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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, Interesting) by urza9814 on Saturday May 03 2014, @12:21AM
Hah. I'm quite privileged myself. I've got more money than I know what to do with, work exactly 40 hours a week, including right now while I'm posing on Soylent. Life is good :)
But that doesn't mean I'm blind to the failures of our current society either. All you've gotta do to prove that is look at a graph of wages vs. productivity over the past few decades. People keep getting more and more work done -- but getting a smaller and smaller portion of the profits for doing so. Or look at all the CEOs who run their company into the ground then get rewarded with their "golden parachute." Or all the ISPs charging higher billing rates for the same service, which they can do not because they've got great innovative ideas, but because they're big, wealthy, and powerful.
We're an oligarchy, and there are now studies to prove it. America's class mobility is far lower than many other industrialized nations. So, what, all Americans are just stupid and lazy...? Or are there other factors that are more important -- like luck of birth?
If hard work and perseverance are all it took, then it would be just as likely that someone born to poor parents would end up a millionaire as someone born to rich parents. And there are a hell of a lot more poor parents than rich parents, which means if that were true you'd expect the vast majority of wealthy Americans to be first generation wealth. They get rich, then they die, then their kids slowly fall back to middle class or something. Instead, we see most wealthy families stay wealthy; most poor families stay poor; and only the extraordinarily lucky move between.
This also happens to be why I find capitalism to be such a horrible system. It's all about the momentum of inheritance. Eliminate inheritance, put every newborn at an equal start, and capitalism would be great. But eventually wealth and power concentrate and lock everyone else out.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 03 2014, @05:19AM
Except for the part where most of that isn't remotely true, I'd agree. Most of the rich in the US have become rich since the 80s. Most of the poor stay poor because they lack two of the following: wisdom, inspiration, or drive. Most of the middle class only lack one. Hard work and perseverance alone will get you nothing if you don't have the wisdom to know you need marketable skills and the drive to get and sell them.
Again, luck has nothing to do with it except to set your starting capital and that can only take you so far. Put every newborn at an equal start? Yeah, definite jealousy. Do you really hate yourself that much for having more than others? Give your money away then and leave what doesn't belong to you the hell alone.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.