male with a couple of different races and maybe it will be easier for you to see.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Charts? I wanna see pictures.
That does sound kinda sexist, probably because it is.
I too was a lazy screwup that passed with 'b's in every class while sleeping through it and doing no homework. That was because I was a genius and everything came naturally. I've only ever met 1 person that I can unquestionably say was my intellectual superior, and she was a chick.
And all of that has nothing to do with which side has the higher average intelligence.
Girls are not smarter because the smartest person I know is a chick.
Guys are not smarter because most of the geniuses I know, myself included, are guys.
Even if there are more male smart people in my male dominated field of CS/Math, that does not mean that men are smarter either, it is biased by the rarity of women in this field. It would be like going to a construction crew and trying to figure out if men are dumber than women because there are more of them there.
Women on average do better at education and common intellectual jobs.
Why inflammatory? He is just stating his opinion, which happens to be the same opinion many people have about this subject. He is given his anecdotal experience as fact. If you want statistical data, just look for it and you will find it. Choose any field, anything at all, anywhere, at any time of human civilization, at the top women are from rare to non existent. Do you need more evidence than that?
Understand that in average both sexes are not equally fit for every task and equally gifted in everything is not sexism it is lucidity. Sexism is to think that a member of one sex is always better than a member of the other in anything, which is obviously false.
I concur. I went to a very wealthy public high school where there were multiple "tracks" one could be in mathematics. Your placement in one of these "tracks" depended on the teacher's recommendations from 6-8th grade. I did no homework, never raised my hand, never studied and still pulled down B+ averages through innate ability. Frankly, I was bored by the material. I was placed in lower tracks by the teachers. Meanwhile these girls who tested at C levels but stayed after school every day, kissed ass had tutors bought by their parents were placed in the advanced tracks.
To this day I am extremely biter about the outcome. I had to take extra courses and summer classes to get myself back into the AP tracks in high school. I went on to graduate with honors in mathematics and received a PhD in Computer Science. I imagine the girls who struggled with 6th grade mathematics material aren't still in technical fields but hey, they were the ones who "worked hard" and accepted the system so they got accelerated.
I once read a summary of a study that indicated this is somewhat wrong. Boys and girls both have roughly the same averages, but boys have a higher standard deviation. This means there are more "smart" boys and more "dumb" boys; but boys aren't smarter overall. It did mean that if you asked, "How many of [gender] have [intelligence at some high sigma]?" it would indicate there were more boys, unless you were looking for people around the median. No idea if this was ever corroborated but I thought it was interesting.
Time for a Calvin Coolidge classic:
I don't see the additional bachelor's degrees or the additional brains as a guarantee of anything. The genius who flunks out of college because he discovers for the first time he actually has to study and actually has no idea how to do it is almost proverbial.
his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so"
Actually, no.
He posted the application of Occam's Razor to to situation described in TFA. Instead of grasping at straws and coming up with insanely convoluted reasons why girls "look" better but perform worse in school, he bluntly stated the most straightforward explanation.
That doesn't make his explanation correct, but class grades describe performance viewed through the social filter of the professor; test scores have no such filter.
Or... Girls socialize better. Film at 11.
Asians in general are natural rule-followers. They do well in school because they follow the rules, work harder, pay attention more, etc. Teachers also cut them a lot more slack, especially when they lay on the charm or waterworks.
But whites are still smarter.
And I'd much rather be smarter in the end. Following the rules, paying attention in class, and kissing your teachers' asses can only carry you so far without real intelligence to back it up. And most of the A-student Asians I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me, the caucasian, on my laziest B-student day. If you need someone to get the grade, fine--go to the Asian. But if you need someone to get you to the moon--your best bet is still a white person.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, as I'm sure many of you politically-correct pansies will be falling over yourselves to point out.
Will this get modded to +5 like the parent post? Why or why not?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Girls in general are natural rule-followers.
I submit my co-workers as a counterexample. Anything but rule followers. Nearly every woman I have worked with wants to do things her way and her way only, standards be damned.
That being said, the problem here is gender discrimination.
What do we do with this study?
The narrative here is that since girls are getting more college degrees that they're somehow better. Why do they earn less? Why do they do more poorly at standardized testing?
It could be that percent of degrees being awarded to women is a bad metric. I'd suspect it's simply because higher learning is simply more accessible to women. Let's skip over the gender-specific scholarships, because frankly they're probably not significant. How many women end up clashing swords with their families over trivial matters? How many parents try to push their daughters out to the streets instead of letting them stay at home while they finish a degree?
There's a whole lot of crap that's being missed by this troll story.
But boys are still smarter.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
That is the big fucking elephant in the room that gets missed every time here. We want gender equality, right? We want career women, right? What about house-husbands? Oops, can't have that, sounds too much like homosexuality and weakness.
Women are never going to be equal until we get rid of gender stereotypes. And I mean really equal, as in being required to sign up for selective service, as in protecting boys' genitals from mutilation as well as girls' genitals. And that will never happen as long as we continue to judge, categorize, and discriminate against our children by their body parts.
Socialization starts in the cradle. Are boys and girls different? Yes. I couldn't be transgendered if male and female brains were biologically the same. What that doesn't mean is that we can take women who have been told from day one that their biggest achievement in life will be having children and compare them to men who have been told from day one that if they don't get a real job it's the gutter for them.
The way forward in my view is to find some middle ground. Of course, I'd be happy just extending that same threat of "in the gutter" to girls and taking away benefits for getting pregnant (welfare, subsidized housing, medicaid etc). Of course put in the exemptions for rape, etc.
Either that or let's just give up on this whole idea of gender equality if we can't move past the men are expendable meme vs. protect women so they can get pregnant, fuck all who pays for the pregnancy and child care.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
B's? I see they're dropping the bar for genius.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
There's no insight here, no data. The parent just spews his own feeling that "girls are rule followers" and "boys are smarter". The scientists with actual data found that the qualities were actually "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization", but don't let science get in the way of your shit headed misogyny.
And yet this anti-science post makes it instantly to +5, why? Because it strokes the ego of the Slashdot anti-female crowd who think that feminists are coming to take their balls away.
Too funny, all those requests for citations and your retorts are exactly the same, devoid of any proof but your belief.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
"Most generalizations are false, including this one." -- Samuel Clemens
Anytime someone claims that group X is better than group Y at task Z, I usually call bullshit, and when the metric by which the standard is measured is a purely subjective and arbitrary one, doubly so.
People who generalize tend to do so because it absolves them of the need to apply critical thinking skills.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
In average races are not equally fit for everything either. Most long range runners at the top, for example, are black people from African countries, for example. There are exceptions, but the vast majority follows the rule. That may applied to everything. There is no motive why a given group should be in average equally capable of doing any task as another one, except by a very unlikely coincidence.
Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress)
Anecdotal evidence, but:
Social competition. For females, it's much, much more brutal and vicious, and happens earlier, than for males. In the schools I attended, girls were clique-ish and segregating themselves by the second grade. That shit didn't start happening for boys until around seventh grade, as I recall.
Girls who did badly? We ostracized them, led in fact by members of their own gender.
Boys? Nobody cared who did what, and everybody - everybody - loved the scholastically inept but hilarious class clown.
I'd need a doctorate to even begin to describe the convoluted social pecking order they fairer sex had set up for themselves, but for whatever reason, doing terrible at school seemed to be the quickest way to be thrown to the bottom of the heap. I actually suspect it may have something to do with primarily having female teachers at young ages - it perhaps sets a certain expectation. I'd be curious to see if there's any difference in the lower grades where male teachers are the primary instructors.
But school was a goddamned nightmare, and I'm not going through that again. :p
questioning feminism and state sponsored discrimination is not hatred.
It could have something to do with the predominance of women teaching kindergarten through eighth grade. My kids didn't have a male teacher until they got into eighth grade and only one. Most reading assignments tended to be biased towards the girls, little to interest the boys. Schools are reducing physical activity time (recess), so boys tend to be a lot more restless and disruptive in class.
I have both girls and boys, and these are observations from just two schools; but I believe the observations to be descriptive of the problem with boys. I haven't looked at the stats for college entrance in 2012, but last time I looked the percentage of young men entering college as Freshmen nationally was only around 35%. Boys are definitely being under served in schools.
You're using the fact that women didn't receive the same education as men until.... well, the 1970s in the US as an excuse to continue in your misogyny. Not to mention that until about the 1920s, women's jobs were housewives, house maids and possibly cooks. After that, it expanded to secretary.
So yeah, you're not really doing well in your argument.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So in short, you were a lazy fuck and got left behind, and they worked hard and got ahead? Wow, I'm shocked by that outcome. I'm sure once you join the workforce, you'll find that's totally not the case, and that people will reward you for your innate ability to pull B-level work with no effort.
Totally.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A very small proportion of the population have always been responsible for most of the creativity. As such, your observation indicates that there is a higher proportion of men amongst the smartest people, but it doesn't say anything about the general population.
Men have a broader distribution than women in just about everything. If this is also the case for smarts, that would give the same observation. It would also mean more men are at the bottom of society, which is the case.
While it is true that he's supporting his argument with anecdotal observations, and he is a bit heavy handed, I'd say it's a pretty common observation.
/. posters that identify the same thing and it'll always be anecdotal, sexist and untrue.
I've noted pretty much the same thing going through school. My older sister and I were in the same Chem class at one point and were lab partners. I did the work, she got the A I got the B. It was very clear comparing our tests and labs, where we had extremely similar answers, that the teacher preferred her work to mine even though her work was mine with nicer hand writing. The end result is I finished university, got married and have a great job and she's a college drop out and depends on her boyfriend to support her, despite her perfect GPA being double mine all through school.
I'm not saying men in general are smarter than women, it just strikes me that in the general sense maybe we have different strengths. Grading in the school system favors the strengths of women and practical application favors the strengths of men.
I've also observed is several cases teachers, epically male ones, are more likely to provide help to female students as opposed to male students. This could have some affected on why girls seem to do better in a controlled environment where regurgitation of knowledge and complying with a superiors is more valued over practical application and challenging authority.
Of course it doesn't really matter, there could be thousands
You have all the evidence in the world, you just need to stop blindfolding yourself. Women are responsible for very little creation of about anything in this world, no matter which time span, location or field or you decide to analyze. Sure, there are exceptions, as in everything, but as a rule women are consumers, not creators.
If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.
Women historically have been culturally handicapped by the need to birth and rear children, which consumes extraordinary amounts of time and energy. They have also been physically dominated by men due to sexual dimorphism. It is only in the last century that women have even been generally enfranchised in society. Since childbirth and rearing is much easier now, we are seeing the gaps between women and men close drastically in many fields. Eventually, as we no longer have a need for physically powerful men to protect their female counterparts from like, bears and shit, sexual dimorphism might even be bred out of the species (though it might take thousands of years).
Also, your comment of "as a rule women are consumers, not creators" is clearly ridiculous. There are many, many women in art, music, and literature who create extraordinary masterpieces. These fields have been historically more open to women than STEM and others, so the gap between male and female participation is narrower. There are also numerous brilliant, creative women in STEM fields...far too many to write them off as "exceptions".
As for learning, do you not understand that regardless of all the similarities between male and female, the biggest difference is that all of our cells, including brain cells, are floating in a chemical soup that is greatly different between the two sexes. If you don't understand the effect of environment on gene expression...
Don't allow the collective stupid belief of sexual equality to stifle any logical thought. Use science, not your pissant societal indoctrination.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
females are a lot more likely to get a warning instead of a ticket from a cop than a guy.
This is arguably more the fault of the (about 80% male) cops, who are sexually attracted to women and let this fact affect their decisions.
There is one very large fundamental difference. "black" and "white" are socially perceived categories very loosely based on some genetic traits that relate to appearance.
Gender is a legitimate biological difference that has a massive impact biologically, chemically, and socially. It isn't a made up category based on some arbitrary perception of appearance but a real tangible distinction. I am of course not accounting for the oddball chromosomal flukes that sometimes pop up that can't be easily fit in either category.
But even on the race factor. Take out the political winds of today and the social taboo of suggesting a difference. In the US at least african slaves were literally breed for physical performance while the "white" counterparts succeeded in breeding on different standards particularly economic success which loosely correlates to management and leadership ability. The result is that those with african american heritage have a predisposition to a great count of high twitch muscle fibers that give them athletic advantages (it could be argued that since most african american's today actually are mixed to some degree that they may well enjoy the benefits of both breeding systems). This could well be argued to give them an advantage when performing manual labor.
It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.
Manual labor may not be highly valued in our society at present so skills there might be somehow be perceived as negative but "rule following" and social skills are actually extremely prized and rewarded in some areas. It could be argued that it highly desirable to have this in every level of management short of the CEO. While the highly intelligent/skilled lone wolf males are more suited to being the CEO he is only one executive. In most other cases you'd want them to be the talent that actually wows your clients and works solutions or the lower tiers of management that are effectively working in the same capacity using their minions as tools.
While it was a decent idea, the trouble is, they went wholeheartedly with the effort for pushing women up, but they dropped the ball severely on boys/men, and it is showing NOW in a large fashion.
Trouble is, it isn't politically correct to take male sides on issues (especially if they are Caucasian), and increase funding and programs to push our young men like we have the young women for the past decade or two...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
At what point is writing an inflammatory post with nothing to back it up (his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so") trolling?
If it's just an "opinion" then there's nothing to argue against, because he's quoted no actual facts.
No arguing against? Maybe if you are living in the 19th century. It's not an opinion. It's irrational sexism, put into matter of fact phrasing. According to Logical Fallacy Bingo, this is "Wishful Thinking." What amazes me is that anyone would believe otherwise.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?
It would be racist (and un-scientific) to say that whites are poor runners or blacks are poor swimmers in general based on the sports record. It wouldn't be racist to simply point out the sports record factually. To make a hypothesis on possible physiological explanations of the difference gets into a gray area that's a hot point of ethical debate in science, example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Ethics_of_research
But in general I would agree with this:
There are differences in all people, which are highlighted across ethnic and gender lines due to both biological and cultural factors. Discussing these differences should be okay, as racism and sexism is not in noticing the differences, it is in hating those who are different. We should be able to embrace each other in our differences without bigotry.
Except I would say that racism/sexism is in hating or discriminating against those who are different. Let's say for the sake of argument that it were statistically proven that black people are better runners on average and physiological reasons for it were scientifically proven. To use that information to discriminate against non-black runners when assembling a team would be racist.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Actually this article doesn't indicate that girls are better students. It clearly states that males are doing better on the tests and therefore were better students by the only definition that counts, their ability to absorb, comprehend, and apply the knowledge they were studying. The article indicates that girls are being inappropriately given grades they can't back up while boys are being inappropriately given lower grades than they deserve.
In other words, the article says more about the deficiency in teachers grading methods and criteria than it does about either girls or boys.
Also, in my experience (in private industry) those who don't ask for raises don't get them. This is true for both men and women. So maybe it's not so much that companies want to pay women less, maybe they just aren't on average as assertive as men in asking for raises.
-Xoltri
I personally wouldn't blame anyone like that. Busy work in public school is seemingly almost always completely worthless and a waste of time. This isn't always true of real work.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Err...there are different levels of abilities, in general that seem to go with race too, just like with sex.
Trouble is, we're becoming too politically correct these days to speak any truths, if they even hint at being based on race or sex.
It is one thing to discriminate based on sex or race, but entirely another to discuss inherit capabilities, strengths or weaknesses that do seem associated with with sex or race. Sadly, even bring up the possibility and you get shot down immediately for sexism or racism....those terms have become blanket methods for stifling even basic discussions on subjects that should be looked into and be able to be freely discussed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Test scores have a huge filter. Since at least the 70s/80s that filter has been widely studied and debated. The only thing op used occams razor for was to cut up his lines of meth.
I've heard about it filtering on wealth or region, but I've yet to hear it filter in gender.
You can be a B student and still be a genius. Einstein did very poorly in several subjects, most notably because he was board and didn't apply himself.
The way the grading system is setup doesn't favor critical thinking and practical application, it favors memorization and regurgitation, which for many is boring and leads to easy distraction, in-turn leading to poor grades. You can take a lot of those people any give them self study projects and they'll excel, but the school system favors people who are better at taking test and following directions.
If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.
Why not? What proof do you have that this is not the case? Why would two distinct groups that share many biological differences be equally fit for everything, especially considering evidence points to the opposite direction. Why try to find convoluted explanations based on excuses that do not apply anymore if a simpler more logical explanation is available?
I understand that you want to believe in this impossible "equality" you indoctrinated yourself with, but that is simply not true. Equal rights between men and women are no more or less than fair and are a great conquest of our civilization, but that does not extend to pretend we are equally able at everything. That is silly.
I'm not even that old but I can remember within my lifetime that it was just considered common-sense knowledge that obviously boys outperformed girls in school, and transparently had more of the traits of "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization". Yes, in the college math classes I currently teach most often the best work is being done by girls. But to look at that and say that there's some intrinsic property of girls that makes them more school-oriented is the most tunnel-visioned, provincial bullshit that I've read in some time.
The best comment I've seen so far is that the character of schools has changed, i.e.: over-protectiveness, lack of recess, rough sports, physical activity. There's some clear changes in schooling that have likely made a difference in the very recent past. The other thing I'd say is that all my acquaintances today let their children run around uncontrolled and screaming all the time, which is not something I ever saw growing up (i.e., restaurant last week: two separate families kids under the tables, pulling on curtains, handprints all over the mirrored walls, etc.). In the past boys got some real serious discipline; now I'd say that seems to be reduced, and perhaps they suffer more for it.
When I graduated from high school the top 5 students were all boys as I recall. When my sister graduated from the same school two years later, 7 of the top 10 were girls. Of course that's anecdotal, but it broadly seems to synch up with the sea-change that I've seen in my short life.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think we need to ask why girls have a better attitude towards learning. Speaking as a teacher, I think that I can suggest a couple of factors and examples of why this is an important question.
TLDR: schools and schooling is overwhelmingly female oriented, and does not adapt to the needs of boys (nor anyone, really).
Schools, particularly primary (elementary for my American friends) schools are female dominated and, unfortunately, this leads to problems for boys. I taught in a school recently where I was the only male teacher at the school where there were some issues for boys. Whether there was a causative relationship or not is open to question, but the boys at the school were wild, and their achievement was substantially lower than the girls on several measures. I (simply because I was a male) was seen as the solution to an ongoing behavioural crisis among the boys in the older grades because I was seen as a role model as a boy who was interested in learning, but I think that by middle school, where I teach, it's too late for that to have much effect.
In fact, against the more influential male public role models who seem to be more interested in sport, driving, etc., than anything school-related, my effect would have been minimal (and I argued this point prior to my appointment, and my position was confirmed time after time through my appointment - in fact that failing was attributed to me which was fun). I have seen at other schools attempt to conflate an interest in sport with an interest in school by involving local sports people in reading programs at the school. The sports people come in to the school and inadvertently confirm students' beliefs, that sport and reading do not mix much. But it's a fun novelty, I suppose.
The other problem with female dominated schools is that the curriculum becomes more female dominated. At least in my experience, boys do have shorter attention spans, and do seem to have more kinaesthetic or visual approaches to learning (against girls, who more often seem to have auditory learning styles more suited to the "stand-and-deliver" lecture approach to teaching). Teaching in a single sex boys' class requires shorter lessons with more emphasis on doing stuff than discussing stuff, and this doesn't suit the approaches that a lot of teachers want to use.
Finally, there's a belief that boys are bad, whether this is explicitly stated or not, and, equally, that we should be easier on "boys being boys". In my work, I visited a school and sat through a presentation given by Year 1 students on school rules. Which was hilarious for a whole bunch of reasons, but most notably in the way that the activity seems to have been presented to the students. They were providing examples of good and bad behaviour. The teacher had chosen to tell the students to make a girl doing something good, and a boy doing something bad. The students then got up and use male pronouns for describing one scenario (where a student does something wrong) and female pronouns for describing the other (when a student does something right). The teacher corrected a student (a girl actually) twice when she said that she had drawn a girl doing something wrong, which had me on the verge of heckling the stupid woman.
As to being soft on "boys being boys", I believe strongly that we need to instil a sense of honour among boys. I had a Year 6 student a couple of years ago who incessantly physically and verbally bullied younger students and girls in the playground. I constantly brought him up on it, but was always held back from applying the school's discipline policy because "he doesn't have any great male role models", "you know his parents are really strict", or "he's just a bit energetic". The worst excuse that I heard from a colleague was that a girl he had bullied had to "share part of the blame" because she "instigated" the situation by talking to him (it's like a "she asked it by dressing that way" defence in rape cases). Over and over excuses were made for him by other staff su
Instead you'd rather mouth the mantra of the pro-masculine individualist agenda as you arrogantly proclaim your superiority over the lesser cattle.
Maybe it's not hatred, maybe it's just prideful self-delusion.
Truth be told, I didn't get A's in languages, it was only last year that I grasped what a syllable was.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The proof for a systemic, culturally reenforced feminist counterpart to your accusation exists in the law and the growing malaise towards men and boys in western culture these days. A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious. Sadly, it is, for the most part, men who are at fault for this, men who've been convinced to feel 'male guilt' who then pass the laws and decree pro female bias in their organizations in attempts to 'prove' just how much of a feminist they are. It it sad they've internalized this insecurity and self-hatred as they assume the guilt because of having a penis. Basically it's stockholm syndrome exacerbated by misapplied notions of chivalry.
There is nothing wrong with an individualist agenda. You support it for girls and women, don't you? All that 'my body my right' (yet somehow his responsibility) and 'I don't need a man' egocentricity isn't individualist?
It has not been culturally "cool" to be smart, for many decades.
There was an improvement in this situation during the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's - but our culture, particularly in the USA, has shifted back towards macho posturing, and money-earning, as the primary values. Much of "being smart" has to do with whether an individual nurtures an inherent intellectual capability, or whether they focus their time and energy on "other priorities" (social, religious, family, financial, athletic, etc.).
I think that a huge amount of intellectual talent in this country is wasted, because of this shift in priorities.
Ultimately - people should have the right to choose an interest that they want. I don't think that it's possible or constructive to try to "Engineer" our culture. I think that most of our past idolization of intellectualism came out of our cold-war fear of being technically inferior to the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
(and also - as demonstrated by Germany, the Nazis).
We spent a HUGE amount of effort trying to specifically ENGINEER this cultural change. (and we were successful, in the short-term, but in the long-term, there has been a backlash. Hasn't there?) - We created NASA, DARPA, we had guys like Von Braun and Disney collaborating on publicly-funded propaganda films on educating our population about our future in space exploration and colonization. This inspired two generations of Americans to become scientists and engineers. We leapt so far forward, so quickly. But obviously, we were unable to sustain that. (there is no technical reason for that.)
Engineers and scientists have proposed solutions to these issues; sustainable energy, population control - but the "cool" people objected. Now, we abdicate control back to Nature. Maybe the females, who seem to no longer be constrained by the "macho" socialization, will figure this shit out.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In areas where males and females compete in separate tracks, female standards are ALWAYS lower than male standards - for example sports, the military, emergency response. In areas where the two are forced onto the same field (for example - jobs, education), the standard for EVERYONE is lowered or changed to suit the weakest performer. In practice, this results in a situation akin to a male runner being forced to carry extra weight to slow him down to the female standard. Perhaps this results in a nice tidy "equality" of outcome but it surely costs the person who is hamstrung to the lower standard. This is what you see in schools. Schools have been re-engineered to a standard that fits females far better than males. The fact that we actually DRUG our male children with things like Ritalin just to get them to sit through a school day should be indicative of a serious problem. Most males sleep their way through K12 because they can ) and increasingly in university as well). Ask a world class male runner to walk a course to make it fair to the women and see how long he lasts before he drops out from disgust. In education and in the work force, males are dropping out. Success at the male pace and level is absolutely hamstrung in this society. So where does a male who can't use his natural strengths to achieve accomplishment go? To the last great male space: the couch and the XBox. Where are our males right now? On the couch with the XBox. We have even had numerous social commentaries on this VERY FACT (while of course completely sidestepping the TRUE reason). This study is a joke. All it does is identify that males are bored performing to the female standard. Big surprise.
He wasn't lazy, just bored. Most smart people that I know do horrible in school. My brother was failing 9th grade math, so my mom went and complained and got him put into 12th grade AP math and he got As.. Go figure.
I am very similar. I can't keep concentration on boring stuff unless I drug myself up with ADD meds, but then I lose my creative ability to problem solve, which seems to stem from my ADD.
I've had some fun talks with the Dr who gave me my ADD meds in college. He had a PHD in that kind of stuff and he told me it is very common for people with ADD to do poorly in boring stuff, but do extremely well in that which interests them.
Different people have different abilities and boys tend to vary a lot more than girls. Teaching processes that are good for girls tend to be bad for boys. Boys need more interaction.
Next thing you know is they'll start giving boys estrogen birth control and wonder why it doesn't do the same thing as it does in girls. One size doesn't fit all.
So whites can't be the victims of racism? Males can't be the victims of sexism? You're seriously saying that?
You're the typical feminist. You whine about how there aren't enough woman lawyers, CEOs, and other white-collar, high paying jobs; but you're not out there picketing because they're aren't enough woman miners, crab boat fishers, and oil rig workers because those are physically hard and aren't glamorous.
What you want isn't equality, you want superiority.
Except women's lack of representation at the highest levels of government, business, etc. is used as a justification to give all women advantageous treatment, while poor male performance on any level is ignored as normal, or even used as a justification for punitive measures
It's one explanation, but it's only one.
My explanation: Women tend to be more even. You get fewer geniuses, but fewer total morons as well. Look at lions - male lions are pretty much 'all or nothing'. They have to risk it all in order to mate and have offsprings. Females just need to gather enough food to feed themselves and their kits. Male lions, when presented with evidence of MULTIPLE male lions in their territory, will still jump in to attack. Female lions, presented with evidence of multiple female lions in the same territory, will go get her sisters.
I don't read AC A human right
this points to the real problem that this discussion should be looking into. I had similar issues, because I would ask the teachers if the goal was to learn the material or to do the work. I didnt do the work, but could pass the tests. I was viewed as a malcontent and actually asked to drop out of school. I was actually trying to get into the challenging courses because I was bored in the standard levels, but couldnt get reccomendations to move up because of poor scores. I consistently had very low participation and homework grades, but had very high test scores. I never got moved into challenging levels, and I began taunting teachers by achieving pre-determined grades in the class... literally choosing my test scores and then missing the right number of problems.
I cant confirm a gender specific cause to this, but following rules and completing busy work was much more important than mastering and applying the concepts.
Understand that in average both sexes are not equally fit for every task and equally gifted in everything is not sexism it is lucidity
Sorry for the poor source, but girls and boys are equal in mathematic ability when you look worldwide, which indicates that differences in the west are due to cultural bias, not natural ability.
Physically, men are stronger than women on average, but mentally it appears that it's entirely or nearly entirely cultural. In that case, saying that they're different on average in mental ability is at the very least supporting a sexist construct in our culture.
Your argument might be more convincing if you provided evidence that this cultural backlash against men has actually resulted in a structurally-supported norm of female privilege in each of the arenas you mentioned.
I'm sorry that you've been made to feel "male guilt" (while I'm female, I'm also white and have experienced similar discomfort dealing with my own privilege, so I know well what "white guilt" feels like), but your hurt feelings are not sufficient proof of the systemic subjugation of men (in the video game industry? Seriously?). You seem very concerned that men have to "pass laws and decree pro female bias" but you're overlooking the fact that it's still overwhelmingly men who are in the position to pass those laws to begin with. This harms both men and women--and the guilt isn't a matter of assigning blame, but collectively shouldering the responsibility to make things more fair and equal.
In my last year of jr. high, my father challenged me to write the scholarship exams to a prestigious boys' school. I won one. And so I left a co-ed school for a male one. The atmosphere was completely different; moments of rowdiness would be tolerated by the master (there were no female teachers), but he would then instruct us to settle down, and the class would continue. Unlike the 45 minute periods at jr. high, our periods were only 35 minutes. The school realized that teenage boys have to get up and move frequently, which is why we still had recess each morning - unheard of at the public high schools. We also had an hour for lunch, giving us time to play ball hockey or basketball or touch football, and burn off some energy so that we could sit through the afternoon.
Wolfing down your lunch in ten minutes, playing 50 minutes of basketball with all the intensity teenage boys can muster, and then racing to class, tieing your tie with one hand whilst carrying your books in the other - it was thrilling. We would, literally, stampede through the halls in a way that wouldn't have been tolerated at public school. We were FREE to be BOYS, and I would not give up the memory of those days for anything.
With no girls to show off for, we competed at everything - academics, sports, arts, clubs - without fear of being labelled, for example, a 'browner' or a 'jock'. Many of us were a bit of both. The school encouraged you to be an "all-rounder", and while classes ended at 3:15, you were expected to participate in some extra-curricular activity until 4:30 or so. My friends at public high school envied that; most of their teachers were out the parking lot 10 minutes after the last bell.
Teenage boys, adjusting to the suddenly changed levels of testerone in their bodies, don't fit well into the female-dominated "sit still and be quiet" mode prevalent in the co-ed school. They need space and more importantly, time to move and burn off some of that raging energy. Women don't understand that at all, which is why so many bright young boys are being mis-diagnosed with ADHD/ADD/whatever, and being put on drugs because they don't fit into women's world view.
I had two beautiful and bright daughters, who chose public school. Had I had a son, though, I would have pushed him for all I was worth to go the school. I know he would have been treated like a young man there, with the understanding of a young man's particular needs, and not have been pushed into a feminist/schoolmarm charicature of what a boy should be.
What was once true, is no longer so
The fact that men and women see the world somewhat differently doesn't mean that either sex is superior (and therefore neither is inferior.) Men are physically stronger than women, yet women shoulder most of the physical labor on the planet (on top of raising children.) Women are still virtual property in many countries and cultures. Even in America, the largest percentage of the poor are single mothers and their children (most abandoned by their husbands/partners.) Add the high occurrence of rape and assault, unfair business practices that underpay and overcharge women for the same jobs and services as men (go to any dry cleaner or look at the price of virtually identical clothing in store and price the difference between men's and women's clothes) and I think its fair to say that inequity today still exists (even acknowledging advances made by women over the last 50 years.)
Its like acknowledging that there's an African American President, doesn't alter the fact that men of color are still profoundly discriminated against in the legal/justice system. Women have made advancement, we've punched a few tiny holes in the glass ceiling (sadly many of the women that made those holes made less than spectacular splashes as CEOs, but then great CEOs are rare even among men so I'm still hopeful.) There is still a long way to go before men can claim that women are overly privileged. A growing number of young women are becoming scientists, engineers and programmers and I can speak from my own experience that girl geeks are alive and well, and I know women scientists and engineers from all fields who are leaders in their fields. I acknowledge that men have advantage in certain kinds of concentration and focus, though women handle big pictures and relationships better (pros and cons of having a bigger corpus collosum), and logical thinking is a learned skill equally available to either sex. The comment regarding women's emotions is simply a cheap shot and has literally no bearing in the intellectual prowess of a person of either sex.
I think the problem boys in this culture are facing, is a veritable vacuum of good male role models and heroes who are scientists or engineers. We have a generation of young men who measure their masculinity against violent video games, Jersey Shore style reality (not) television and Rap Culture. None of this tends to promote higher education or cause a burning yearning to become scientific. Perhaps at a time in history when science will certainly determine all our futures, it might be good time for our society to start teaching our men children how to get to that future and perhaps a dash or two of ethics as well while we're talking about education. Or y'all can just complain when the girls take over in the 2030s, your call.