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Comment by d3nj4l | Hacker News Reader

Key point here is:

    [H]igh schools under Tokyo Metropolitan Government jurisdiction are the only prefectural schools to have separate enrollment caps for male and female students. The numbers at each high school are based on the ratio of boys to girls at public junior high schools in Tokyo.

I.e., this is sort of “affirmative action” for boys since girls score much higher. From personal experience, too, I’ve seen girls score much higher than boys at the school level here in India.

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I think the important question here is: Why are the girls scoring higher? Are they doing better academically, or are teachers grading them differently?

In Canada we see girls outperform boys dramatically on teacher-assigned grades, but only very slightly on standardized tests; it's important to understand if the difference arises from the students or from the teachers.

Isn’t this iron-clad evidence of structural sexism?

Could be that teacher-assigned are more likely to be English whereas standard tests Math so it's possible a difference in subjects. Girls do really well in languages.

But it would be interesting to test.

> Girls do really well in languages.

There is no evidence that proves that girls do better than boys.

There is a ton of evidence that girls do better in reading and writing, to the point where it's not even controversial.

Here from PISA [1]

Also APA [2]

It's the same story across cultures, after kindergarten, most girls accelerate past most boys in languages. Boys are generally a little bit ahead of girls in math.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342344680_Examining...

[2] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/09/girls-read-w...

It's an evidence of a difference. If you can identify what causes the difference, that can tell us if it's structural sexism.

Nature happens to be structurally sexist, if you haven't noticed.

This is the only valid observation here.

I'm sure the journal's editors would deny this outrageous allegation. ;-)

I always felt that the key to harmonious development is first, to acknowledge this fact (by both genders), and second, to agree that because of that, we as a society need to implement some countermeasures to somehow reduce this biological inequality. This already happened in several countries, to a degree. However, there is a counter-trend saying we're totally same and all differences are due to social conditioning - and this creates all sorts of new problems.

Yeah, but we live in society and society doesn't operate on "whatever nature says"...

It could be a personality or some other trait here not the gender, so finding the causation not the correlation would help then understand and maybe fix the issues.

One aspect that I've seen in pedagogy literature is that those evaluations evaluate slightly different things - in addition to pure competencies at a point of time evaluated by standardized tests, teacher-assigned grades are influenced also by "learning process" factors (e.g. diligence and disruptiveness in class) and girls at school age on average tend to have an advantage in those factors or at least in teacher perception of these factors.

I recall reading material attributing this to differences in biological development during teenage years which are relevant not only to sexual characteristics but for general body&mind&behavior changes and gender/hormones influence not only the type of changes but also their timing - so adolescent girls are not exactly equivalent in development to adolescent boys of the same year/grade; asserting that they are slightly more "psychologically mature" (or more adult-imitating/conforming behavior?) which affects study performance in adolescent years, and the boys 'catch up' a bit later. However, I'm not certain if this material I read has a solid evidence basis or is driven by speculative stereotyping.

No. It could be that girls on average score better at whatever makes you do good in teacher exams - things like verbal ability, agreeableness, ... - whereas boys score better (or just the same) on the actual subject matter.

The difference could very well be biological (although some would call that "structural sexism" as well).

I studied theoretical math (here in Poland).

When we started 1st semester, there were about 120 students of which about 30 were men (well... boys, really:)

The competition for entry was fierce, there were 17 people for every opening. In Polish education system we had point system which allowed selecting students, even having maximum points did not guarantee entry. You can be sure that every one of 120 students had equivalent of straight As on all subjects and the same for their exams, plus additional points for competitions, etc. They probably were best in their schools.

After 5 years only 20 students were left of which 15 were men.

I had distinct impression that the guys who went there went there because they loved math. We would talk to each other about math, meet to discuss interesting information, trivia, etc.

Gals, on the other hand, I had distinct impression that the went for math because they did good at previous school. They would meet with other students, but in my observation much more rarely and the talk would be exclusively about current assignment. They got max grades in everything at their previous school and they just happened to choose math as something they had good grades. They had no particular interest so they just chose one of the topics they thought they are good at. They were not interested to spend future with math, to teach math or work in research. Those girls worked harder than guys but this was just work for work sake. They had no love for math and it is pretty difficult to stick to a demanding topic like that if you are not really interested in it.

The tragedy of this is nobody told them what they had in their previous school wasn't really math and they were not interested enough to realize that memorizing formulas or "solving" problems by memorizing solutions and substituting numbers is not math.

As somebody who was doing quite well (I may have been asked by prof to do one or two lectures in their absence), I met with a lot of people who were desperately seeking help to understand the material. Guess what, almost all of them were women who were incredulous they always "did good at school" and don't understand why they are not anymore.

That's it, my subjective opinion on the matter. I was one of the guys who dropped after 3rd semester and went to work in IT.

I saw the same in France: the ones who choose Maths at Uni want to be teachers, vaguely. The guys we all wanted to program computers, fpga chips, make 3D game. You would see us compete like madmen to do the most open assignments to have the most insane stuff (I won once after doing a 3D engine able to parse, draw, texture and navigate inside arbitrary counter strike map, with skybox and ok perf but no physics).

The girls they d send you the last day of vacation a plea to send them the response to some basic assignment. It's hard now to take seriously my company trying to make us diversify the workforce. We either get no one or once we got a girl who look half interested she leaves after a year because she doesnt find it so fun, the daily code grind. We have to do fake interviews with our female friends to pass the rule "each male hire must be preceded by an attempted female hire".

And God I wish they d persist,the girls, because I d love to see something different at work. And I sure hope my daughter will see the joy of talking to and making algorithmic machines, but I guess it's on me

,, And God I wish they d persist,the girls, because I d love to see something different at work''

I (as a man) also didn't like to spend most of my time in male-only environments, so the solution for me was remote working and having a girlfriend who is also remote working.

>In Canada we see girls outperform boys dramatically on teacher-assigned grades, but only very slightly on standardized tests; it's important to understand if the difference arises from the students or from the teachers.

Poland here and I can agree on that.

Additionally it felt like boys put a slightly more effort into caring about what to do right after school (high) - 1st job, but I cannot prove it, it's just more or less random thought

Maybe it kinda affected grades?

Similar results here in Czechia, girls outperform boys on teacher-assigned grades, but boys outperform girls on standardized tests (high school final exams).

There is a relevant passage embedded, but not expanded upon, in the original article:

>Whether a student passes or fails is dependent on a combination of two assessments; >a report from their junior high school marked out of 300 points >and a written test covering Japanese, math, English, science and social studies and scored out of 700.

The report is worth up to 300 points which is about 10x the typical differentials mentioned in article. Going by the condensed explanation in article, is created by the junior high teacher(s?) of the pupil. I suspect a scoring inflation, quite possibly gender-selective - specifically to prop up pupils the teachers perceive as worthy moving onward.

> I’ve seen girls score much higher than boys at the school level here in India.

I think the same is true here in Germany. As a (boy) teenager I felt that this was often unfairly spun as "girls are actually smarter, boys are troublemakers in school".

(Sometimes combined with the comment that I can agree with: Although they have better grades in school, women have less opportunities and earn less later in live, which shows the systematic discrimitation.)

Looking back I interpret girls doing better in school tragically - they are not "better" than boys, but (on average) more obiedient and adapted. So yet another way how they draw the short straw in our society.

> Looking back I interpret girls doing better in school tragically - they are not "better" than boys, but (on average) more obiedient and adapted. So yet another way how they draw the short straw in our society.

Same realisation I have looking back at school in Brazil, girls would conform more easily to the mold required by schools: be obedient, follow instructions, don't speak up, don't go against the accepted flow. And yes, all of that now seems to stem from the way girls are raised to fit into the "female gender role", it sucks and I hope that girls can do better at school while not being oppressed, doing better at school at the expense of your self-expression isn't that good of a trade-off.

I grew up with the values that discrimination is wrong no matter the gender. Normally it's guys that get discriminated against in this highly institutionalised manner. At least in the West. Japan and the third world are a different story.

You are not doing the fight against institutional discrimination any favours by calling this affirmative action.

Japan is probably the most old fashioned major economy. They look at gender in a different way than the West. I don't think even the feminists who invented it would agree with any 'affirmative action' explanation for this and they invented that word.

Here's another example of academic discrimination against women in Japan.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/12/two-more-japan...

But the point is that recall based examination may be discriminatory against males, it's an institutional requirement as a form on entrance requirements and therefore would require affirmative action.

I don't necessarily agree with this but I do believe you could argue that it fits the definition of affirmative reaction. Unless it's got a requirement to never be applied to males.

Affirmative action is a Western attempt to help previously discriminated against groups through re-introduction of institutional discrimination. I don't like to use the term because i don't want to promote institutional discrimination and believe in individual rights. But if forced to use it, I don't think males are a discriminated group in Japan or places like India if it even applies to such places. This is the more old fashioned kind of institutional discrimination. Can affirmative action ever apply to males? Yes theoretically. But it's not this.

Of course the approach is misguided. They should instead address the systemic discrimination against boys that is causing them to score lower. Isn't that how it goes?

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