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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: 3, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Friday May 02 2014, @06:11PM
From what I read of TFA the "study" did not examine or attempt to control for the gender of the teacher. As someone else pointed out, the critical grades are the primary grades and there, the teachers are overwhelmingly female.
Quick hypothesis: when a human is doing the subjective grading, that human is prone to favor members of his or her own gender to a certain extent. I do not you can seriously make a conclusion about girls or boys being "better" at anything until you take into account the gender of the judges. Many studies try to remove the subjective element of evaluation for this reason, but this study explicitly rejected that premise by throwing out standardized tests and looking only at teacher-assigned, subjective grades.
People, including me, commonly complain about the scarcity of women in tech but no one bats an eye at women being the overwhelming majority of elementary teachers. In my humble opinion this is largely because teaching is easy to associate with child care, and that fits nicely with the traditional female role. Also, it is generally low-paid and unappreciated work (for the same reason) and so it's hard to make people care that males are excluded from it (similarly to how few people complain about the lack of women garbage collectors). Our society is very resistant to the idea of male elementary teachers. If you press people as to why, pretty soon you will get to some vague FUD about pedophiles. Reflect for a moment on how deeply offensive and unfair *that* stereotype is.
If we are honest with ourselves, it seems pretty freakishly weird that we have an objective for gender equity in society and yet the minute young kids leave the home we enroll them in an institution that is overwhelmingly female dominated. Might it not be worthwhile to consider that if you want kids to grow up thinking men and women working together is normal, you might want to sprinkle some more men into the first workplace many of them ever see?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by ButchDeLoria on Saturday May 03 2014, @01:04AM
Not to insult women as a whole, but it seems that it's overwhelmingly females who are dumb enough to take the shitty pay of being in education, though men are capable of making the same mistake. Usually when men go into academia though, they go into the sector of it that offers things like tenure and grant money.