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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

This is the only valid observation here.

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

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).

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 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.

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