If your school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers then your school was the exception.
20 female teachers. 1 male.
No males on the senior staff.
LAUSD: ~4.5:1 in elementary school, ~1:1 in secondary, ~4:1 in special ed[1]
Across all CA public schools: ~2.5:1 [2]
Across the US: 3:1 [3]
So, more women? Yes. 20:1? Wild outlier.
So, what about the claim that it's more women, somehow building a system more friendly to girls? Turns out the data says "not so much" there, too. Principals are roughly 1:1[4]
[1] https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/doma... [2] https://www.ed-data.org/state/CA [3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp [4] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cls.asp#:~:text=I....
Plugging these numbers into R shows that it's not exactly a surprising result:
> prop.test(1,21,p=11/100)
1-sample proportions test with continuity correction
data: 1 out of 21, null probability 11/100
X-squared = 0.31913, df = 1, p-value = 0.5721
alternative hypothesis: true p is not equal to 0.11This makes the "principals are 1:1" data even more interesting. It also lends a good chunk more weight to the idea that at least elementary schools are an environment with outsizedly more female role models.
I still think the "build a system" argument doesn't hold - see the 1:1 data - but I'm certainly more convinced on "the effects of the system-as-is result in this", even without the conscious build step.
Mmm, that's interesting, I have the same observation. I'm not in the US, if that holds any value.
I grew in Europe and, until I was about 10 years old, I firmly believed that the girls must be much smarter than the boys, precisely because they always received much better grades at school.
Alas, eventually I was disappointed and I lost this belief, when I understood that the good grades received by the girls were determined only partially by their knowledge of the subjects on which they were graded and that a large part of the grades was caused exactly as throwaway53086 said, because the girls were "much more likely to obey rules and instructions".
Looking back to the previous years, it became obvious for me that every time when a girl and a boy proved to have identical knowledge about mathematics or biology or whatever else was tested, the disciplined girl received a high grade, while the naughty boy received a low grade.
The girls always did whatever the teacher asked, while the boys failed to do homework, did not pay attention to what the teacher taught and so on.
At that time I was reading a huge amount of books, so even when I was nine-year old there were some fields, e.g. biology, about which I knew far more than my teacher.
Obviously, pointing to errors in what the teacher taught was also a recipe for low grades, in comparison to those who did not question her wisdom.
In primary school, everybody that I knew had the same experience, with the grades that were influenced by the discipline and obedience demonstrated, which favored a lot the girls.
In high school and university, I have no longer seen such cases, the grades received by everybody were mostly correct, but the girls continued to be on average much more disciplined and obedient, which resulted in good grades across the curriculum.
On the other hand, many boys liked only some subjects at which they obtained good grades, while neglecting the others, at which they obtained low grades, resulting in a low average.
In high school and university there was also the same problem that I had first encountered in the primary school, that with the exception of the best teachers, the teachers who were not so good themselves gave good grades only to the mediocre students, while both the bad students and the very good students (who knew more than the teacher about what was taught) received low grades.
The girls were usually not affected by this, because even when they knew that the teacher was wrong, they would not confront him or her about the errors.
Lots of socialization going on.