Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being-outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap

by ddtaylor • 5 years ago

267 535 5 years ago

endisneigh16• 5 years ago

How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent then you’d think. I suppose all three could be true.

refraincomment2• 5 years ago

Or simply that boys don't take education seriously until 10 years later?

0xy3• 5 years ago

Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less, and under conditions that pay less (part time, contract work, etc).

How many deep sea welders are women? Less than 0.1%. How many oil rig workers are women? Less than 1%.

Good deep sea welders earn over $300k.

krisdol• 5 years ago

Hard to live up to the expectation of being a good mother and spending months on an oil rig at the same time.

wizzwizz42• 5 years ago

Define “naturally”.

La1n• 5 years ago

Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less,

Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women gravitate towards are paid less.

BobbyJo• 5 years ago

I don't think those are what the parent was referring to as 'top tier'. Those pay well, but in both cases they are highly paid because of risk and life disruption (having to spend extended time away from home on rigs). It's my understanding that men are naturally less risk-averse, so the gender differences there seem natural to me.

I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and high ranking corporate officers.

noir_lord• 5 years ago

It's also possible that the distribution is different.

i.e there are more men who are total geniuses at one end and total dumbasses at the other but the average would be the same.

https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-dumber-and-smarter-than-w...

No idea if it's true though - not my field and not an expert.

endisneigh16• 5 years ago

Even if this were true it still wouldn't explain the difference. This could only be the explanation of two conditions are met:

1. Your cited article is correct.

2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top tier" level intelligence. This second point would require some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy persists.

doctors: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-women-n....

lawyers: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers...

(just to use two popular examples. if you extend this out to a lot more professions the pattern persists)

You could be right, but I personally doubt it.

curiousgal• 5 years ago

I think the answer lies in the fact that in countries like Tunisia for example, women represent over 60% of people working in STEM. Why? Because STEM jobs are the highest paying jobs. So from my perspective, the lack of women in STEM in the U.S. is not an issue but a symptom of a strong economy, as in you don't have to decipher someone's spaghetti code for a living, you can pay the bills doing other things that you are more passionate about.

renewiltord5• 5 years ago

ku-man• 5 years ago

Indeed. The number of women in STEM fields is also low in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries compared to in-development ones. And, nobody in his/her right mind will accuse the Scandinavian countries of being patriarchal sexists societies.

LeegleechN• 5 years ago

Girls get higher grades (perhaps due to higher conscientiousness), but do not do better in standardized tests.

micdr0p3• 5 years ago

That's interesting. Got a source?

hc-taway6• 5 years ago

My graduating class was remarked on through multiple schools as an exceptionally smart class. We had lots of very bright boys and girls. Maybe our class was unusual in other ways so this isn't part of a broader trend or tendency, but practically all the smart girls did all their homework and maintained a 3.5GPA or higher (most more like 3.8+), while probably half or more of the smart boys skipped lots of it and pulled Cs and Bs (with the occasional A in classes that had little homework). Meanwhile, those same boys who skipped much of their homework scored in the top percentile or two when it came time for ACTs and SATs and achieved excellent marks on annual state testing (not that the latter matters whatsoever for students), were often in gifted programs or active on "smart kid" extracurriculars, et c.

So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.

tester7569• 5 years ago

It seems to confirm my experience over whole education

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

I don't know if this is a good faith question, but the big obvious reason you've omitted is that women frequently drop out of the work force (or shift to part-time work) because they want to be directly involved in raising their children.

amanaplanacanal2• 5 years ago

Societal expectations that women do child rearing rather than men probably has some impact on that decision.

kube-system• 5 years ago

There are other familial factors that are often at play. For example, many choose to delay their careers in lieu of raising children. Not all women make this decision, but a sizable number do.

That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity, there are likely many factors at play at the same time.

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

Depends on how you define top tier jobs.

They are solidly in the majority of students in medicine, law, accounting, etc.

micdr0p3• 5 years ago

A suggestion from the article:

What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been shown to favour male underlings. In a few places sexism is enshrined in law: Singapore still canes boys, while sparing girls the rod.

carnagecity786• 5 years ago

I guess it also has to do with the fact that this is a relatively recent change. Probably we'll see the effects of this in future generations of industry demographics, for now though the research and statistics are pretty clear in that women are underrepresented in STEM across the board; but this is something changing rapidly, especially in tech.

marklubi2• 5 years ago

Perhaps a fourth explanation... The vast majority of teachers are female, so maybe their teaching methods are favorable to girls

endisneigh16• 5 years ago

I suppose this is possible - how exactly do you think teaching methods are more favorable to girls compared to boys?

hddu• 5 years ago

Top tier jobs are subjective. Women have less interest in engineering.

cobraetor• 5 years ago

This shouldn't be a controversial take. It is Occam's razor after all.

We know that before the tech industry became popular and a way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better academically outside of the US.

disgrunt• 5 years ago

Or possibly, academia and the general workforce optimize for different things not included in your list?

Does anyone here think their academic experience was a direct analog for their workforce experience?

proc0• 5 years ago

women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs

Correct. I've yet to impress with my math skills, just saying.

kashkhan2• 5 years ago

or this is the cumulative effect of systematic discrimination for decades and centuries.

CydeWeys• 5 years ago

This is the right answer, certainly a larger factor than anything else being discussed here. In the US, women were only granted the right to vote a century ago, and a time when it was considered improper for well-to-do women to work is within the memory of many living Americans.

wing-_-nuts3• 5 years ago

I'm not denying it's true, but I have little patience for this argument because we can't actually do anything about it. Injustice today? Yes, we should absolutely stop that where ever we find it, but what am I supposed to do today about the fact that women could not vote in 1920? Words are cheap, actions matter. I'd much rather focus on current discrimination than dig up injustices from the past.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

Or, people pursue their passions as young people without much regard for what a professional career would look like.

I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy stories all the time, because that was her interest.

20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.

spaniard89277• 5 years ago

Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues.

There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.

Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.

There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.

Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.

aklemm2• 5 years ago

Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it well--is not avoiding work.

Kluny2• 5 years ago

Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.

Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.

farias0• 5 years ago

I'm sorry but why are you so sure they're trying to avoid work? From my experience most women would love to have careers and be financially independent and successful. But babies indeed make it a lot harder -- both from a time/energy perspective and from a discrimination perspective.

tshaddox• 5 years ago

In the United States in the last 30 years, the percentage of women working in computing fields has decreased significantly. In that same time period, births per women has decreased and the age of first-time mothers has increased.

P_I_Staker2• 5 years ago

I'm mostly with you on this, but there's a larger percentage of guys than you think. If you worked in corporate America long enough, especially in tech, you've encountered lots of guys that clearly enjoy being at work more than home.

People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.

I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What if it really is better to have less money, and not have to deal with any of this work stuff?

imtringued2• 5 years ago

Before women were allowed to work the few women that did pursue higher education were basically expected to marry immediately after graduation. There was absolutely zero expectation that you would work a job relevant to your education because you were supposed to be a housewife who is busy with her kids. The biological aspect is probably the biggest driving force.

wing-_-nuts3• 5 years ago

Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues. There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.

Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?

You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?

I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.

kache_• 5 years ago

Most of my money is attributable to my negotiation skills and assertiveness, rather than my programming skill that I bent over backwards to develop.

ImprovedSilence• 5 years ago

I would agree with this. However Ive seen very assertive women take advantage of that as much as men or even more, and where I work its probably <10% of my co workers of either sex take active roles in “managing” their career as opposed to just showing up and hoping their work gets noticed, or just coasting and enjoying the paycheck they have (while still grumbling about fading benefits, of course)

burlesona• 5 years ago

I don’t know how true this is, but one thing I’ve seen referenced a few times is that students perform better under teachers of their gender, especially at younger ages. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the same applies for employee performance in the workplace.

If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, then you would expect females to do better in school. Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces.

Again I don’t have a study handy so I’m not sure how empirical that is, it may just be conjecture.

barbacoa• 5 years ago

I don't understand why people ignore the role children play in the life ambitions of women.

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

In part, because salary has to do with agreeableness and many cultures have stupid expectations for women such as them expected to be more agreeable.

Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.

dekhn4• 5 years ago

In many subfields of biology, women have achieved numerical parity at all levels (IE, there are roughly 50% women in entry and leadership positions). It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination. It's unclear what the full set of contributing factors are.

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

You also can’t have mathematical equality with some fields dominated by women, like nursing.

If every field is 50% or better in women, you need a heck of a lot more women.

rajin4443• 5 years ago

How do you know 50% is the correct amount of women at all levels?

asdff• 5 years ago

I think the training environment at the undergraduate level is still toxic for women. I graduated 4 years ago, and while I wasn't in the CS program I had a female friend who was and she often lamented how isolating that program could be. This was a huge program at a huge school (50k undergrad), yet she was often one of only a few women in the program, and as she progressed she became even more of a minority as others switched majors. Of course there were hardly any women professors or role models as well.

Engineering is a field that selects for a certain personality, not all the time, but I think everyone here knows at least a couple classmates like this who are pretty arrogant, stubborn, self validating, the type to argue with the TA over their wrong homework answer for half the class, and never one to admit shortcomings. It's also a major that encourages regular group projects, where you might be stuck with personalities like this, or legitimately total creeps with questionable hygiene (I've seen all of this even outside CSE in my program). I think we all remember a few creeps from the undergrad days, too. Frankly, many of these men, especially in that age between 18-22 when you are basically a high schooler in maturity and might never had a female friend before due to social awkwardness, are overtly misogynistic, maybe without even knowing it just by cracking dumb jokes for cheap laughs among their male friends.

In majors with more representation among women, you are less likely to be saddled with these personalities (or even have to do massively weighted capstone group projects), and more likely to have camaraderie among people in the same boat as you, and are more likely to see through the major without switching to another one.

134152• 5 years ago

Maybe linguistics vs. philosophy is a good example. They are not too different from each other and I've studied both of them. My impression has always been that male vs. female linguistics professors were roughly 50:50, whereas at least in the past there were way more male than female philosophy professors. It seems to be getting better now in philosophy, though.

However, I could be totally wrong about this, as I've never bothered to check the figures.

TimPC2• 5 years ago

No interest in money is an extreme position to take. Small differences in interest can lead to big differences in outcome. There is also some time lag with this data, studies have shown boys doing worse academically over time (relative to girls) so the age group in 2015 is largely in school, university, or just entering the workforce. Women in their 20's already outperform men in their 20's in earnings and we don't yet know if that trend is going to carry on into later years given new ability gaps. It hasn't carried on historically due to a wide variety of reasons including the adverse affects of maternity leave on careers but we haven't seen an academic gap of this magnitude between the genders either before so that may be changing. It's also worth noting that a lot of top earning careers are looking at a slice of top performers academically, and the distribution of academic performance for males tends to be higher variance so even with a lower average we may see similar numbers of top performers in both genders.

cphajduk• 5 years ago

I'd like to point out that the workplace values are different from academics values.

The top performers in my college class, struggled to get internships within my internship-mandatory program.

itronitron• 5 years ago

Performing well academically usually means that the student is good at at completing assignments in a way that aligns with the teachers grading rubric. I think boys have a certain contempt for that for a variety of reasons (at least mine do) so they focus their attention on how to work around the system, which probably yields an advantage later in the workplace.

visarga3• 5 years ago

Like when you solve the arithmetic problem with algebra and the teacher says it's wrong because you didn't use the official method?

paperwasp42• 5 years ago

There's also the major factor of children. Women get a lot of scolding from society if they prioritize their career over children. Men generally aren't shamed to such a degree, and workaholic dads are even lauded as being "diligent bread winners."

Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an option. They have to leave the office before day care closes. Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically more likely to impact moms.)

Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high paying, high power careers.

SkyBelow3• 5 years ago

Another reason people don't often take into account is that men have an extra incentive for earning more money as their worth as a person is judged more upon what they make than it is for a woman (women have other things they are judged more upon). So each dollar, beyond the utility of having an extra dollar, also makes them 'more of a man' to use a phrase that tries to condense all of complexities of society's judgements down into 10 letters. Many of the explanations commonly given, like men being willing to take on more dangerous jobs, can be partly explained by their judgment as a person (and as a parent) being derived from what they make to a stronger extent than for a woman.

women have no interest in money

Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and less interest, and also a difference between interest in money and interest in the status associated with a certain level of salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.

neffy• 5 years ago

Lags in real time systems. To get into high paying jobs in most fields requires a 20-30 year apprenticeship.

So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so. Just as with universal education, it starts to be available from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start making it into the skilled workforce.

Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on eternity.

cperciva• 5 years ago

There are couple more explanations which haven't been mentioned:

1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men.

2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce correlates with academic success, one would expect it to correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on homework but only very slightly on exams.

collias• 5 years ago

Source for the stats in #1?

xyzelement• 5 years ago

Someone commented that it's about "babies" and that's so incredibly right. But I think it's more benign than it may sound.

We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff.

I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father.

There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of it can be read as systemic imbalance.

Hermel• 5 years ago

Maybe the most talented women prefer pursuing a career academics over one in the real sector?

cullinap• 5 years ago

I don't if we can conclude that top academic performance directly results in high performers in top tier jobs

tomjen3• 5 years ago

I think Jordan Peterson is correct on that one: the real question isn't why women don't go after those kinds of jobs, but why anybody is willing to work so hard and to give up so much for incomes that allow a marginally better life (e.g going from 40k a year to 100k a year is a huge improvement, going from 200k to 300k?).

Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.

jhatemyjob• 5 years ago

I wish I had the option of being a stay at home dad. Fuck working

xenihn• 5 years ago

academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs

This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills" means specifically in the US:

- you perform well on standardized tests - you perform well on rubric-graded essays - you do all of your homework, and you get As on every assignment

this leads to:

- you get into a good university - you (presumably) perform adequately or well at said university

Every student who performs well academically has a similar path to this point, but then there's divergency.

Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career. It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and medicine.

Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not see a link between academic performance and engineering competency.

I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo) for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation between academic performance and representation in the top tier of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the other big industries.

dijit2• 5 years ago

Men are over represented at the top _and_ at the bottom.

So the average may be higher for girls, but that’s across all girls.

This is what the bell curves are and a result of men’s being very wide and girls’ being very narrow.

This is known as the variability hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=s...

drdec• 5 years ago

Now consider the fact that there is a limit on the top grade and much more more at the bottom of the grading scale. If you assume the variability hypothesis is true, it seems inevitable that the average for girls would be higher.

SamReidHughes2• 5 years ago

Top tier jobs need to use top tier statistics. The top 10% of male test-takers and top 6% of female test-takers score at least 700 on the math SAT. Over twice as many boys as girls get 800 on the math SAT. The ratio gets even higher beyond that. This is despite the systemic bias in the school system against boys.

albntomat0• 5 years ago

That's an interesting statistic. Do you have a source? I'd be interested in learning more

throwaway36993• 5 years ago

Isn't this the standard bimodal distribution we expect? Boys make up the majority of CEOs but they also make up the vast majority of criminals. Median girls are smarter than median boys, but the distribution is less wide on a population level.

P_I_Staker2• 5 years ago

Many of the above are true. Especially, academic skill is one of the most overrated abilities out there. You're better off with zero skill or being actively harmful, if you know how to play the game and have the right face (I don't mean literally, though sometimes that too. Do you say the right things and have the correct manners?)

I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay" for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to do is be devastating for my social status.

It's actually interesting to talk about because technically these things are true for women too, but we have a whole industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say in anything.

We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood) that are harmful to their career, because their career is all they have.

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

Either women have no interest in money

This is close, but too strong. You only need women to have less interest in money than men to cause a difference.

A likely cause of such a difference is that men with high income and prestigious careers are very popular as romantic partners for women.

To spell it out, women in high paying jobs get a lot of money. Men in high paying jobs get a lot of money and improved romantic success.

qu4ku• 5 years ago

They choose not optimal collage majors is one of the answers: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

ThrustVectoring• 5 years ago

Tournament theory - top tier jobs (particularly executive ones) are a competition where rank-ordering contestants is relatively easy, but quantifying performance is hard. So one solution is to give the winner a big prize, the losers a smaller consolation prize, and if you ignore risk-aversion this is as economically efficient in terms of incentives as paying for piece-work.

The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

A lot of literature seems to focus around the gap being mostly that girls

- Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in school)

- Are better at following instructions

These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no instructions to follow when you are building the next Google: nobody did it before you.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

Psychology.

Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction association) it was asked for the people in the room to send proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a few things we could do but we have a problem because there is not a single lady in the list'.

We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic, no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining). My only idea so far is that women and men have different instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.

frongpik• 5 years ago

Academic grades measure skills that are only applicable at entry level jobs that are about following simple known rules. I knew many female students in school and college that got top marks on every subject, and yet they were mediocre in real life and never achieved much 10 years after graduation. I think that's precisely because their patience to follow silly rules didn't help them to compete in the world where there are no rules. On the other hand, I also knew many guys from the same classes who absolutely sucked at every subject except one or two where they shined and they have made impressive careers.

PunchTornado• 5 years ago

Or, another question, why don't we, as a society, help boys perform as well as girls.

chlodwig3• 5 years ago

How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs?

I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2).

Here is my model:

1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1.

2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do some bit of work only because they see some advantage to themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude, who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic.

When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl does more homework than the median boy.

The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork. But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that get the top positions.

On top of that, in my experience, women do make different choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-actualization", while more men still have the expectation that they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed, obviously, many exceptions exist).

And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track" job than take a high-powered career path.

B-Con• 5 years ago

I'd like to see data on academic performance in specialties. Most well-paying first world countries employ specialists (eg, doctors, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc). Recall Simpson's paradox in statistics, where a general distribution doesn't have to apply to the individual sub-sets.

FTA:

Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved ahead.

This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing.

academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs

I highly doubt that there is no correlation, but I doubt that education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the other direction.

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

I decided to underrepresent myself in the top tier of jobs because I do not want to live a life of a workaholic. You won't get into the top tier by doing 40 hours of work weekly.

Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.

7_my_mind3• 5 years ago

Women have different incentives. Having a career is not really necessary and the reasons to have one are different. Us men need to compete with each other to be the best providers. Women just need to pick one of us, and then their goal is to retain that man in their lives. Having a career does not factor much into that. Especially having a high stress career would maybe even hurt such goals. Some men and some women get so caught up spinning the hamster wheel, that they loose track of why they are spinning the wheel in the first place. But most of us in general are aware of the reasons.

micdr0p3• 5 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210309182923/https://www.econo...

refraincomment2• 5 years ago

Whatever the results say, women are discriminated and they need a pay rise and more acknowledgement. Data will say whatever we tell them.

throwaway53086• 5 years ago

Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better.

Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.

endisneigh16• 5 years ago

I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women compared to men?

Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

visarga3• 5 years ago

The difference in teaching style is putting accent on cooperation vs competition.

xhkkffbf• 5 years ago

* Lots of sitting still. My local school canceled recess several years ago to make sure the kids had more studying time.

* Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often explicitly as part of the grade.

* Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks students to write and make a presentation about their math answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as long as the presentation is professional and impressive.

aviraldg3• 5 years ago

The rules and grading are different.

In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.)

At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.

ameister144• 5 years ago

Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

That might be true if you ignored development, but we're talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the same as a 23 year old man.

1_player• 5 years ago

Perhaps, presuming OP's assumption that women have an easier time to follow the rules and there are more women in education than men is correct, that school has a lot of rules and not enough freedom.

I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school was a really strict place compared to real life and work. There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher had intended you to.

As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.

dec0dedab0de3• 5 years ago

Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

In my working life every time I brazenly break the rules and ignore instructions I end up getting a raise, or promotion. This is across 5 or 6 jobs stretched out over 23 years in small businesses, and fortune 100 companies. This is because I always back it up with results

In school, any deviation, regardless of intention or outcome, was perceived by my teachers as being disrepectful to their authority, and was quickly punished. To be fair, I went to catholic school in the 80s/early 90s, so following rules was probably a bigger emphasis than most people's experiences.

aviraldg3• 5 years ago

I don't agree with the rest of your comment (my school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers), but anecdotally the primary difference between boys and girls was exactly what you mentioned: the former were more likely to skip classes, study things that were not in the syllabus (which helps sometimes), not maintain notes as well, etc. whereas the latter would typically follow the syllabus, teachers' instructions etc. more closely and maintain very thorough notes.

dijit2• 5 years ago

My own anecdatum indicates that the parent is right though.

20 female teachers. 1 male.

No males on the senior staff.

esja7• 5 years ago

Male primary school teachers are a tiny minority, and that's true globally.

iagovar4• 5 years ago

the former were more likely to skip classes, study things that were not in the syllabus (which helps sometimes), not maintain notes as well, etc. whereas the latter would typically follow the syllabus, teachers' instructions etc. more closely and maintain very thorough notes.

Mmm, that's interesting, I have the same observation. I'm not in the US, if that holds any value.

protomyth2• 5 years ago

In the US, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm shows that female teachers are 98.8% of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 79.6% of elementary and middle school teachers.

If your school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers then your school was the exception.

odiroot2• 5 years ago

Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women.

That was definitely the case for me until university.

protomyth2• 5 years ago

Education and childcare administrators are 66.5% women in the USA according to https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

mfenix• 5 years ago

As the father of 6 years old twins (one boy, one girl) I agree with this 100%. My son needs more discipline than my daughter, he's more likely to get into trouble at school, he likes physical activities, etc. almost the opposite of his sister.

jacobolus2• 5 years ago

son needs more discipline

This does not seem like the right conclusion. More like "needs running around time and free play".

Cf. e.g. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/discipline-problem-solutio... https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/beyond-discipline-article/

tompazourek• 5 years ago

Girls the same age are more mature than boys. They develop differently. Maybe that's a factor?

mpweiher• 5 years ago

Maybe, maybe not.

However: if it were the other way around, would that ever be an acceptable answer nowadays?

kzrdude• 5 years ago

What do we mean by mature though? It's a kind of bias to prefer one over the other, when it's simply different.

tomp3• 5 years ago

I've always heard this as a kid/young adult but as I've grown older, I've noticed that most people don't ever mature (well, at least not until 35-ish) so I've started doubting all claims and folk-wisdom about maturity pretty much wholesale...

pmarreck3• 5 years ago

I see a lot of people in this thread speaking in generalities or correlations around gender.

Is this OK, or not? I thought it wasn't OK, so I tend to avoid it, even if I think some of it may be true, but isn't stereotyping anyone based on attributes something we are trying NOT to do?

bb611• 5 years ago

In the US, there's a significant gender gap in administration, especially above the school leader level. Also, larger schools (middle, high) are more likely to be run by men than woman.

dominotw3• 5 years ago

run by

what do you mean by this ?

filmgirlcw• 5 years ago

I'd assume most school administrators are women.

At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true. A disproportionate number of administrators (especially when adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown) are male.

There have also been many studies that show that teachers call on boys more, praised them more (they acknowledge girls, praise boys), and talk with them more.

So your assumptions are completely at odds with decades of data.

[1] https://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/ — has good links to various research from across the world.

jimbokun4• 5 years ago

Teachers grade boys more harshly than girls:

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

scarmig3• 5 years ago

Teachers also criticize boys more often, and boys' grades tend to increase when submitted work is anonymized.

Boys and girls experience different gendered teaching practices, but the net result is girls being given higher grades than boys on average.

dominotw3• 5 years ago

A disproportionate number of administrators (especially when adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown) are male.

Surprised to hear this. This is opposite of my experience working for Chicago public schools(CPS).

mattmcknight• 5 years ago

> I'd assume most school administrators are women.
At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true.

54% female, 46% male

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cls.asp

alentist• 5 years ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

Teachers are more lenient in their marking of girls' schoolwork, according to an international study.

An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60 countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared with boys of the same ability.

When it comes to teachers' marking, the study says there is a consistent pattern of girls' work being "marked up".

RulingWalnut• 5 years ago

Do you have a citation for the number of administrators breakdown? I didn't see a reference in the Time article but maybe I missed it.

dominotw3• 5 years ago

Do you think it has anything to do with girls having better handwriting.

I couldn't improve my handwriting for the life of me when i was in school and got really poor grades from teachers not being able to read what i was writing.

analog312• 5 years ago

Today, it's typing. I've seen the difference in kids. I think readability may be one issue, but perhaps even more important is that if writing is physically awkward and painful, it leads to writing fewer words and doing fewer edits.

My own experience was that learning to type, thanks to getting interested in programming, was game changing. All I can say is that I could write lengthy essays and reports in a jiffy. Still can.

kaitai5• 5 years ago

Fine and large motor skills develop unevenly across genders/brain structures. There may be a link here, a feedback loop.

pavlus• 5 years ago

I've had a terrible handwriting, and we had 'calligraphy' in like 3rd-4th grade or so, where I consistently received 1s and 0s, sometimes 2s (of 12), switched few schools, and the only person who cared enough about teaching me writing, instead of "grading" it, was my math teacher in high school, maybe it didn't become perfect, but it became readable, and for that I'm grateful to her.

Even though I'm mostly typing now, it helped me in university and it helps me sometimes when solving problems on paper is easier than with computers.

musicale• 5 years ago

Schools have largely (and probably wisely) abandoned looped cursive handwriting, a fiendishly difficult sort of writing with variant letter forms and complicated joins, but I tend to think that teaching cursive italic, a simple and beautiful form of cursive writing (think William Shakespeare rather than Thomas Jefferson) that uses the same letter forms as printed italic with simple joins, would make it easier for boys and girls to develop better handwriting overall, both printed and cursive.

That being said, handwritten long-form text seems like a rarity in the age of computers, though I still feel that I express things differently in handwriting.

JKCalhoun2• 5 years ago

Also, most teachers are women.

Probably true for half a century now. And yet.

0xy3• 5 years ago

Don't forget that teachers give artificially low marks to boys for identical work. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

pmarreck3• 5 years ago

Why is this getting downvoted?

legulere• 5 years ago

At least what I read about Germany the disadvantage of boys is even bigger under male teachers.

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

With shrinking recess time and PE disappearing from some schools, I also wonder if a lot of this is caused by boys having more energy and needing more movement than girls. Energy has to go somewhere so it ends up manifesting itself in behaviors that are deemed "disruptive" (really, not sitting still and being unable to concentrate on tasks).

Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand.

It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.

zionic2• 5 years ago

Future generations will consider us barbarians for dosing our young boys with drugs because we providing them with physical education/exercise was inconvenient to us. They'll also be able to datamine the internet from this time period and use our own words to hang us.

TeMPOraL7• 5 years ago

It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.

It's a common trope, but AFAIK ADHD has a big hereditary component and currently is deemed to be extremely underdiagnosed in girls and adults in general, so I think this cliche isn't holding water. I will agree that modern schooling is extremely good at surfacing the symptoms (but then so is adult life in general, if you know what to look for).

pmarreck3• 5 years ago

It seems natural

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means, because it's the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal to intuition

girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions

So is that difference a problem, then? Or not? Or neither? You can't force people to take a risk they aren't comfortable with, and if boys (for whatever reason) are a little less risk-averse, what is there to do? Punish boys for taking risks as we praise girls for doing the same?

akudha• 5 years ago

Another thing I've noticed is that girls are generally much better at taking exams than boys. I don't have any numbers, just from observation - from my own school days, from observing my niece/nephew. It is super painful to get my nephew to do the homework vs my niece, for example.

walkedaway• 5 years ago

A great video on how boys are treated vs girls in schools: https://www.prageru.com/video/war-on-boys/

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

Anyone with young boys and girls

I'd have to see hard data, not anecdotes. My daughter is a wild child, actively flouts damn near every rule I create, refuses to follow instructions, and has a lot of trouble in school because she thinks it's stupid.

My son is far more compliant. Like night & day different from his sister. And they've been like this since they were old enough to start showing real personality.

kamaal2• 5 years ago

>Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better.

This hypothesis fails when applied to militaries. Throughout history men have near 100% representation in militaries and wars. Where discipline and following rules is more seriously enforced.

tropdrop• 5 years ago

It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.

Public School Education in the US is not a hotbed of innovation – we are largely riding on the coattails of a system constructed by men, no? Women may have filled these positions, but the system was largely constructed circa the Industrial revolution (and the tertiary education system with its initial origins in monasteries).

marbartolome• 5 years ago

Or perhaps we are stricter when raising girls, so they become more compliant.

"don't be so loud, that's not lady-like" "don't play in the dirt, you'll ruin your dress" "it's uncomfortable, I know, but you have to look pretty" "girls don't like sports, here, sit down and play with your dolls"

It's subtle things, but a million of them may make a difference. There's a lot more rules for girls than boys, they are used to spend their time in quieter activities, etc.

pixel_tracing• 5 years ago

This title seems click baity we should be asking the question as to why our system allows one gender to outperform the other. Not blanket statements of correlation == causation.

Something is clearly wrong with our system which is resulting in one gender receiving more support. The distribution curve should mostly be equal, yes we are different gender wise. But for large majority of people our brains function mostly the same (it’s not like girls are a different species than boys).

puddingnomeat• 5 years ago

I find it curious when people agree that X doesn't matter, but then they go about and compare outcomes based on X

in this case X=sex but it could be race, age, etc.

learn_more2• 5 years ago

Actions speak louder than words.

kashkhan2• 5 years ago

And yet this the first time a woman has become Veep.

firefoxd• 5 years ago

This is anecdotal but I'm sure many people are seen this increasingly. In the past 10 years on the job, I'm seeing more guys make jokes about how stupid they are. Every time they make a single mistake they say "oh my God, if my head wasn't attached to my shoulders..."

Then it becomes a competition of who has done the dumbest thing. I know it's just being playful, but you rarely see the opposite.

Turn the tables, I was in a meeting with a male and female coworker. The guy was saying how stupid he was, and the female stopped him and said: You shouldn't say that about yourself, in a serious tone.

I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.

TimPC2• 5 years ago

I've had a significantly different experience with this. I know a few men who self-deprecate when they make a mistake, but I know more women who do. I haven't seen it turn into a competition on who's done the dumbest thing because I'm seldom in groups where self-deprecation is widely encouraged. I've been the person encouraging people not to self-deprecate in this way, so I don't think it's really a gendered thing. I'm curious if this is trending differently in different age groups I'm almost 40.

renewiltord5• 5 years ago

Haha this is likely some sort of selection bias effect because I need constant validation and I have a group of friends who are all like that and a group of friends who are all not like that.

If I were in one group, I reckon I'd form one opinion and if I were in the other I'd form the other opinion.

I'd be wary of making population generalizations when one uses sample populations highly susceptible to selection bias: one's friends and one's coworkers - both of whom are usually selected for agreeableness with the group, either directly for friends or indirectly through culture fit for coworkers.

hn8788• 5 years ago

That's even a common trope in sitcoms. The husband is a loveable but bumbling idiot, while his wife is the voice of reason who frequently needs to save him from his own bad decisions. I wonder if the shows are imitating life, or the other way around. My wife did her master's thesis on discrimination based on communication, and in her research she found a study showing that the constant depiction of people with a southern accent as being stupid leads the majority of southern children, as young as 10 years old, to view themselves as inferior to people without the accent. Maybe the same is true with TV shows and movies frequently showing males as stupid.

steverb• 5 years ago

I spent some serious time as teenager training myself out of my southern accent for this reason. You could have a PHD in Astrophysics, but if you speak with a southern accent people will assume you're an idiot.

The only downside, is that I have a slight speech impediment, but it's mild enough that most people don't notice.

And for some reason I still (25 years later) tend to pronounce hill as "heel".

remir• 5 years ago

This has been going on for a while in advertising as well.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

I wonder...

After doing something stupid at work, I once said, out loud, "AnimalMuppet, if brains were leather, you couldn't saddle a flea." And 30 seconds later I was over it and back to work. I didn't say that because I think I'm stupid. No, I was able to say it because I'm sure that I'm smart. The security of being sure made me able to say that.

I wonder if the females don't feel secure enough to say such things, or if they're just wired differently. (So that saying derogatory things about themselves, which they don't actually believe, is an alien concept. It sounds rather weird when I put it that way...)

hntrader3• 5 years ago

It's the new status contest among men in technical circles.

Who can self-deprecate, feign uncertainty and fake modesty in the most sophisticated way. Everyone is competing for the "nice guy" designation - or perhaps they're frightened of the "asshole" designation - and they're using deception as the means.

It's reminiscent of stale scientific writing where every statement is hedged with endless caveats just so they can't get singled out for overstepping slightly.

nemo44x4• 5 years ago

Right, it's a mating strategy probably. I'm not sure it works (we tend to select towards strong men in whatever capacity is relevant, in this case actual intelligence) but a desperate man will gladly debase himself tactically if their other wells are dried up.

People would rather be liked than respected I guess but I also think that many today can't tell the difference.

standardUser3• 5 years ago

Women avoid saying such self-deprecating things because they already have a tougher time than men being listened to, taken seriously, promoted, etc. Not that there aren't exceptions, but most women are acutely aware of how they act and are perceived at work because they start off at a disadvantage. I imagine few men ever think "will my gender get in the way of my ideas, or my work relationships or my career trajectory?".

whimsicalism4• 5 years ago

Don't know why the pretty obvious explanation for why this sort of thing is common is downvoted.

Even if you're some weirdo who thinks there is no gender discrimination in the workplace, you can't deny that many women at least perceive there to be gender discrimination, and one of the tips passed around is to stop self-deprecating yourself in front of your colleagues.

koonsolo• 5 years ago

I don't fully agree with you, at least not in the European tech world. According to my experience, women in technical jobs have a higher chance of getting hired, winning a presentation award, and being promoted to team or project manager.

On the other hand, I also think that they have a harder time taken serious on highly techical topics, and earn less on average for the same job.

It comes with benefits and drawbacks. I honestly don't know which outweighs which, but putting it all in a negative perspective is unfair and not accurate.

learn_more2• 5 years ago

Only confident people mock themselves.

SkyBelow3• 5 years ago

I have to disagree with this. While there are plenty of confident people who will mock themselves in humor, I've also known many people whose self mocking hides a very negative self image that needs serious if not professional help that they often don't get.

Goosee• 5 years ago

I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.

Thats because girls blame it on their *astrological sign*

In all seriousness, I truly believe girls mature way earlier than guys. Just look at insurance rates.

paxys• 5 years ago

This has historically been true in India, but mostly because only smarter, more upper-class girls (so those actually interested in education) were allowed to study beyond the primary school level. Boys need a college degree no matter the circumstance, and thus drag the average down.

sriku• 5 years ago

From a personal perspective (Indian here), it feels odd that this would make news. I've been a fairly good "performer" at high school and have always had a hard time getting the better of my girl classmates. The acad stuff just seemed too easy for them. They'd remember and recall things so well and that would make me curse under my breath. Their language and general maturity was also much better that I could hope for at that point.

The_rationalist3• 5 years ago

I wonder if a reason behind it is the fact that girls become hormonally mature earlier than boys. Hormone supplementation on boys could be tested to assess the hypothesis.

thepete24• 5 years ago

What's probably missing from the article is the giant caveat of almost all educational research, which is: *as measured by grades*

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

It's in the title. That's what it means.

after_care• 5 years ago

Grades aren’t great at measuring real learning, but it’s the best we have.

Alex3917• 5 years ago

"A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material."

In reality, boys may well be learning more than girls in school, maybe even substantially more.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

There was an article/study saying girl grades were shifted due to teacher appreciating their answers as better. I'm not sure how solid the study is (I still fail to understand how grades can shift for a whole group of pupill) but yeah grades can be fickle.

tester7569• 5 years ago

some dead comment here wrote

That's right, the women are smarter.

I think that's right, especially at young ages like before 20? 25? then this difference seems to be closing

I always felt like girls were like 0-3 years ahead

but I tend to believe that the gap tends to be closing over time

m1117• 5 years ago

Because guys spend their time playing videogames, drinking and watching sports.

njdullea2• 5 years ago

Yeah all those beer drinking 12 y.o. boys should know better

The_rationalist3• 5 years ago

f430• 5 years ago

the mind has no gender so how can cognition be considered different across genders? hmmm

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

The linked article is about sex differences, not gender differences.

The_rationalist3• 5 years ago

Male and female brains while similar have some significant differences that goes beyond the androgen proportion differences. This has nothing to do with the gender identity as someone else pointed out.

blank_fan_pill• 5 years ago

I recognize that my experience is probably not average - but at my high school (2004-2008 US public school) the advanced/AP classes were 80%-90% female. This was true for all subjects, the student government, and the academic after school activities.

Also anecdotal - but I've seen a lot of the boys who were academically behind seem to get their shit together ~3-5 years after graduating and ended up going to college, grad school, getting white collar jobs, etc.

It appears that if you have the resources and privilege its not too hard to overcome having dicked around in your primary education - but I'm willing to bet most people who aren't in that position never catch up.

jl27188• 5 years ago

Raising animals has made me think a lot about maturation. Our babies are helpless and incompetent longer than any other species on earth. Compare a human to a dog at 3 months and clearly the dog is smarter and more capable. Slower maturation often ends up as better total cognitive adaptation as an adult. For some reason, boys are hormonally behind by about 4 years now, also with significant differences between haplotypes. But I see same thing over and over, the fast ones stall and the slow ones just keep growing in their area of interest. This is true even in college students. If I had to bet on one of my students for the Turing award, it would be my worst at the time, already quite famous. It’s a little upsetting for me because I was more on the precocious side, and this observation has greatly humbled me. Specifically because I think you’re right; catching up is probably rare for institutional reasons, and maybe half the people turning wrenches would be much better than me at whatever I’m feeling challenged by. Maybe we have it all wrong, and we should be looking for the slowest learners, as in, the ones that have to take in everything and won’t accept anything until it’s 100%.

johnx123-up• 5 years ago

https://archive.vn/AIMT2

jvanderbot2• 5 years ago

What's the metric? Average GPA? Average graduation rate? It seems so.

It is well documented that men drop out at higher rates and are in general more prone to failing. Having a few extra "zeros" in the GPA rankings would skew the mean down for males.

It's tempting to say that "Girls are better than boys in academic things", but if you look at the performance of a cohort of graduates, I'd expect you'd see we're all about equal.

After graduation, there's a couple other well documented attrition filters for women, unfortunately.

There was this old essay about it, which is now quite old and probably cancelled, called "Is there anything good about men" that discussed various life tradeoffs that affected the genders differently.

ipnon4• 5 years ago

On a random individual basis men and women perform equally well at college. On the aggregate there are now 3 to 4 million more female than male college graduates in the US.[0] And now that more women than men are enrolled in college we might expect this trend to continue.[1]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_302.60.a...

jvanderbot2• 5 years ago

It'd be interesting to see a time when people study why men fail at school, and are a minority of successful graduates.

I find it fun to share that my boss is a woman, her boss is a woman, and _her_ boss is too. And they're all at or past mid career and highly successful managers at a world-class technology company. JPL is a wonderful place though.

thepete24• 5 years ago

As always we don't measure what matters, but what is measurable. There are actually very good arguments against giving grades at all, but it's sadly way out of the mainstream ...

ganzuul9• 5 years ago

Bypass paywall: https://archive.is/E6NWK

I kinda suspect not a lot of people are reading TFA since no one has noticed it's paywalled.

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

To be fair, it wasn't paywalled for me. But you're right, nobody is addressing the explanations given in the article and instead making up their own.

amelius3• 5 years ago

Then why do boys/men seem better at inventing things (edit: from past statistics)?

ipnon4• 5 years ago

If schools could teach invention then art school graduates would be lining the halls of the Louvre.

wonnage2• 5 years ago

where did you get that idea

amelius3• 5 years ago

Just think of any random invention, then look up on Wikipedia who was the inventor. Repeat a bunch of times, and you get the idea. (And please don't respond with cherry-picked examples.)

standardUser3• 5 years ago

I am sure that if men were had been subjugated by women for all of civilization the outcomes might have been a little different. We'll never know, since the only civilization we know is one that has oppressed women for its entirety.

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

Jewish people were subjugated and kept in ghettos for a millennium or so, even subject to pogroms and genocides.

All this suffering did not seem to reduce their academic and technological aptitude.

jpxw3• 5 years ago

My understanding is that IQ is distributed such that men are slightly lower on average than women, but more spread out.

If this is true, then it would follow that there would be more genius men than women, which would explain what you mention.

amelius3• 5 years ago

That's a good explanation. Another one, I think, is that men often like to take the role of "problem solver", even when it doesn't make sense (e.g. in relational problems). So IQ might not be the only reason, but also intrinsic motivation.

carolina_332• 5 years ago

There are a lot of problems with this- this study doesn’t include all womxn, only cis womxn. And what about latinx womxn? Or bipoc/mena womxn?

carolina_332• 5 years ago

Downvoted by transphobes.

viach2• 5 years ago

Isn't this considered incorrect nowadays - to publicly generalize a superiority of a group of humans with dimension by race or gender?

FactCore• 5 years ago

I find your sentiment interesting, but we can't ignore a fact in favor of not hurting people's feelings. Of course, more research is always being done, so I'm sure in a few years a new research paper will come out and we will hear a different facts about a certain gender's academic performance. Then next big paper comes out and the cycle repeats.

That's just my two cents anyways.

cmdshiftf42• 5 years ago

Have you been living in a cave for the past 10 years?

tester7569• 5 years ago

different facts

or fabricated papers heh

viach2• 5 years ago

but we can't ignore a fact in favor of not hurting people's feelings

This should be either a perfectly put sarcastic statement or a result of living in a sort of cultural isolation in the past decade.

nemo44x4• 5 years ago

It has nothing to do with superiority. More girls are "average" than boys. More boys are "brilliant" than girls but also more are "dumb". It's about variance and distribution of intellect among each sex. A boy is more likely to be a genius or a dolt than a girl and a girl is more likely to be competent than a boy overall.

99_00• 5 years ago

It's because women are better at school.

kderbyma• 5 years ago

This is one of those cases where you get the outcome you design for....they don't know they designed a system that is better suited for women. biology affects men's and women differently. that's why if you notice. most of the difference shows up during and after puberty. small children are not very different (when controlled for environmental bias)

hcurtiss2• 5 years ago

I realize that this isn't terribly PC, but isn't it possible that testosterone is negatively correlated with attention span and compliance and positively correlated with risk taking? You certainly see it in other species. Without any value judgment at all, I would expect this would manifest in different outcomes in academic settings versus competitive markets. That is, it seems likely to me that some of this is due to innate differences between men and women.

waterheater3• 5 years ago

PC or not, academic literature supports your views.

http://psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publica...

"Thus, high levels of testosterone are associated with willingness to incur greater risk in both sexes."

In my experience, this view has loose ties to ADHD, specifically regarding the hunter-farmer hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis

Doesn't say it in the article, but Hartmann's main book on ADHD discusses how he tested an African tribe for ADHD. 100% of those tested were "positive" for ADHD.

I believe we're looking at evolutionary aftereffects of generations of family-based societies where men hunt and women run the family.

hcurtiss2• 5 years ago

Thanks. I don't have any education in this arena, but I know for certain why we geld male riding horses. It radically changes their disposition.

websites2323• 5 years ago

I don’t have any background is psychology. This information you provided increases my skepticism of ADHD as being a thing at all. In short, I’ve felt since becoming an adult that ADHD is simply the result of forcing people into situations that are poorly suited to their brains, implemented by people who happened to fair well in those situations. That is, the humans themselves aren’t broken, just a different neuro-variant.

darkhorse132• 5 years ago

Hartmann's main book on ADHD discusses how he tested an African tribe for ADHD. 100% of those tested were "positive" for ADHD

If this is indeed true, why are we not seriously reconsidering this whole thing of dosing kids on very shaky grounds?

TrackerFF2• 5 years ago

I think testosterone increases self-confidence, which in turn is incredibly helpful when it comes to things like negotiation, interviews, and just selling oneself.

xyzzy123• 5 years ago

Except that boys don't have elevated testosterone as children.

There are a couple of points in very early life, then not until puberty.

You could still point to the indirect effects of elevated T during infancy.

cush• 5 years ago

I've heard from teacher friends that the year a boy hits puberty is basically a write-off academically

twgp1232• 5 years ago

Throwaway because this is one of the data points you are required to ignore in polite society.

Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers. Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their behavior is better. The effect of biased grading is enormous and a huge disadvantage to our boys.

Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. [1]

[1] https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

amanaplanacanal2• 5 years ago

Doesn’t that mean that 79% of the difference is not due to bias? So boys would still be behind girls even if the bias didn’t exist. Or am I misunderstanding this?

twgp1232• 5 years ago

Tables 1-6 show you the actual results on the page labeled 40 (PDF page 42) and the page prior shows actual numbers.

In blinded effects, boys overperform in math and underperform in literacy. In non-blinded effects, boys underperform everywhere.

szhu• 5 years ago

Serious question, why is this a data point we are required to ignore? There's been a lot of discourse about bias lately, so I feel like this is a data point people will welcome hearing. Thanks for sharing it.

fullshark• 5 years ago

Because people interested in bias, are only interested when the bias is in other direction.

throwaway02345• 5 years ago

Because if you don't characterize women as an oppressed people in every possible instance then you're sexist. The truth is that women benefit a great deal from the general goodwill that society grants them. From legal sentencing, to taking your kids to the park, to mentorship opportunities, to simply crossing the road. The list goes on, but western society generally goes out of its way to accommodate the needs of women, particularly in areas such as the job market, where men pave the way with increased risk taking.

jpxw3• 5 years ago

If the poster works at a big tech company, there’s a reasonable chance they could get fired for bringing up a point like that. That’s the world we live in now.

SkyBelow3• 5 years ago

If you raise a point that shows a slice of society discriminates against men more than women you'll face criticisms that range from "what about the men" to being called an incel to being let known you are not welcome in a community. It is worse online than off but it happens in both. I've personally had it happen numerous times when bringing up statistics concerning gender bias in prison sentencing.

PoignardAzur4• 5 years ago

How to put this factually...

Discourse about bias usually makes strong distinctions between groups that are known have relative positions of power in their society (because this discourse is mostly held in Western culture, that usually boils down to "white heterosexual christian-adjacent men") and minority/disenfranchised groups (women, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc).

Progressive groups are perceived to get extremely testy when it's suggested that minority groups might benefit from / majority groups might suffer from systemic effects in some ways.

anotherman5542• 5 years ago

You are citing a study that isn't peer reviewed as a "data point" but when you summarize it like that looks like a factual claim when no factual conclusion should be drawn.

It would be an interesting data point if there was any particularly reason to believe the document you cited would hold up to further study.

subtypefiddler• 5 years ago

study that isn't peer reviewed

Terrier, C., 2020. Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 77, p.101981.

"Economics of Education Review is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering education economics. It was established in 1981 and is published by Elsevier."

What are you talking about?

kamaal2• 5 years ago

>Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers. Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their behavior is better.

In my country(India) we have board exams, where people evaluating and candidates are both anonymous to each other. People don't write their names, but use a number.

Still Girls do better. Let's just agree girls are better at academic work.

FlyingSnake• 5 years ago

On top of that there was also patriarchy that favored boys over girls. The teachers were more receptive and attentive to boys' well being. The resounding success of girls in India (and the subcontinent) in academics is a great indicator that teachers are biased in favor of girls.

higerordermap• 5 years ago

Girls do better in boards, and boys do better in math-intensive tests like JEEs. It's balanced out here.

cutemonster2• 5 years ago

this is one of the data points you are required to ignore in polite society.

Actually it's not; it's fine to bring it up. It is PC and OK

gordian-mind• 5 years ago

Who could have guessed that having a majority of female teachers while constantly telling boys that they were born the wrong sex and should shut their mouths would have an impact?!

JKCalhoun2• 5 years ago

I have never heard anyone say that to me.

dmayle• 5 years ago

“IT’S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York.

Which is it? Their brains/bodies/chemicals? Or the social pressure?

Testosterone doesn't really kick in until high school, and the article (at least the part outside of the paywall) seems to suggest the problem exists in adolescents, not young children, so that would suggest that it's the former not the latter.

The next question is... what has changed in the last 30 years? The answer to that is most likely going to be social, and not chemical, unless you mean less lead in the air. Maybe the answer is more complicated.

Finally, what has changed in the last 30 years that might be linked to both? Well, easier access to pornography could be a factor. It's a social change that lines up with male adolescence that could be related.

In any case, the 'answer' is to try to combat the change, and wait for statisticians and scientists to study the problem to understand the root causes.

throwgender1233• 5 years ago

I've noticed throughout my life that negative outcomes that primarily affect females (math test scores, wage gap, etc) are Huge Problems That Demand Immediate Action, and negative outcomes that primarily affect males (language test scores, life expectancy gap) are just kind of how it is. I'm not bitching about it or pushing an agenda, but it's not subtle.

standardUser3• 5 years ago

Generally speaking, the clearly oppressed and disadvantaged group is the one we focus on in terms of equity. Men are not, nor have they ever been, that group.

zepto• 5 years ago

This is the problem with making it about sex or gender.

‘Men’ as a category may not be that group with respect to ‘Women’ as a category.

But there are a huge number of men who are in fact, just as disadvantaged as a huge number of women even if that number is marginally smaller.

There is no reason at all why those men’s problems should not be receiving the same attention that women’s problems are receiving, other than the framing as a response to oppression of groups.

DC13502• 5 years ago

Men are the disadvantaged group when you look at things they do worse than women though. There’s no such thing as being disadvantaged overall.

busterarm• 5 years ago

You know that the article is about a study demonstrating that women are outachieving men academically, right? It's outright suggesting that there is some as-of-yet-identified disadvantage there.

So while you say "no, not ever", I say "are you even having the same conversation we are?"

ganzuul9• 5 years ago

Being coerced into fighting wars that have nothing to do with you is clearly oppressive. Maintaining a society which accepts this, is oppressive. Violence for entertainment is male-focused, and oppressive.

Men are very, very oppressed. A few who have escaped into financial independence does not make a trend.

garmaine3• 5 years ago

Maybe we should be focusing on outcomes and equality, not equity?

dudul3• 5 years ago

You're literally commenting on an article that shows you that boys are the disadvantaged group.

Veen• 5 years ago

It may be true that men have historically dominated the top of most institutions—that most "oppressors" are men—but it doesn't follow that the majority of men are privileged or that most women are oppressed and disadvantaged, especially in modern western societies.

Der_Einzige2• 5 years ago

In America, the chances of you being mutilated (non-medically necessary circumcision) are astronomically higher as a man than as a woman.

Men have been that group when it comes to their foreskin.

screye• 5 years ago

As long as males have to compete to woo females, the natural order will persist.

Every species on earth shows us this: "males are disposable, females matter". A 1M:100F ratio can revive an extinct species. A 1F:100M ratio is a blood bath. There are zero incentives for powerful men to help underperforming men, while women have neither natural nor sociological pressures stopping them from helping other women.

For better or for worse, we are barreling towards a point where male underachievement won't be ignorable. More than 50% of women will have to 'settle' for a man with worse career prospects. Scarily enough, if women choose to continue acting oblivious while wielding their primary evolutionary bargaining chip (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) to their fullest, then at least a couple of generations of men will waste away before a proper equilibrium is reached.

Ofc, this is a hypothesis that leans too heavily into our animalistic tendencies and their stranglehold over all societal developments. I also don't want this to come off as an MRA rant. Just a few ideas I wanted to put out there.

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

while women have neither natural nor sociological pressures stopping them from helping other women

Doesn't pass reality check IME

jl27188• 5 years ago

The population ratio is irrelevant. The relevant ratio is ‘actively seeking reproduction in the same age and social class’. Nearly all men in the progressive career class are actively seeking reproduction, and very few women. This is because, in this social class, the opportunity cost of reproduction is low for men and high for women. It is massively the opposite in low social class. I think you might be shocked to experience gender dynamics in largely poor and uneducated communities. The desperation for suitable male mates is palpable.

PoignardAzur4• 5 years ago

Eh, I think it will average out eventually.

New political currents hate ambiguity and nuance. If you're trying to motivate people to rise up against the Empire, the last thing you want to hear is people saying "Okay, but some imperial officers are actually good people, and this Saw Guerrera is a sadistic monster", even though both are true.

Eventually, once the Rebellion becomes widespread enough, people start saying "Okay, the Empire was awful and we're glad it's gone, but maybe we should cut back on the whole hunt-down-every-single-ex-stormtrooper-and-murder-them-and-their-family thing".

I hope, anyway.

throwgender1233• 5 years ago

Eh, I think it will average out eventually.

I agree, which is why I'm not bitching about it. But it's also kind of sad. I have a young son, and even at 5yo he has seen enough "yay girls!" messages in books and cartoons to deduce that there's something wrong with being a boy.

It's also a good example of the societal construction of concepts like "oppression". The idea that women earning less for the same work is a huge problem, and that men doing more dangerous jobs and dying younger isn't, is a subjective choice we've made. And the problem isn't so much that it's wrong, but that we don't have to choose. We could decide that they're both problems, but we don't. And I think the reason has a lot to do with the heavily-downvoted sibling comment saying, "Well, we worry about the oppressed people, and men aren't oppressed."

muskox22• 5 years ago

I think what happens in real life is the rebellion quickly becomes an empire, with it's own set of horrible things. Then you need a new rebellion... And so on...

berdario• 5 years ago

Maybe?

the wage gap has clear reasons (mens' jobs are better paid, women get promoted less) and thus clear solutions (stop discriminating against women at hiring/promotion time, or improve women's retention thus allowing them to stick in a job for longer, improving their chances at a promotion), even if these solutions are easier said than done.

the life expectancy gap instead... what are the reasons? I suspect that in some cultures it can be because of gender-specific abuse of alcohol... but if that's the reason ( or even if otherwise if the reason is biological) I'm not sure that we have an obvious solution to the problem.

Also, I presume that language test score could be as concerning as math test scores... but the latter will help students pursue a STEM career, which is better remunerated than a career that makes use of knowledge of languages. From that point of view, to improve opportunities later in life, fixing math scores can have priority.

throwgender1233• 5 years ago

... better remunerated than a career that makes use of knowledge of languages.

"Good oral and written communication skills" are a requirement of virtually all high-paying careers, including STEM.

del_operator• 5 years ago

Interesting, I wonder how skewed my perspective of high school was by finding a community college high school hybrid program that gave me freedom and access to better electives. It didn’t hurt that community college tutoring was a huge bonus: provided hours of free tutoring per course and then rewarded with opportunities to get paid tutoring the subject if I did well. Meeting older community college students through tutoring was also very formative. Tutoring money as a 15/16 year old helped my independence and motivation.

Meanwhile, I could have easily dropped out, parents even suggested I could given the strain of me getting me to school freshman year similar male peers did at 13/14, so just I lived with friends and couch surfed through all of HS. As a youngster though I did not show much academic connection and was suspended each week in a charter school, failing 2nd grade, but never going to 4th grade after switching schools. After a parent teacher conference where my mom embarrassingly tried to fight my teacher I realized things might go easier if I took time after school or during lunch to just wrap up my homework. Through middle school the boys and girls club created an atmosphere where I could continue that behavior and get access to computers and printers for written assignments. It was still a hassle though. Without a few key teachers in middle school I probably also wouldn’t have kicked a bad habit of ditching school.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/E6NWK

dang• 5 years ago

Discussed at the time:

Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812 - March 2015 (70 comments)

supergirl2• 5 years ago

HN is not mature enough to hold a discussion related to gender issues.

underrated comment from the old thread

dennis_jeeves• 5 years ago

Agreed, on HN most members are castrated/low testosterone/nerd boys.

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

Either you can ignore the data that suggests there are differences between girls and boys, or it might be worth considering some problem solving.

E.g. at any point do we think about optimizing some learning environments for boys? When college graduation rates in the US are 70/30 girl/boy, is that okay? I know it feels weird asking the question since those ratios were flipped a few years ago, and we fixed it...

hvJ4kN2• 5 years ago

Any research on gender past infancy has a problem in that it's hard to untangle what is "innate" and what is a result of differentiated socialization based on gender.

There's a lot of speculation in this forum about whether this is because of different distributions of IQ, effects of testosterone, etc., but how can we possibly determine if these are true differences or the result of parents, teachers, and other people in society treating young children differently based on their gender?

wassenaar103• 5 years ago

Modern progressivism has apparently solved that issue already.

I'll demonstrate:

Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka "the patriarchy".

On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance that benefits women, such as sentencing/incarceration rates, suicide rates, or academic performance, it seems that often people are satisfied with an explanation that says the disparity is due to some innate behavioral difference in men. Occasionally, in the case of poor academics or crime rates among men you'll hear justifications along the lines of "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them", which in my opinion is a statement that subtly implies that these men's misfortune is their own fault.

Also in some cases you see outright deflection; bring up how women generally make better grades than men, and how they outnumber men by nontrivial amounts at universities? The response it "well, better education doesn't necessarily translate into better employment for women". Bring up the substantially higher male suicide rate? You'll often hear "well actually women attempt suicide more often, but use less effective methods" - and that's supposed to be the end of the conversation, as though attempting suicide with a bottle of pills (where you could still wake up in the hospital surrounded by family and friends) has the same sort of finality as shooting yourself in the head or jumping in front of a train.

klyrs3• 5 years ago

[baleeted]

hvJ4kN2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is. I agree that all of your examples are just further cases where being sloppy about innate vs. learned differences results in bad policy.

The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune; this seems to misunderstand how society affects its members. In the context of violent crime, an example hypothesis would be that boys are taught by their families, movies, etc. that violence is a valuable part of being male, and because of this social norm, more men end up committing violent crimes. It seems crazy to suggest that a man affected by these cultural norms could have chosen to be brought up in a different environment; I don't know that people are suggesting this when they claim that patriarchal social norms are a problem.

nemo44x4• 5 years ago

Girls on average are more likely to be competent due to the lower variance in their intellectual ability. Boys on average have a greater variance so you have fewer overall that will perform because there's more that are on the lower end and more that are on the higher end.

dudul3• 5 years ago

Some studies seem to have found a bias towards girls when it comes to grading: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

ipnon4• 5 years ago

Do we want equality in this area? Should we change schooling to make it easier for boys than girls until we get to 50/50 achievement? Or should we retain the status quo to boost the chances of women succeeding later in their lives when they do not achieve in their careers at the same level as men?

tomp3• 5 years ago

I often considered that... in particular, because I (as a white male) am more bothered by the girl-boy discrepancy than by the black-white-Asian discrepancy (in the US).

Why? Is it just self-serving prioritization?

Reflecting more, I don't think it is. I'm naively assuming that the girl-boy difference is likely biological (either female brains are different than male brains, or the differences in sex & reproduction result in equivalent human brains pursuing different life strategies in different bodies), while black-white-Asian difference is likely social, probably related to culture and poverty level (i.e. no brain differences).

It follows that in order to optimize for social good & progress, we should adapt the education system so that both female-ish and male-ish types of brains flourish (note that there is likely significant overlap) yet we should help people out of poverty (which might involve changing education, but also probably other, much more significant efforts) and change culture (make schooling & achievement more important and popular) to reduce white-black-Asian gap.

ganzuul9• 5 years ago

Yes. No. No.

We have known what the problem is and what the solution is for a long time. - Standard curriculum for non-standard children, and finding out what makes a child special and encouraging that at the expense of other things.

BlargMcLarg4• 5 years ago

Don't disadvantage young men for the troubles older generations have caused. They did not want to be the scapegoat of women of older generations being held back by society in any form.

Frankly, all the quotas and other artificial constructions to help women should already tip people off that disadvantaging young men further will only cause more and more resentment.

_-david-_3• 5 years ago

I think the best situation would be to mostly separate boys and girls in classes. We could then do things for boys that are generally better for boys and do things for girls that are generally better for girls. There probably should be co-ed schools so boys and girls can still socialize during lunch and other breaks, just not during classes.

ipnon4• 5 years ago

One problem: separate public education for boys and girls is illegal in the US.

audunw3• 5 years ago

But some girls are like boys, and some boys are like girls in this regard. Gender differences fall on a spectrum.

7_my_mind3• 5 years ago

This won't sound very PC, but despite all the bullshit about equality, men need to be better than women. Women demand that men are better than women. If we are going to end up with a situation where women have higher income potentials than men, nobody will be happy. Women will feel like they cannot find anyone suitable and men will feel like they are inadequate.

Der_Einzige2• 5 years ago

You're right on this one, and I hope you don't see mass downvotes for this.

Men are physically stronger and more athletic on average, and it's so extreme that hilarious stories like this [1] come out when top-tier female athletes try to compete against men in some sports. Woman simply do not want to be working the same kind of manual labor jobs at the rate that that men have for this reason, and it would be extremely bad for society if we attempted to fix this "inequality".

But it's even more pronounced in dating/sexual patterns. Most women do not want to be "dominant" and this lack of "dominant" women is a huge problem for men who consider themselves to be "submissive". It's a very talked about issue for men in BDSM communities. And it's even more well known how a majority of women find it very hot to be "dominated" e.g. lightly choked [2]. Women simply will not prefer a society where men on average are not the "dominant" gender, at least in key aspects of society such as the bedroom or in labor intensive work.

[1] https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/0...

TrackerFF2• 5 years ago

In some countries, various (college/uni) majors/programs have their own quotas or bonus "entrance points" for gender, if the majors are very unbalanced. If/when over time this balance gets closer to 50/50, those quotas/points are removed.

nottorp2• 5 years ago

Well yeah, I have a daughter who finished high school and I've observed:

- when I was in school I only cared about results for the subjects that interested me; otherwise i did just enough to pass - when she was in school she cared about high grades for all subjects

ganzuul9• 5 years ago

We can't attribute any meaning to your post unless you tell us your gender.

njdullea2• 5 years ago

I think the poster is making a comparison, and is therefor presumably male.

hntrader3• 5 years ago

This could be a consequence of the variability hypothesis[1] interacting with the way grades are distributed.

If grades tend to have a lot of negative skewness, that means that it pays to be in a group that has the least number of extreme underperformers, since your group's outperformers are handicapped due to the upper bound existing near the mean.

That means we expect men to underperform in domains that have lots of negative skewness in the outcome distribution, assuming [1] holds.

In domains where there's a lot of positive skewness in the outcomes distribution, we would expect the opposite result.

As a first step, we would want to check how grades are actually distributed in the raw data, and whether there is an inter-country correlation between its grades' skewness and its male-to-female differences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis

abhyudaya63• 5 years ago

Variability hypothesis seems to downplay the cultural aspects a lot. Males were generally thought to have better visual sense of an object but the advantage was nullified when females were tested with objects that they are most familiar with.

And you are right that we should check for inter-country data. It will provide a more accurate view.

hntrader3• 5 years ago

  "better visual sense"

This example pertains to mean skill level which doesn't seem relevant to the variability hypothesis (which pertains instead to variance of traits/skills/interests).

If your point is that the empirical findings underpinning the variability hypothesis may have some cultural causes instead of being only genetic, then we don't disagree. But I wouldn't agree that the culture-over-genes perspective is undersubscribed, that's the most fashionable and socially acceptable perspective to take.

andrewzah• 5 years ago

Anyone who has ever taught young boys and girls has almost certainly experienced a marked difference in behavior.

Schooling as a whole needs to be overhauled to better accommodate young boys. Until then, we're going to see wider and wider gaps at highschool and university levels.

Regardless of gender, schooling as a whole needs to move away from this factory-like system with underpaid teachers and an emphasis on test scores. It would be nice if there were an easy solution...

jpxw3• 5 years ago

Given that the current trend is to blame any disparate outcome on discrimination, are we to believe that this is sexism?

z77dj3kl• 5 years ago

I find it very curious that at high school level, it seems females outperform males in grades, and there is higher female participation/caring about the content (participation is rarely voluntary in high school); but as soon as you go to university level (STEM in particular), participation rates do a complete switch in that a lot of STEM fields have a huge over representation of males.

wisty• 5 years ago

Meta comment, a lot of comments here are not as measured, accurate, or carefully worded as the Damore "memo".

Damore was sacked for his memo. Well, arguably he was sacked for people (at his workplace, using company resources and time) making disingenuous and vicious attacks on him (often misrepresented what he actually said), far less accurate or polite or measured than anything Damore said, creating enough of an internal activist movement that the boss had to cancel his trip to the Maldives IIRC.

DobryMorozov• 5 years ago

Damore lost credibility in my eyes when he lied about being chess national master. Such a bold and egregious lie

nsainsbury• 5 years ago

Reading this reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favourite essays "On the Wildness of Children" by Carol Black - http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children

It's definitely influenced how we raise our kids - boys in general really seem to need to be active, exploring, and heavily engaged in physical activity otherwise they turn that energy towards destructive activities.

p0nce• 5 years ago

Super interesting page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition

TedShiller• 5 years ago

That's not good for diversity.

randyrand• 5 years ago

No surprise there, it's genetic..

supergirl2• 5 years ago

so many sexists on HN, it's surprising. whenever there is a thread about some differences in genders, it gets bombarded with "men are actually the ones being oppressed" comments.

just look at this thread. 400 comments in 3 hours. it's because of the title. the idea that girls are doing better than boys triggered a whole mob. pretty worrying.

Wolfenstein98k• 5 years ago

And the gap is only growing.

There's a budding problem for gender equality growing, and it's not the usual story.

We're not quite ready to talk about it openly though, without the stated cause being toxic masculinity or something - as if that's a problem that has been getting worse, not better, and is somehow only now taking its biggest toll on boys under 15 (and even under 5).

Alas, the answer must be doubling-down on that narrative and pumping the boys who can't function like girls full of ADHD meds - I was on Ritalin before age 12, and it does "solve the problem" to a workable enough degree for everyone to keep on keeping on.

serjester• 5 years ago

This is just my experience but these days I read 50ish books year - back in school I would do everything possible to avoid assigned reading. None of them spoke to me, I wasn't particularly interested in figuring out a books underlying theme.

Out of my friends, none of us enjoyed this. All my teachers were always women and I have to wonder if the curriculum was designed by someone more like us would we have gotten more from it? I honestly don't know.

Inu• 5 years ago

Off topic, but why is this thread (207 points | 5 hours ago | 474 comments) on page 2, rank 37, and the thread about Italo Calvino (62 points | 7 hours ago | 19 comments) on page 1, rank 23?

belval• 5 years ago

The HackerNews algorithm uses velocity (I don't know the exact equation) to rank posts so a post with 20 points acquired in a 5 minutes span will generally outperform a 400 points post for which the points are only trickling in.

alexpetralia• 5 years ago

I believe threads which are heavily upvoted & downvoted (i.e. potential flame war) are penalized.

b0afc375b5• 5 years ago

But doesn't this discourage discussion?

acenes• 5 years ago

It seems most commenters here think that the results can be explained by bias (e.g. on the part of teachers), or cultural factors / environment (e.g. schools are set up for women to do better), or personality differences (e.g. girls are more obedient etc), and so on. But isn't the most straightforward explanation that women are simpler smarter than men on average?

dudul3• 5 years ago

Can we apply the same logic and say that women are not as successful in their career because they're not as good in a professional setting as men?

Maybe there are so few female inventors because women are not as good at inventing/creating things?

Also, this is assuming grades are good at measuring how smart someone is.

astrophysics• 5 years ago

In Norway, girls outperform boys in every subject - but the opposite is true when tests are anonymized. It turns out teachers give boys lower grades because can't sit still during class.

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Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

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