Girls Get Better Grades Than Boys
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Turns out, there's no statistically significant difference between male and female grades. http://minimaxir.com/img/online-class-charts/gender-grade.pn...
Basically your post confirms the theory of the person above. That grades aren't measuring mastery of knowledge but the skill to obey arbitrary rules.
> 113,571 female students (26.7%).
> The fact that it’s not even close to 50:50 is surprising.
It didn't surprise me, I went there & searched for it. How can it be surprising (you see these ppl all the time on campus!). And it shows that there are ~3 times more men at Harvard than woman.
So thank YOU so much for nearing to a problem: Girls do better early on (cf. orig. article) & men later in live (cf. your analysis)
Why did you screw that? Political correctness? You are dishonest (you'd have my downvote).
An important aspect: We need to make sure to not loose males [which would do fine later] during early years.
The article does raise one real issue - grades in school are based on more on obeying arbitrary rules than on actual mastery of the knowledge. That's a problem worth fixing. But it's a problem worth fixing because grades are measuring the wrong thing, and it's worth fixing regardless of it's affects on statistical gender disparities.
But I guess "modern grading systems measure the wrong thing" is far less of a clickbait topic.
My question would be: "why do females have a head-start in self-restraint, and why do males fail to catch up quickly?"
I suspect much of the answer could be cultural.
I suspect much of the answer could be genetic. Males in primate species tend to be more aggressive and have less "self-restraint".
I'm not saying I agree that women have a ~subservient nature~, just that the way comments ended up being laid out really struck me.
I'm certainly willing to reconsider my views, and even conceded the possible incorrectness of my beliefs in my other post which you linked.
But, I think there's a big difference in both meaning and tone between "self-restraint" and "subservience", which is (part of) why I had objected to the other post.
I had a huge problem with how the point was presented: use of a derogatory adjective, opinions as fact ("school sucks" coupled with "they like it"), "blow [my] brains out", etc. Came across as angry injust blame, to me, which is why I said it was "off the rails". It's not reasonable or fair to predicate an argument on an exaggerated and probably sexist set of statements.
Whereas contrasting aggressiveness against self-restraint (with very vague sources cited, at least) and leaving room for uncertainty as in GP at least leaves room to consider respective advantages and disadvantages of both aspects, instead of painting a "female" aspect with an entirely negative light, as in your link's parent.
This guy said it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338243
School sucks and boys feel that more acutely, is the long and short of it in my view. Girls tend to tolerate or even like it because subservience is more in their nature. Women also tend to like moderate status corporate drone jobs that make a lot of men want to blow their brains out.
Wow, I agreed with the first half of what you said, but you really started going off the rails here.
1 No citations given.
2 "Subservience" is unlikely to be a genetic trait, which would mean you're engaging in negative reinforcement of a culturally-imposed patriarchal "value" for women to hold.
Even if subservience is a genetic trait, it's hardly reasonable to accuse someone of possessing it.
Subservience is forced, has been forced, due to biology, until the very recent past. Women could not even control having children until birth control. No one likes "corporate drone" jobs. No one likes being a servant or a slave either. Sometimes you take what you can get at the time just to survive.
The downside of all this is that it promotes disparate outcomes for those who come from privileged backgrounds and those who come from more ordinary ones. I'm currently attending an "elite" college and there seems to be a pretty clear distinction between job placement and family status.
I always did well on tests and in any class I didn't totally hate I felt like I gained the knowledge I needed to. However, I never did all the homework. Hated it. Most of it felt like busy work, or just plain unimportant.
Not that I think self-discipline is worthless. It is a very important life skill. But they don't really teach you how to be self-disciplined so much as attempt to force it on to you by making your grade dependent on a ton of extra work. I like the idea of splitting grades into knowledge and self-discipline like the Minnesota school did.
Thankfully I left loving learning and am always learning new things from different subjects I am interested in but I feel for those not as privileged/lucky as me.
Education needs a rework, one size fits all doesn't work. Splitting grades I think is just a bandaid on the problem.
I think instead of forcing younger students to memorize multiplication tables and which shoe belongs to which profession (my first F. I remember getting it in kindergarten) we should try to figure out what style of learning suits them.
For example, my homeroom 6th grade drill sergeant-esque teacher would order us to do push-ups when we acted up, rather than docking our grades. That kind of pseudo-military style punishment fits boys better, I think. Gets the point across without feeling emasculating or overly punitive.
I wonder, is the article true or does it just appeal to my feelings?
But, as they say on HN, the plural of anecdote is not science.
She’s found that little ones who are destined to do well in
a typical 21st century kindergarten class are those who
manifest good self-regulation.
For a very long time (40+ years) we know that girls have done better in grades and boys have done better in standardised admission tests. The quality of "good self-regulation" others may describe negatively as a false reward for "girls keep quiet". In open format classes boys dominate and demand attention. Teachers may be rewarding girls "self-regulation" because they are more considerate of the teacher and fellow students. But as a result teachers give more attention to the students that are worse at "self-regulation". see: "Failing At Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls" from 1995
Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence
that the stress many girls experience in test situations can
artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading
of their true abilities.
This field of study appears to me to be a mess.
Here is a study on the male grade crisis with a counter conclusion. Pretty much the similar research results but different conclusion and language:
The researchers examined 369 samples from 308 studies,
reflecting grades of 538,710 boys and 595,332 girls. ... The
study reveals that recent claims of a “boy crisis,” with boys
lagging behind girls in school achievement, are not accurate
because girls’ grades have been consistently higher than boys’
across several decades with no significant changes in recent
years, the authors wrote.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades.aspxEven as a nearly 30 something I don't like being told what to do. Ask, don't tell.
I know I could see this was pointless charade and would rather do something of actual value, whereas most of what you do in school is pointless busy work with no real educational value at all.
You're male.
It seems like according to your premise, if we could just get over our prejudices, we could drastically streamline military training by simply selecting docile, compliant females instead of petulant, inquisitive males.
I did terribly in school, by the way.
That said, one cannot fairly compare the two. The military has an express purpose of national security, and is well suited to obedience and susceptibility. Public schools, on the other hand, are little more than industrialized daycare at best, and harmful propaganda centers at worst. That and joining the military comes with benefits that extend beyond the artificial void inside a public school... it's supposed to, anyway.
(I'm reading more into your comment than you actually said, I know; maybe you're just making a tangential point).
And young women, too.
> I think boys can largely see this is a pointless charade and would rather do something of actual value
I don't think there's a lot of evidence in the behavior of school age boys vs. girls, either in school or in any other context, to support this.
OTOH, I do think your explanation may reflect (though in a distorted way) something that may be a real issue that may explain part of the difference: I suspect that boys have a lower tolerance for activities with a delayed payoff, where conventional school curriculum mostly has a very delayed payoff.
To this end, having stereotypes and games like girls playing with dolls while boys build things and play more combative games instills different behaviours in children, which fundamentally change how they relate to others. You can still see it reflected in stupid things like "Be a man", which is essentially a shaming shorthand for "assert independence and dominance, thus showing less vulnerability to those able to dominate you in a competitive social hierarchy".
This obviously also reflects on the way people relate to obedience; independence being a supposed virtue, obedience can be intepreted from this masculine framework as an attempt by someone else to dominate. Emphasising co-operation and connection, though, means a greater willingness to engage. These are obviously only broad trends, but they are noticeable.
Sorry to be anal about it, but (assuming you're from a Western country) the society is anything but patriarchal.
"Patriarchy is a social system in which males [...] occupy roles of political leadership, moral authority and control of property, and where fathers hold authority over women and children"
Some recently reported research (I apologize for lack of a reference) explains that already in the crib girls are paying attention to people and boys, to things.
Then what the OP is describing about differences in K through the early grades is essentially just that the girls are more interested in people, e.g., pleasing the teachers, and the boys are more interested in the material, at least if it has to do with things, which in those grades it mostly doesn't.
In particular, of course the girls are much better behaved in class: From the crib, the girls are much better socially than the boys, and that means girls do better in groups, e.g., the social behavior in a classroom.
Next, in those early grades, the girls have much better verbal aptitude so do better at reading and writing, learning languages, etc.
Next, by paying more attention to people, girls have much better understanding of people in the fictional reading that is common and, thus, do better in that reading. Also the girls have much better understanding of emotions and, thus, better understand the emotional content of fictional readings. Also, as in D. Tannen, the girls are much more active in talking with their friends, i.e., their girlfriends, with gossip, and, thus, get still better at understanding people and social situations, including what is in the fictional readings, the classroom social dynamics, etc.
The OP also claimed that the girls are better at "math", but here I start to question. Sure, for math in K-8 or so, the girls are much better because they have much better clerical accuracy and much better handwriting (better at getting the columns of digits lined up important for accuracy). And, again the girls are better at and more interested in pleasing the teachers.
And, with some teaching and grading styles, the girls might be able to seem better at math through grade 12 or so. It can continue to be a really big advantage to be really good at sensing how to please the teachers, and girls are better at that.
But my experience in math (and I was a math major in college and my Ph.D. is in applied math), really, for much of anything like real math, the girls are a big step down. Somehow they don't get it; here maybe the main problem is lack of interest due to cultural stereotypes that girls are not supposed to concentrate on STEM subjects.
Last I heard, on the math SATs, the boys still do much better than the girls and, yes, on the verbal SATs the girls do better than the boys.
Then for the girls/women along come marriage and babies, and then on average their ability to compete with boys/men in most of more important work fades.
You think maybe that might have something to do with it?
To say that girls worker harder than boys offends me greatly. These studies are never accurate and somewhat biased, and I think work ethic is something that can't be averaged out like this. I don't doubt a lot of girls out there do work harder than boys, but making statements like: "Girls succeed over boys in school because they are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals." is offensive and heavily typecasting all boys into the same category.
There are boys out there who put effort into planning and setting academic goals, because I am friends with many guys like this who care and put the effort in, I also know as many women who do the same. If this study were truth, why are there just as many male academics as there are female? If anything, I have seen more male academics than female (in my experience and field). Imagine if the effort that went into this study was put to better use, to help solve a problem or achieve a result that would benefit society? Studies like this are a waste of time.
I realise this is just a study and the whole point might be to highlight issues with school curriculum and have no sexist undertones, but at the same time, studies like this are relatively useless. The modern school system being completely broken to the point kids are falling behind is a very well known fact, and sadly, no study is going to change that anytime soon.
Maybe if we had less studies and more action on fixing things, then there wouldn't be instances of boys getting left behind in the schooling system. Did it ever occur to those responsible for this study that maybe, just maybe, the system is actually broken? And maybe, just maybe, it has nothing to do with what sex you are? I feel like society already has enough issues when it comes to rampant sexism and gender equality without more fuel being thrown on the fire. All studies like this do is take a handful of people, average and collate the results and then proclaim they've made some kind of conclusive discovery that applies to everyone outside of the sample group. Unless this study leads to change or another longer and more conclusive study, the results mean nothing.
Regardless of what sex you are, nobody should be getting left behind. If it is true that boys learn differently to girls, then adjust the curriculum to make it more flexible for different learning styles. When I went to school I struggled, not because I am stupid or because I am a male, I struggled because the curriculum assumed everyone learns the same way and when I couldn't fit myself within the mould, I got left behind and taught myself everything I needed to know. Everyone learns differently, we are not all the same.
Sorry for getting worked up, Studies like this do nothing to help resolve gender equality gaps whatsoever.
You then ask: Why are there just as many male academics as there are female? I would ask: Why do males fill out almost all highly skilled and/or highly paid fields, despite poorer school results on average.
This is a very important question which points out the true scale and direction of the problem.
After all, they're gatekeepers and enforcers.
Since society ridiculously built a massive infrastructure based on gender, women and men are trained differently. To the intellectual destruction of men.
I think you mean "equate". "Equivocate" means something quite different.
My guess is that the study focused mostly on K-8 or K-12 maybe with some college. In contrast, you are talking about what happens in the world of work. There the boys/men can be plenty serious, hard working, aggressive, bright, ambitious, good at planning, etc.
From all I've seen, for high end technical work, especially research, in STEM fields, the men totally and effortlessly blow away nearly all the women.
In my experience, in grades 1-8, the teachers treated me like dirt. Thank goodness for social promotion! But in math, from grade 9 through high school, college, graduate school, work, to the present, I totally effortlessly blow away nearly every female I've come across. It's like the females are from a different planet. In other ways, the females totally, effortlessly blow me away.
Or, from E. Fromm, "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same.". From all I can see, this is true.