Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

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Looking back at my own high school experience, the girls were way smarter than the boys. The boys at least in highschool were far more concerned with cracking a good joke and goofing off. The girls were actually studying. They had the best outcomes too in terms of professional success generally in my cohort.

I think it is because girls mature emotionally a lot sooner than boys. Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. I wouldn’t be surprised if mentally they were years apart in highschool.

Now today we have a society that is no longer so biased in terms of opportunities along gender lines. And what do you know, girls are generally eating boys lunch here. They are outnumbering them in college. They have higher GPAs. They are starting to outnumber them in post grad programs. And eventually in the workforce this will happen as well, as this cohort gets jobs and supersedes older male dominated cohorts from before the silent cultural revolution over the last 30 years.

Eventually we should see this effect find an equilibrium where the number of women in high impact jobs vs men reflects the underlying intelligence bias women have over men.

> Looking back at my own high school experience, the girls were way smarter than the boys.

I'd like to suggest that the difference was that girls were way better at school than the boys.

That is, school is an environment built such that the skills required to succeed are more likely to be found in a girl than a boy.

Well it goes beyond school and into the workplace as well. Easily the most successful people in my cohort from school are women in terms of what they've accomplished in their life and careers thus far. Most of the boys are relatively middling or have made some pivots to their detriment by now, the most successful of them attempted to spread their wings for a time before being offered a good position at fathers company back at home that was assured since birth.

> Easily the most successful people in my cohort from school are women in terms of what they've accomplished in their life and careers thus far.

Really no guys in your class became programmers or engineers? Its really common for guys to go into those fields, on average its a few per class depending on country.

Or do you mean success as in they have started families? Women do that much earlier, but that has nothing to do with competence.

Girls are better at life.

Schools aren't designed to give girls an advantage. They're designed to make productive workers and members of society. Boys may have more asocial, even antisocial, tendencies on average. That still doesn't mean the system is stacked against them. It just means they have to learn to work within it, not burn it down and rebuild it to oppress the 'other'.

> They're designed to make productive workers and members of society.

Let's say that is correct. Wouldn't the observed failure of school to make boys productive workers and members of society then indicate that it should be changed to meet its goal?

Something to note, most testing seems to show women/men are about average in intelligence but there is slight variability between the two. So thinking one gender is smarter doesn't bear out.

I've read excerpts "Of Boys and Men" that indicate academic changes to assist girls may have harmed boys.

For example, in schooling, it was shown that girls do better on homework while boys would do better on testing. So, teachers realizing this, would increase the homework mix into final grade which helps girls but harmed boys.

Getting rid of recess or PE earlier may have had an impact as well.

Something to note, these changes were not made deliberately to hurt men, it's just accidental on part of educators trying to fix what was clearly a flaw system.

> Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college.

Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)

> Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)

Well that is the entire point of my thesis really. This is no fault of the boys character but just a realization of what is going on biologically that generally boys like cackling with the other tribsemen out on the hunt perhaps. Of course not every boy has that behavioral phenotype of being a sort of simple slackjawed chummy individual, but it is certainly present. Plenty of examples of such people both in terms of public people and probably people you personally know that fit this description to a tee, maybe without ever growing out of it truly. And of course not all women are perfectly smart. But I think in terms of the raw numbers of the sort of people who can make use of the vines of society and best swing to their own benefit, assuming they aren't encountering total bigotry hobbling them along the way, those people are more likely to be women. And indeed, as we see the old bigots age out and be replaced with more sensible generations in charge of hiring, we see more women in the workforce often outnumbering men these days in many knowledge work domains.

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