Girls Get Better Grades Than Boys

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get-better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/?single_page=true

by throwaway344 • 12 years ago

50 68 12 years ago

fsk141• 12 years ago

Is anyone bothered that this has no references, seems like a nice helping of hearsay to me.

fdsary2• 12 years ago

It doesn't link, but to nit-pick (and show Teacher I did my homework!) it does reference studies. But you do have a point, I agree.

azakai• 12 years ago

The article gives one major reference near the top, to http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades....

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

tl;dr; Girls work harder than boys and are more diligent about getting things done. Awesome for them. What's the problem?

The article does raise one real issue - grades in school are based on more on obeying arbitrary rules than on actual mastery of the knowledge. That's a problem worth fixing. But it's a problem worth fixing because grades are measuring the wrong thing, and it's worth fixing regardless of it's affects on statistical gender disparities.

But I guess "modern grading systems measure the wrong thing" is far less of a clickbait topic.

alukima2• 12 years ago

To try to be fair, life is often more about obeying arbitrary rules than mastering certain subjects. Many of the things named in the article are important life skills that should be taught and encouraged.

scott_karana4• 12 years ago

Yes, I agree. "Self-restraint" in particular was emphasized in the article, and it's one I (a male) feel that I lack compared to female peers. So in my anecdata, sample size 1, it seemingly adds up.

My question would be: "why do females have a head-start in self-restraint, and why do males fail to catch up quickly?"

I suspect much of the answer could be cultural.

a8da6b0c91d• 12 years ago

Becoming an acceptably rewarded cubicle drone requires obeying a lot of arbitrary rules for many years. I wouldn't say life is about that.

School sucks and boys feel that more acutely, is the long and short of it in my view. Girls tend to tolerate or even like it because subservience is more in their nature. Women also tend to like moderate status corporate drone jobs that make a lot of men want to blow their brains out.

jeffreyrogers• 12 years ago

That's true, and I want to extend that by saying that at the highest levels life is more about relationships and who can do favors for you. Even Y Combinator is an example of this. I'm sure everyone who gets in is fully capable, but there are probably just as many capable people who don't get in. Those who got in will probably go on to do bigger things simply by having the Y Combinator brand and network. I often ask my friends at business school whether they feel it's worth it. Invariably they mention how the things they learn aren't that useful, but that the relationships they make (plus the signal of HBS or Wharton or wherever) are well worth the price of admission.

The downside of all this is that it promotes disparate outcomes for those who come from privileged backgrounds and those who come from more ordinary ones. I'm currently attending an "elite" college and there seems to be a pretty clear distinction between job placement and family status.

wosos2• 12 years ago

We should have in mind that this transcends into how society will work in a few years, probably something that we're already seeing; becoming more of a bureaucratic society guided by politics than innovation, pragmatism and merit.

fdsary2• 12 years ago

As a man who left school not that many years ago, I'm amazed how well I feel this describes the situation back then. I remember being frustrated by grades being all about who (I then thought) manipulated the teacher best by acting like a "Good Boy/Girl". By being neat and by being timely rather than the one who knew what the grade requirements asked of the students.

I wonder, is the article true or does it just appeal to my feelings?

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

I recently did an analysis of Harvard and MIT's MOOCs to determine which gender gets the better grades in classes. (full post: http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/online-class-charts/)

Turns out, there's no statistically significant difference between male and female grades. http://minimaxir.com/img/online-class-charts/gender-grade.pn...

penprog2• 12 years ago

It's a different sample though. People that do Harvard and MIT moocs are usually people that want to learn the subject and are self motivating whereas school is forced upon everyone. Willing or unwilling.

Basically your post confirms the theory of the person above. That grades aren't measuring mastery of knowledge but the skill to obey arbitrary rules.

onewaystreet3• 12 years ago

It doesn't surprise me that there would be a different result at the high school level and the college level. Most people are more invested in their education when they enter college, especially at elite schools like Harvard and MIT.

mqsiuser• 12 years ago

311,534 male students (73.3%) and
113,571 female students (26.7%).
The fact that it’s not even close to 50:50 is surprising.

It didn't surprise me, I went there & searched for it. How can it be surprising (you see these ppl all the time on campus!). And it shows that there are ~3 times more men at Harvard than woman.

So thank YOU so much for nearing to a problem: Girls do better early on (cf. orig. article) & men later in live (cf. your analysis)

Why did you screw that? Political correctness? You are dishonest (you'd have my downvote).

An important aspect: We need to make sure to not loose males [which would do fine later] during early years.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

...the article is about online courses.

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

I find this incredibly sexist.

To say that girls worker harder than boys offends me greatly. These studies are never accurate and somewhat biased, and I think work ethic is something that can't be averaged out like this. I don't doubt a lot of girls out there do work harder than boys, but making statements like: "Girls succeed over boys in school because they are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals." is offensive and heavily typecasting all boys into the same category.

There are boys out there who put effort into planning and setting academic goals, because I am friends with many guys like this who care and put the effort in, I also know as many women who do the same. If this study were truth, why are there just as many male academics as there are female? If anything, I have seen more male academics than female (in my experience and field). Imagine if the effort that went into this study was put to better use, to help solve a problem or achieve a result that would benefit society? Studies like this are a waste of time.

I realise this is just a study and the whole point might be to highlight issues with school curriculum and have no sexist undertones, but at the same time, studies like this are relatively useless. The modern school system being completely broken to the point kids are falling behind is a very well known fact, and sadly, no study is going to change that anytime soon.

Maybe if we had less studies and more action on fixing things, then there wouldn't be instances of boys getting left behind in the schooling system. Did it ever occur to those responsible for this study that maybe, just maybe, the system is actually broken? And maybe, just maybe, it has nothing to do with what sex you are? I feel like society already has enough issues when it comes to rampant sexism and gender equality without more fuel being thrown on the fire. All studies like this do is take a handful of people, average and collate the results and then proclaim they've made some kind of conclusive discovery that applies to everyone outside of the sample group. Unless this study leads to change or another longer and more conclusive study, the results mean nothing.

Regardless of what sex you are, nobody should be getting left behind. If it is true that boys learn differently to girls, then adjust the curriculum to make it more flexible for different learning styles. When I went to school I struggled, not because I am stupid or because I am a male, I struggled because the curriculum assumed everyone learns the same way and when I couldn't fit myself within the mould, I got left behind and taught myself everything I needed to know. Everyone learns differently, we are not all the same.

Sorry for getting worked up, Studies like this do nothing to help resolve gender equality gaps whatsoever.

onewaystreet3• 12 years ago

Now you know how many women feel every day of their lives.

gph3• 12 years ago

You mean falsely victimizing themselves?

alukima2• 12 years ago

The entire point of the article is that the way schools grade may discriminate against boys. There are lots of articles about things that may discriminate against women. Society isn't perfect, writing articles that raise awareness is not sexist or discriminatory towards either sex.

gertef• 12 years ago

"Academics" are a small biased sample of "K-12" or event college-level students.

Fomite• 12 years ago

If a sample is biased, it is often interesting to ask "Why?"

learnstats2• 12 years ago

It's not sexist to point out a fact: "Girls Get Better Grades Than Boys". This is almost universally true where statistics can be found, internationally and across all subjects. It's factual that girls perform better in school: you can decide what the reason for that is, but there must be a reason. It's the essential purpose of science to try and figure out the reasons - as they have here.

You then ask: Why are there just as many male academics as there are female? I would ask: Why do males fill out almost all highly skilled and/or highly paid fields, despite poorer school results on average.

This is a very important question which points out the true scale and direction of the problem.

calibraxis• 12 years ago

Sexism is about power relations. Like racism and capitalism. Men dominate society. Doesn't matter how meritorious women are. Women can be tacitly competent and men buffoonish, yet incompetents routinely triumph.

After all, they're gatekeepers and enforcers.

Since society ridiculously built a massive infrastructure based on gender, women and men are trained differently. To the intellectual destruction of men.

vezzy-fnord3• 12 years ago

This is true only if you use a specific sociological definition of "sexism", which is absolutely not to be equivocated with the one in common vernacular.

Torgo• 12 years ago

In the article, evidence is presented that boys and girls need to be trained differently, and are being trained the same, to boys' detriment. That is the exact opposite of what you're saying.

graycat2• 12 years ago

If this study were truth, why are there just as many male academics as there are female?

My guess is that the study focused mostly on K-8 or K-12 maybe with some college. In contrast, you are talking about what happens in the world of work. There the boys/men can be plenty serious, hard working, aggressive, bright, ambitious, good at planning, etc.

From all I've seen, for high end technical work, especially research, in STEM fields, the men totally and effortlessly blow away nearly all the women.

In my experience, in grades 1-8, the teachers treated me like dirt. Thank goodness for social promotion! But in math, from grade 9 through high school, college, graduate school, work, to the present, I totally effortlessly blow away nearly every female I've come across. It's like the females are from a different planet. In other ways, the females totally, effortlessly blow me away.

Or, from E. Fromm, "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same.". From all I can see, this is true.

onewaystreet3• 12 years ago

It's been a while since I was in high school, but looking back I would say that this was true. It doesn't surprise me when you factor in puberty and maturity (girls at that age tend to be more mature at least when it comes to school work). Boys also spend more of their time on extracurricular activities (sports).

ps4fanboy2• 12 years ago

I wonder if this has anything to with the massive decline in male teacher population.

TulliusCicero• 12 years ago

Probably. I'd imagine that male teachers have policies that jive better with male students, especially the more energetic/unruly ones.

For example, my homeroom 6th grade drill sergeant-esque teacher would order us to do push-ups when we acted up, rather than docking our grades. That kind of pseudo-military style punishment fits boys better, I think. Gets the point across without feeling emasculating or overly punitive.

cwbrandsma• 12 years ago

Was that population that big to begin with? Most of my male teachers in highschool were actually just wanabe-sport coaches. My male history teacher/basketball coach just played movies every day.

cafard2• 12 years ago

In my middle-school days, there were some very sharp guys teaching in part because of the Vietnam draft. (No, I'm not young anymore.) At my high school (all boys, Catholic), the coaches had to teach real subjects: Algebra I, Trig, Plane Geometry, Biology, Chemistry. Now, one of the wrestling coaches sent a classmate of mine hurrying to the other class with his statement that a milligram was one million grams, but most of them seemed to do OK. Not all of the other male teachers were in orders, either, and most of them, lay or religious, ranged from adequate to good.

ps4fanboy2• 12 years ago

I guess it depends on when and where you went to school. I had hardly any male teachers and I am a student of the 90s. In Australia less than 30% of all teachers are male, divorce rates are very high and single parenting is increasing. I think young boys really lack male role models in society today.

gph3• 12 years ago

This article brings up an important point about our education system. How much is it about teaching a subject versus teaching you how to work.

I always did well on tests and in any class I didn't totally hate I felt like I gained the knowledge I needed to. However, I never did all the homework. Hated it. Most of it felt like busy work, or just plain unimportant.

Not that I think self-discipline is worthless. It is a very important life skill. But they don't really teach you how to be self-disciplined so much as attempt to force it on to you by making your grade dependent on a ton of extra work. I like the idea of splitting grades into knowledge and self-discipline like the Minnesota school did.

penprog2• 12 years ago

I always got Bs in highschool. These were 89s and 87s. My homework average, which usually accounted for 20 to 30% of my grade was usually 80 or lower.

Thankfully I left loving learning and am always learning new things from different subjects I am interested in but I feel for those not as privileged/lucky as me.

Education needs a rework, one size fits all doesn't work. Splitting grades I think is just a bandaid on the problem.

I think instead of forcing younger students to memorize multiplication tables and which shoe belongs to which profession (my first F. I remember getting it in kindergarten) we should try to figure out what style of learning suits them.

lutorm2• 12 years ago

The whole point about forcing kids to do homework is that they are not in a position to judge whether something is important or not. For everyone like you, I'm pretty sure there is someone saying "I didn't want to learn X in school but I'm sure happy they made me now that I know how important it is."

gph3• 12 years ago

That wasn't really my point. If you don't want to learn something, you probably aren't going to. But even classes I enjoyed like Math and Science, I wouldn't do all the homework. I still learned all that I needed to. The fact is that a lot of homework just isn't necessary all the time, especially for quick learners.

andyl• 12 years ago

This society rewards restraint and conformity. Then there are the mood-altering drugs. When my boys were in elementary school, the teachers wanted to drug them into compliance because they were 'too competitive'. Nurse Ratchet lives.

donatj2• 12 years ago

So much of school is based on blindly doing what you're told and I think young boys have trouble doing what they're told. I know I personally wanted to know the reasoning behind things. In the army they have to break young men down before they blindly follow orders.

Even as a nearly 30 something I don't like being told what to do. Ask, don't tell.

I know I could see this was pointless charade and would rather do something of actual value, whereas most of what you do in school is pointless busy work with no real educational value at all.

tptacek3• 12 years ago

Let me take a wild guess here:

You're male.

It seems like according to your premise, if we could just get over our prejudices, we could drastically streamline military training by simply selecting docile, compliant females instead of petulant, inquisitive males.

donatj2• 12 years ago

I just know these to be the reasons I and my friends didn't do well in school.

vezzy-fnord3• 12 years ago

Public school and military training are (or were) intimately related, actually. The former, as we know it today, has its origins in 19th century Prussian militarism.

That said, one cannot fairly compare the two. The military has an express purpose of national security, and is well suited to obedience and susceptibility. Public schools, on the other hand, are little more than industrialized daycare at best, and harmful propaganda centers at worst. That and joining the military comes with benefits that extend beyond the artificial void inside a public school... it's supposed to, anyway.

wosos2• 12 years ago

Yeah, but they are generally much weaker physically and don't tend to be as aggressive and competitive.

dragonwriter3• 12 years ago

I know I personally wanted to know the reasoning behind things. In the army they have to break young men down before they blindly follow orders.

And young women, too.

I think boys can largely see this is a pointless charade and would rather do something of actual value

I don't think there's a lot of evidence in the behavior of school age boys vs. girls, either in school or in any other context, to support this.

OTOH, I do think your explanation may reflect (though in a distorted way) something that may be a real issue that may explain part of the difference: I suspect that boys have a lower tolerance for activities with a delayed payoff, where conventional school curriculum mostly has a very delayed payoff.

rotw• 12 years ago

I read somewhere (forgotten the book title sorry, I'll try and get back to you on that!) that our patriarchal society's gender roles (and thus the games children play at a young age to educate them about these) differ for men and women in terms of how they relate to people: For men, competition is emphasised, meaning that independence and dominance is the prime goal, while for women, connection and bonding is the overarching ideal.

To this end, having stereotypes and games like girls playing with dolls while boys build things and play more combative games instills different behaviours in children, which fundamentally change how they relate to others. You can still see it reflected in stupid things like "Be a man", which is essentially a shaming shorthand for "assert independence and dominance, thus showing less vulnerability to those able to dominate you in a competitive social hierarchy".

This obviously also reflects on the way people relate to obedience; independence being a supposed virtue, obedience can be intepreted from this masculine framework as an attempt by someone else to dominate. Emphasising co-operation and connection, though, means a greater willingness to engage. These are obviously only broad trends, but they are noticeable.

tomp2• 12 years ago

our patriarchal society's

Sorry to be anal about it, but (assuming you're from a Western country) the society is anything but patriarchal.

"Patriarchy is a social system in which males [...] occupy roles of political leadership, moral authority and control of property, and where fathers hold authority over women and children"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy

johngalt• 12 years ago

The general trend in education is less competition and less physical activity. Meanwhile there is more focus on educational minimums rather than maximums. If education was about the 'highest score' rather than the 'best average' you would see males doing better.

lutorm2• 12 years ago

Are you kidding, American education seems to be all about "highest score" rather than "best average" to me. All these awards and whatever that reward the "best" students.

cafard2• 12 years ago

It seemed to me many years ago that there was an odd pattern in the schools, perhaps exaggerated in Catholic schools, but probably present in the public schools also. In the earlier grades, the girls, who sat still better, had better small-muscle coordination, and were more verbal sooner, pulled down the As, while the boys did more poorly. Somewhere in the middle school years, neat handwriting counted for less, and the boys started to catch up on other fronts. The girls, not always unwillingly, fell back. A cousin of mine infuriated me by saying that she got Bs in high school--boys didn't like girls who got As.

But, as they say on HN, the plural of anecdote is not science.

aidenn02• 12 years ago

Well we can always console the boys by telling them they'll get paid more once they get a job.

barry-cotter2• 12 years ago

Men work more overtime than women. Men work more hours than women. Men work more dangerous jobs than women. Men work in more physically demanding jobs than women. Men are more likely to move for a job than women. Men are less likely to take career breaks than women.

You think maybe that might have something to do with it?

aidenn02• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what that has to do with my statement.

j2kun• 12 years ago

If the difference is just by one year, as one of the studies suggests, why not shift grade/age by one year for boys? So six year old boys will be kindergarten age with five year old girls, etc.?

graycat2• 12 years ago

Well, the article is beginning to understand!

Some recently reported research (I apologize for lack of a reference) explains that already in the crib girls are paying attention to people and boys, to things.

Then what the OP is describing about differences in K through the early grades is essentially just that the girls are more interested in people, e.g., pleasing the teachers, and the boys are more interested in the material, at least if it has to do with things, which in those grades it mostly doesn't.

In particular, of course the girls are much better behaved in class: From the crib, the girls are much better socially than the boys, and that means girls do better in groups, e.g., the social behavior in a classroom.

Next, in those early grades, the girls have much better verbal aptitude so do better at reading and writing, learning languages, etc.

Next, by paying more attention to people, girls have much better understanding of people in the fictional reading that is common and, thus, do better in that reading. Also the girls have much better understanding of emotions and, thus, better understand the emotional content of fictional readings. Also, as in D. Tannen, the girls are much more active in talking with their friends, i.e., their girlfriends, with gossip, and, thus, get still better at understanding people and social situations, including what is in the fictional readings, the classroom social dynamics, etc.

The OP also claimed that the girls are better at "math", but here I start to question. Sure, for math in K-8 or so, the girls are much better because they have much better clerical accuracy and much better handwriting (better at getting the columns of digits lined up important for accuracy). And, again the girls are better at and more interested in pleasing the teachers.

And, with some teaching and grading styles, the girls might be able to seem better at math through grade 12 or so. It can continue to be a really big advantage to be really good at sensing how to please the teachers, and girls are better at that.

But my experience in math (and I was a math major in college and my Ph.D. is in applied math), really, for much of anything like real math, the girls are a big step down. Somehow they don't get it; here maybe the main problem is lack of interest due to cultural stereotypes that girls are not supposed to concentrate on STEM subjects.

Last I heard, on the math SATs, the boys still do much better than the girls and, yes, on the verbal SATs the girls do better than the boys.

Then for the girls/women along come marriage and babies, and then on average their ability to compete with boys/men in most of more important work fades.

cyphunk• 12 years ago

   She’s found that little ones who are destined to do well in
   a typical 21st century kindergarten class are those who 
   manifest good self-regulation.

The first question is what determines "doing well"? This was not clear to me from the article. Is it grades? High-School completion? Entrance exam levels? Completing University? Getting a PhD? Making their first billion $?

For a very long time (40+ years) we know that girls have done better in grades and boys have done better in standardised admission tests. The quality of "good self-regulation" others may describe negatively as a false reward for "girls keep quiet". In open format classes boys dominate and demand attention. Teachers may be rewarding girls "self-regulation" because they are more considerate of the teacher and fellow students. But as a result teachers give more attention to the students that are worse at "self-regulation". see: "Failing At Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls" from 1995

   Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence 
   that the stress many girls experience in test situations can
   artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading
   of their true abilities.

The Kenney-Benson study I believe is this one from 2006: http://news.illinois.edu/news/06/0220mathdivide.html

This field of study appears to me to be a mess.

Here is a study on the male grade crisis with a counter conclusion. Pretty much the similar research results but different conclusion and language:

   The researchers examined 369 samples from 308 studies,
   reflecting grades of 538,710 boys and 595,332 girls. ... The
   study reveals that recent claims of a “boy crisis,” with boys
   lagging behind girls in school achievement, are not accurate
   because girls’ grades have been consistently higher than boys’
   across several decades with no significant changes in recent
   years, the authors wrote. 
   
   http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades.aspx

Girls Get Better Grades Than Boys

Related Stories