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Here's 100 Years of Proof That Girls Are Better Students Than Boys. In all subjects, even math and science.
In 2006, Newsweek magazine declared it, loud, on their cover: America's boys were in crisis. Boys were falling behind their female counterparts in school. They were getting worse grades, lagging on standardized tests, and not attending college in the same numbers as girls. "By almost every benchmark," Peg Tyre, the author of the cover story, wrote, "boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind." And so it began-the end of men, but also an ongoing conversation on how to better boys' performance in the classroom. From the article:
This "boy crisis," however, was based on an assumption: that males had previously been on top. Granted, there was evidence to support that idea. For one, educational institutions for most of modern history have been openly sexist, favoring boys. And traditionally, males had outperformed girls in standardized tests and in math and science. But "by the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math, and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry," Tyre wrote.
The assumption that boys had been the better students didn't seem right to (married) researchers Daniel and Susan Voyer of the University of New Brunswick in Canada. "I've been collecting grade data for a long time," Daniel Voyer says in a phone interview. "Typically if you find gender differences, they are in favor of girls - it doesn't matter what it is. So it started to kind of puzzle me." And so the pair set out to test, collecting every study they could find on grades and gender since 1914 and crunching the numbers in a mega-meta analysis, the first of its kind.
While the girls' advantage is largest in reading and language studies, it exists for all subjects, even math and science. And though they tested data from across the world, the Voyers found the gender gap was largest in the United States.
What's most striking is that the gender gap held across the decades. If the boy crisis existed, they would have seen boys' performance peak and fall over time. That wasn't the case. "Boys have been lagging for a long time and ... this is a fairly stable phenomenon," the paper concluded.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @11:39AM
There has to be some hand-wavy bullshit soft-science faff that will FUD this finding up. Girls do better on standardized tests? Maybe the openly sexist pro-male bias on the part of faculty puts too much pressure on males. Or maybe its the opposite, and what appeared to be pro-male bias has in fact always been pro-female bias, expressed in subtle but significant ways (language choice, seating patters, whatever, take your pick).
'End of men' is frankly disturbing. If lower standardized test scores means people can openly talk about writing off a segment of the population, then why aren't people crowing about the end of blacks or the end of hispanics?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @11:42AM
As any feminist will tell you, the only place for men is prison.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday May 02 2014, @12:34PM
Some non-hand-wavy soft-science findings: The most important thing to remember about most gender-related statistical differences is that variation within genders is almost always much greater than variation between genders. For example, on average men can run 100 meters faster than women, and Usain Bolt can run faster than Florence Griffith Joyner, but Joyner is much faster than most men. On average, girls score about 10-20 points higher on the SATs than boys, but there are boys who score 1600 and girls who do terribly (or don't even take it).
So what this basic point means is that regardless of this or any other finding, you should not be treating kids significantly differently based on gender, but on their actual skills and personality. You should be giving girls the chance to be great athletes or mathematicians or scientists, and boys the chance to be great therapists or romance novelists or nurses, if that child wants to pursue those kinds of activities and/or is good at them.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @12:36PM
> There has to be some hand-wavy bullshit soft-science faff that will FUD this finding up.
> Girls do better on standardized tests?
From TFA:
I suspect your analysis is about as capable as your reading ability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @01:59PM
I didn't RTFA, I read TFS, which at several points stated or implied that girls are doing better on standardized tests.
I take from your passive-aggressive put-down that you think I'm a moron. Fine, you can think that. I submit that you've dismissed what I wrote based on an unfounded assumption about what I did and did not read, and that you have narrowed your interpretation of the issue to suit your desire to insult me.
- My point was about the implications of the 'End of men' idea, and that point still stands. The idea that we've reached the "end of" any group because they are doing worse in school, whether on standardized or not, is abhorrent to me
- If anything, we may be seeing the end of patriarchy. Fine, good. But immediately replacing one biased structure with another, seeing this as the end of men('s rule) and beginning of women('s rule), keeps the same basic problem, which is that individuals are limited by factors assigned at birth
(Score: 1) by Oligonicella on Friday May 02 2014, @03:16PM
And you don't understand that this alone makes the drawn conclusions pretty much worthless? That teachers are damned near purely female and that will affect grade assignments?
Social "Science" isn't. It has always been, but is becoming even more so, a means of projecting the author's wishes, not anything reality based.
No?
An assumption that the researchers held. Note: The sentence in the article following your quote. In other words, they immediately do in their favor exactly what they believe the tests are doing against it.
You should also have noticed that they:
cherry-picked their data. This in the paragraph *prior* to your quote.