Wide and lasting consequences: Teachers give girls higher grades than boys

Not really. Without metrics for attention and a definition of “findings like this,” your intuition is as good as mine.

I’ve seen dozens of articles and quite a few best selling books about the plight of young men. I’ve even read a few. So it seems our anecdotal intuitions cancel out.

However, I believe that this bias was not caused directly by the gender, but mostly indirectly.

The girls had a much more submissive behavior towards the teachers than the boys, who did what they were told to do by the teachers mostly only when they feared that they would be caught otherwise.

Most teachers were biased into giving better grades to those who were perceived to have better behavior, than to those who were perceived to be problematic, even when the latter demonstrated better knowledge of the taught subjects.

I saw this at university as well. The very few girls in engineering did well on homework and tests but the guys kicked ass in the lab work, but maybe not the lab reports.

I do recall reading a piece by a black author who was lamenting school desegregation. They wrote how black schools in the south were a place of community, empowerment, and organizing. The education could be about the subject, and not focused on behavior correction to fit within 'majority culture', or learning 'canonical' language idioms. In this author's view, desegregation was a means for scaling white supremacy, codifying it into curriculum and making it universal. It was about squelching and scattering communities that threatened their power.

When I read that somewhere around 2002, I wasn't able to accept it. I am a biracial adoptee that was raised in a suburban northwest evangelical home. My parents, teachers, community, and I embraced "I don't see color" and other "post-racial" forms of magical thinking. I was taught that white supremacy was about the people on the extreme fringes- sure they threw a parade for themselves a few towns over, but only a dozen people showed up. I was often told just how fortunate I was to be with my adoptive family, and how morally upright our community is. It went unspoken (or literally spoken in Small Group Bible Studies) that whites have a moral high ground, and that others are beneficiaries of their superior canon.

Its 2022 now. The masks are off. Its a lot easier to understand how widespread and institutional racism can be. As of this year, a school district could be fined 2% of its annual budget if a teacher shared what I read in 2002. I have seen naked racism all over the web (Snopes alum 2018-21)and and not just "dozens of people" a few towns over. I counted about ~215 vehicle convoy of pickup trucks and humvees drive though my neighborhood waving their rifles and insurrection flags just over 2 years ago. Now its plain to see how desegregation ultimately gave whites more power over policies and narrative vs segregated schools.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/10/10/why-are-all-the-bla...

I say all that to say I can see the same dynamic in education along the axis of gender. When the state has a de facto monopoly on the standards and practices of education it can become an instrument of oppression for whomever wields it. This supersedes the curriculum and goes to the structure of the school system itself. For example, a no recess policies and a school day that punishes movement openly discriminates especially against people who's bodies evolved to run, hide, fight, hunt, and explore. I can see gender segregation in education being really supportive to empower girls to step into roles that may have been otherwise filled by boys and visa versa.

All of this begs the question of which axes to segregate, if segregation is good. Race+gender? Neurotype? Religion?... The permutations really start to add up. How much is too much, if any?