Study: Girls outperform boys in school worldwide, Solution: More attention to boys

It's my observation as a parent of a boy and a girl and of working in the school system for years, there isn't a difference in ability, there is a difference in attitude.

In general, girls care what people think (peers, parents, teachers) and they are more apt to want to be pleasers and to try harder. It's been my observation that girls also seem to be able to focus better and for longer periods. In general, boys tend to be more "antsy" in the classroom and lose focus quickly, and in the playground they are more physical and motion oriented. It's not that boys can't, or don't have the ability, they often just don't care enough to want to.

Whether this is a function of society or of dna I don't know, but I do know that it's hard to make a child (especially a young child) care about something that seems so nebulous and abstract, as their future.

I agree with your conclusions. What strikes me is why did they need a fancy study to determine that in general 15 year old girls outperformed boys academically?

Surely, it reminds me of some of the grants for research that common sense would tell the researcher, along with no viable/important research goals revealed when they completed the study. IMO.

T Robinson said:

Surely, it reminds me of some of the grants for research that common sense would tell the researcher, along with no viable/important research goals revealed when they completed the study. IMO.

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"Common sense" isn't actually data.

I have very strong and mixed feelings to see this, as I outperformed most of my male peers in college and yet they all were able to continue to grad school and further (I had a career change to a field I really don't enjoy). I also really wish they'd come to a different conclusion. Perhaps a researcher will pair this with the study where they asked teachers to evaluate male and female students for competence and academic performance. In contrast to the actual academic standings, boys were consistently rated higher. If that study is placed next to this study, I'm sure better teaching methods could be devised that would help bring boys performance equal to girls, while bringing perception of girls performance equal to boys.

(I can provide links for that study, but it's buried in pages of bookmarks on the topic of gender skill and perception in every level of academia (here meaning from preschool on through professional levels), and I'm feeling too sick to be able to read through them all to find it.)

Edit: The "mixed feelings" are because I find it comforting to see studies like this at any level, because I worked my ass off to get into the field I love, and I was very good at it, but I failed utterly. Things like this, since it seems to be mirrored at the higher levels, help alleviate some of the pain and help me understand that my failure might be much less my fault than I feel it is.

There's always the possibility that current teaching methods simply favour girls - that it's more dependent on skills that girls are (generally) better at.

I remember watching a programme where a bunch of 16 year-olds were made to do a 1950's style school during the summer. The researchers found the boys were much more interested in their science classes than before - partly because it was full of interesting things like hands-on experiments. After they sat their 'O-Level' (old-fashioned GCSE) it was found they did better too.

Personal anecdote - in my GCSE English Lit, all our texts had romance as the main plot. Not usually the things a 16-year old boy would really be interested in. Perhaps if we'd done King Lear or Richard III instead of Romeo & Juliet, the boys wouldn't have been so bored...

I think we should seriously, objectively look at this problem. It may be that the best method may be single-sex lessons with gender-tailored material. (And no, I don't mean the girls do sewing and the boys do shop. I simply mean that the material and style will be tailored to the gender's strengths).

Lastly, I seriously believe that lessons should be taught to fit all learning styles. I have AHAD, but also have excellent recall for the written word. The subjects I generally did well in (History, Geography etc) were interestingly ones where we were always issued fat textbooks for. Doesn't take a genius to think part of my success may have down to getting bored in class and reading the textbook...

KarmaPolice said:

I think we should seriously, objectively look at this problem. It may be that the best method may be single-sex lessons with gender-tailored material. (And no, I don't mean the girls do sewing and the boys do shop. I simply mean that the material and style will be tailored to the gender's strengths).

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What is gendered-tailored material? That doesn't make any sense.

I was a boy who liked love stories and hated hands-on experiments.

Whatever "gender-tailored material" you are imagining is no less sexist than girls doing sewing and boys doing shop in your example.

I think you're missing the point. That is why I said 'might'. And it's no way sexist to say that perhaps current teaching methods may 'play to strengths' more commonly found in girls than boys.

While I can't comment about other nations education systems, the UK generally operates a comprehensive-style system. Or as I think of it 'one size to fit all, regardless of actual ability'.

You're also contradicting yourself - you said earlier that boys in general lose interest quicker, find it harder to put themselves to tasks they find boring and generally have less 'staying power'. This tallies to what I've seen and heard over the years.

So, is it really 'sexist' to admit that boys have these faults and to tailor their lessons to minimise these, rather than simply letting them slog through regardless?

I don't know how this works out in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, especially in primary education, there are loads more female teachers than male ones. It was the opposite a generation ago. Perhaps girls do better with women, while boys do worse?

The school I work has got it's fair share of rowdy boys and the general consensus amongst collegues is that they do better with a man in front of them.

Annecdotal evidence, I know, but perhaps it's of use.

KarmaPolice said:

You're also contradicting yourself - you said earlier that boys in general lose interest quicker, find it harder to put themselves to tasks they find boring and generally have less 'staying power'. This tallies to what I've seen and heard over the years.

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No I didn't. That was kikazaru.

So, is it really 'sexist' to admit that boys have these faults and to tailor their lessons to minimise these, rather than simply letting them slog through regardless?

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Once one actually starts trying to list the strengths and weaknesses of boys versus girls it is.

I agree that tailoring teaching methods to students learning styles is a great idea, but breaking it down boys versus girls isn't helpful. It should be based on individual strengths and weaknesses, not by gender.

People have been fretting about this for years. I'm still not sure it's even an issue, unlike, say, the gross gender imbalance away from women in almost all positions of prestige and power, which is very real and observable worldwide.

KarmaPolice said:

Personal anecdote - in my GCSE English Lit, all our texts had romance as the main plot. Not usually the things a 16-year old boy would really be interested in. Perhaps if we'd done King Lear or Richard III instead of Romeo & Juliet, the boys wouldn't have been so bored...

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I dunno. I did Lear in school, and was aggravated to tears.

Yet, now it's my favourite Shakespeare. Perhaps with the distance of time you learn to appreciate the taste of something that was force-fed to you the first go.

Sorry. Me bad (about mistaken ID). Happy to admit when I'm wrong

But it is wrong to admit differences even when they do actually exist?

KarmaPolice said:

Sorry. Me bad (about mistaken ID). Happy to admit when I'm wrong

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To be fair, their names both begin with a k and end with a u and are about the same length.

KarmaPolice said:

Sorry. Me bad (about mistaken ID). Happy to admit when I'm wrong

But it is wrong to admit differences even when they do actually exist?

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Individual variance will be greater than any perceived differences in the average learning styles between boys and girls.

If you teach based on perceived gender differences, then you're just shifting the common denominator to which you're teaching. Then it's the students who don't conform to gender stereotypes who suffer instead, and you've solved nothing, only moved the problem.

T Robinson said:

I agree with your conclusions. What strikes me is why did they need a fancy study to determine that in general 15 year old girls outperformed boys academically?

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Because what people commonly assume to be true based on anecdotes and personal experience is often not true when examined systematically.

Alessandra Kelley said:

This is not a new thing. You can't say the 1950s were better for boys, because girls still did better then too.

Statistics show that women outperformed men in high school and more of them graduated from high school in every year from 1900 through almost the entire twentieth century:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
http://www-tc.pbs.org/fmc/book/pdf/ch3.pdf

In fact, it's only around now that men and women finally are graduating from high school at about the same rates.

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Is it possible that this is because in the 1950s, you could still enter the workforce without a high school diploma, and many more men did this than women? Whereas now, a high school dropout is all but unemployable.

Likewise, while the lack of women in certain professions is certainly something to look at, by itself it does not necessarily prove that there is systemtic pressure keeping them out. There are careers and professions that just do not appeal to both sexes equally - whether that's nature or nurture is beside the point.

Let's ignore the fact that females are excelling across the board. Let's arrange to give more focus on the already privileged sex. Clearly, we're not doing enough for them. FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK.

I have daughter. I have son. Daughter was driven more in school, excelled more...came off as the more intelligent based solely on the fact that she put forth the effort. She is an explosion of awesomeness. I did not put her in the background to focus my attention on my less interested, less driven son. I put her on a pedestal. I celebrated her achievements. Incidentally, not because of the gender she happened to be. My children are each unique. Their gender does not matter to me in the least.

KTC said:

Let's ignore the fact that females are excelling across the board. Let's arrange to give more focus on the already privileged sex. Clearly, we're not doing enough for them. FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK.

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"You go girl" and "What can we do about poorly performing boys" are not mutually exclusive FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK.

Aptitude is one thing, but attitude is another. A girl may excel in school, but that doesn't mean that she will directed to the learning paths that utilize what she knows. There are still very definite "girl paths" and "boy paths" in a lot of minds, and that can trump a girl's ability to out-perform her male peers.

Have you ever listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk on feminism? She recounts a story from when she was a child where they gave a test with the promise that whoever did the best would be a classroom leader. She was elated because she scored highest, but her teacher changed the rules because "of course" a boy had to be in charge and gave the prize to the second highest score, which belonged to a child who didn't even want it.

There are cultural boundaries and family boundaries as well as academic ones. It's not enough to get good grades, and it's not enough to just teach the female students how to excel or to teach the male ones how to excel. Both need to be taught that their interests and aptitudes can be applied to their interests without disparagement.

If a girl wants to be an engineer, then she should be helped down that path. Likewise, if a boy wants to be a nurse, then he should be helped down that path. Neither happens very often. Most girls give up on higher math and science career paths, just like most boys are discouraged from "settling" for a job like nursing when they "should" be training to be doctors.

Our idea of a one-size-fits-all education is never going to get even results, no matter how much you tweak the parameters. Instead of obsessing over gender or racial or socio-economic differences in our current system, maybe we should spend a little time considering how to design a new system that might be more flexible and better at taking individual variances into account?

Alessandra Kelley said:

But it is discouraging that the study passes over without comment the apparently vast pool of bright girls who never make their way into heavily male-dominated professions worldwide.

...

But it niggles at me, a little, that that is seen as the fundamental problem to be solved, and not that that the underperforming boys still get better jobs and better pay than better performing girls.

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I don't see anything that gives any implication that this is viewed as the "fundamental problem to be solved", nor do I see any reason for the study to address other inequalities that aren't the focus of the study and have been addressed elsewhere already.

T Robinson said:

I agree with your conclusions. What strikes me is why did they need a fancy study to determine that in general 15 year old girls outperformed boys academically?

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Just out of curiosity, would you feel that this study would have been worthwhile if the results had been that boys outperformed girls academically?

KTC said:

Let's ignore the fact that females are excelling across the board. Let's arrange to give more focus on the already privileged sex. Clearly, we're not doing enough for them. FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK.

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One could consider the view that inequalities females face are worth addressing or more important whereas inequalities that impact males aren't because males are "already privileged" a form of female privilege...

harmonyisarine said:

I have very strong and mixed feelings to see this, as I outperformed most of my male peers in college and yet they all were able to continue to grad school and further (I had a career change to a field I really don't enjoy).

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I find this heartbreaking, as I have experienced similar sexism in the work place. It's why I'm a stay-at-home artist now.

Cyia said:

If a girl wants to be an engineer, then she should be helped down that path. Likewise, if a boy wants to be a nurse, then he should be helped down that path. Neither happens very often. Most girls give up on higher math and science career paths, just like most boys are discouraged from "settling" for a job like nursing when they "should" be training to be doctors.

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I'm female, and I was an excellent math and science student, and I felt pressured to study STEM. Even though I thought these subjects were a bore, I felt like I had to study them or I'd be conforming to gender stereotypes, and everyone would be disappointed in me if I did that. In fact, as a high school student and later an engineering major, I became so, so sick of the push to get women into engineering. However, I never saw the same thing happen with men and nursing. (This was about a decade ago.)

Also, one thing that is not talked about much is how different the gender balance is in different types of engineering. Chem eng was "fem eng" at my school. I think it was at least 50% female. In contrast, computer engineering in my year had no women. Environmental options attracted a lot of women too. To me, the question is not "how do we get women into engineering?" but something more like "how to we get women into ECE and mechanical engineering?"

Now, I know many women have different experiences...I'm just saying that where I live and went to school, I heard an awful lot about the lack of women in engineering and people were determined to change this. And I don't think my experience was a complete anomaly, not at the time I went to school.

lilyWhite said:

Just out of curiosity, would you feel that this study would have been worthwhile if the results had been that boys outperformed girls academically?

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My actual point had nothing to do with the study results per se. Having been a 15 year old at one time and blessed with six sisters, I can say my observations have been at that age, females are much more mature than males, IMO, overwhelmingly so. Any "study" that does not take that into account is intrinsically flawed. It is what happens to females after that point that needs to be addressed.

<broad generalization coming>

In many workplace scenarios, women have to work twice as hard to get half the credit. I have seen it, I still see it. It has changed, but not fast enough, IMO.