Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
In my working life every time I brazenly break the rules and ignore instructions I end up getting a raise, or promotion. This is across 5 or 6 jobs stretched out over 23 years in small businesses, and fortune 100 companies. This is because I always back it up with results
In school, any deviation, regardless of intention or outcome, was perceived by my teachers as being disrepectful to their authority, and was quickly punished. To be fair, I went to catholic school in the 80s/early 90s, so following rules was probably a bigger emphasis than most people's experiences.
In a school setting, someone who listens, follows the rules, and does not challenge the structure of the institution is highly likely to receive excellent grades. In a business setting, this person may be an employee who contributes to the team by doing their job, and doing it accurately and consistently.
A disrupter may work in the same job, and challenge the way things are done - they may fail in doing so, and be repremanded or fired, or they may succeed in their disruption, and allow for a change in the process or job, resulting in greater efficiency.
This is the trade off in my humble opinion.
I mean, good for you I guess?
In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.)
At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
Exactly this. Doing something simply because "it's a rule" and doing something where you see actual impact/results is world of a difference.
Sit in any classroom or ask any teacher who their problem children are, and they're almost always boys. They're louder, more violent, more likely to disobey, and have a harder time sitting still.
Are all boys a problem? No, of course not. I imagine a lot has to do with home balance, the involvement of two parents, etc. Are all girls good? No, of course not. But statistically there is a difference. This is true until they settle down in their mid to late twenties...just look at insurance rates.
Maybe it's not biological and is cultural, but it's true from a very young age through young adult that boys are less able to sit still, be quiet, and listen. And school is structured in a way that punishes those traits, and we as a culture medicate boys to make them calm down.
And it should be noted -- it's not the boys that are the problem it is the schools.
Raise young boys in a way that is completely stifling and unnatural compared to how boys were raised for tens of thousands years based on our evolution, and then diagnose these boys as having a mental problem. No, it is society that has the mental problem.
I want them to challenge, think, be introduced to the complexity and darkness of history, be able to creatively write and imagine, and to not fall in line with whatever the societal expectations and agendas are for the week.
Honestly though...I think one of the biggest factors is that success in school does not predict success in a job. The traits rewarded in school do not correlate to the traits rewarded in high-competition jobs. Being quiet, listening, doing your work on time, not challenging the status quo, parroting things that teachers want you to, not challenging others...none of those things are traits you think of when you think of CEOs. Not that I think that aggressiveness necessarily SHOULD be what we're rewarding as a culture, but when the only goal is profits...it's hard to think that those things make a top company.
I'll probably get down-voted for mentioning him (and that's fine, I don't care), but Jordan Peterson has some really fascinating talks about personality traits between men and women and why personality traits in men lend toward more aggressiveness which is rewarded in competitive business.
Men get the "benefit" of bimodal outcomes, in that they're disproportionately represented in the highest-paying jobs and in prison. Women get the steady middle, doing what needs to be done but less big risk/big reward. I'm dissatisfied with it on both sides. A system in which 'overactive' boys (or kids more generally) are not served well is not good, and a system that optimizes for the wrong outcome for 'good' girls is not good. It's clearly not doing that well for America given our susceptibility to mis- and disinformation and our need to import skills rather than effectively developing talent here.
As far as I know, whether the difference has biological or cultural reasons is not equally well established. But it seems somewhat stable across cultures, which seems to me to suggest that it’s indeed biological, see e.g. Costa et al (2001), Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11825676_Gender_Dif...
“In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude, consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across cultures. Substantively, most of the gender differences we found can be grouped in four categories: Women tend to be higher in negative affect, submissiveness, and nurturance, and more concerned with feelings than with ideas.“
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
> How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
In particular, the differences aren't "stable accross cultures" but more pronounced in more gender-equal societies, so the difference are either (likely) biological, or else caused by society but in a counter-intuitive way.
https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_Ma...
Additionally, pointing out most professors are men does not counter the argument. Merely the transition of going from a highly cooperation- and rule-following-favored environment to an extremely competitive environment should give some indication as to how multifaceted this problem can truly be.
Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
Your claimed "women are wonderful" effect seems to stop conveniently at the career stage of life.
As other comments have pointed out, the reason can easily be explained by a paradigm shift. One which shifts from a cooperation-favored environment, to a competition-favored environment. Though there is an absence of evidence, the absence of evidence doesn't prove the opposite, it merely puts into question the hypothesis.
> Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
The GP stated this goes for women. Clearly, that doesn't claim the same goes for men. In fact, this is entirely in-line with the "women are wonderful" phenomenon, though I would personally believe other factors are at play beyond this.
How do you reconcile this with discrimination towards women?
Also the whole trope that women somehow cannot compete and can only collaborate, as if the two things are at odds, is also exhausting.
Frankly, this "discrimination towards women" may as well be turned around with one simple trick. Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their ambition and achievements? Last time I checked, women are a lot more judgmental of their partner's ambition, earning capabilities, career, and similar traits than men are, frequently to the point of wanting a guy who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to all those things, which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine men respond by being more competitive.
Now imagine your worth isn't as tied to this, you have all these men with a very clear incentive to compete keep trying to one-up another. It isn't a secret people give up easier when the challenge is too difficult compared to the reward, and assuming above, women clearly have less of a reward at the end of this.
Convenient excuses? Probably. Frankly, the entire "oppression" narrative is awfully convenient when put under the right angle. So instead of knee-jerking towards all this, let's stop this "trope" as well and address the problem for the multifaceted issue it truly is.
Edit: as replying to the below is no longer an option and apparently my "competition" claim is "unsubstantiated", it seems I have to point out the obvious. Women still largely go for men outearning them rather than equals, let alone lower.(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12372) Additionally, money helps men more than women when it comes to cushioning traits of lower value (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...) Though I guess one peer-reviewed study tracking diaries says more than entire countries filled with anecdotal data of women more willing to work part time even when not caring for kids.
Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their [looks, and maybe second emotional support]? Last time I checked, [men] are a lot more judgmental of their partner's [looks] than [women] are, frequently to the point of wanting a [gal] who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to [this one primary thing, and then the emotional support bit], which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine [women] respond by ... well, what am I supposed to fill in here? But if you think carefully about this, being agreeable (what's optimized for in this school stuff) is other than appearance probably the single most important currency a woman has.
Your entire comment basically is based off your own bias. Research can and already has been done on this issue, showing that you're probably wrong. I implore you to read this paper which already puts to rest your outdated notions that men are somehow more competitive than women. I'd like to emphasize the following with respect to competition and finances:
> The same line of reasoning might lead to the
expectation that men should compete more about financial
success than women do, since this would make them more
attractive to women. The data, however, do not support
this: there was no sex difference in the strength of
competitive feeling about attaining financial success,
nor were there consistent differences in the fraction of
diary entries concerned with things that might be
thought to lead to financial success, such as success at
school; in fact, in Study 1 women had a
larger fraction of diary entries about success at work
than men did.
No worries though, I'll just believe your baseless conjecture instead of a peer-reviewed paper.
* Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often explicitly as part of the grade.
* Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks students to write and make a presentation about their math answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as long as the presentation is professional and impressive.
I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school was a really strict place compared to real life and work. There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher had intended you to.
As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.
Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to the sheer amount of time it took and the constant, overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines. College was a vacation. Work is easy.
High school did little to prepare me for "how the real world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and requirements and such in school) but did harm me psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get over—and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that), and crazy workload.
That might be true if you ignored development, but we're talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the same as a 23 year old man.
https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_Ma...