SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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) by sgleysti on Friday May 02 2014, @02:51PM
I think the data will show that the variance across the male population is greater than that in the female population, but that the average female "intelligence" (whatever that means) is higher than the average male intelligence.
The averages are the same; the difference comes because grading is such that you can only lose points -- there is no chance to get higher than an A, no matter how good you are. As a result, the low end of the male curve significantly lowers the average male grade, but the high end of the male curve cannot raise it in proportion to the drop.
Women being more toward the average, there are fewer women at the bottom to drop the average female grade as much as the males at the bottom, and those on the high end of the female curve score similarly to the males on the high end -- grades being insensitive to differences in this range.
This gets a lot more interesting when you consider salaries of working people, sorted by gender. The underperforming men can't earn less than the minimum wage, so they can't drag down the male average too much. On the other end, the most exceptional men stand to earn boatloads of cash, significantly raising the male average.
The women workers have fewer than men on the very bottom, but they didn't affect the statistics too much due to minimum wage. The women also have fewer at the very top, leading to a very different average salary.
This isn't to say that there is no discrimination, but analysis should take the above factors into account to be accurate. I'm getting this from the book "Is there anything good about men?" by Roy Baumeister. A free summary can be found here [denisdutton.com]