I'm sure there's some defensiveness going on in this thread. But there's also some truth to the fact that people place undue emphasis on certain quantitative measures of academic performance. This is why I don't like it when, for example, people are overly concerned that America's standardized test scores are lower than those of other nations. What matters is what you achieve, not what you are predicted to achieve (although there is certainly a correlation between the two).
"Need to be" number 1? Sure, I suppose that would be a bad desire to have. It's impossible for anyone, individual or nation, to be the best at everything. But what about "want to be number 1"? I would love to be number 1 at everything. Balanced with some reasonable expectations, I think this is great; in fact, I think we should encourage more people to feel this way.
I think people should be more concerned about standardized test scores like PISA. Because you need good evaluation of education to improve education. Education is just one input variable to achievement, so measuring achievement is not good for evaluating and improving education.
It seems like whenever someone brings this up, they have an untone of sexism within their point. Like "See! Women are fine, let's ignore pay imbalance, the lack of female CEOs, lack of woman in tech', and every other problem."
Facts cannot be sexist. However I cannot help that feel like this one gets bounced around because people have some type of agenda. This just further goes to prove how powerful of a force patriarchy is. Woman do better in academia but get lower paying jobs and promoted at a lower rate.
If a guy told you that he detected an undertone of anti-male sexism by anyone who brought up the lack of female CEOs, that all discussion of female issues carries an implied "See! Men are fine, let's ignore suicide, homelessness, incarceration, and every other problem", would you consider this a reasonable interpretation?
I certainly wouldn't. I'd assume that he's intentionally misinterpreting people in an attempt to shut down discussions that go against his preferred narrative.
How would it not be? Women weren't in work at first, because of patriarchy. After social reforms they slowly entered the workforce, but they were not paid as well and not given as good jobs. Things have improved over time, but there's still a gap.
I don't see why it wouldn't be because of patriarchy. Look at history.
The U.S. Department of Labor looked at the actual reasons.[1] It's predominantly because men statistically choose to enter higher paying professions and specialties, work longer hours and take fewer days off. Accounting for such things leaves the pay gap in the neighborhood of 5%, and the DoL concludes that it could in principle explain more of it if they had better data available. Here's the last paragraph of the summary:
"Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
The entire issue is just politics. For example, studies have shown that taller people make significantly more money than shorter people, by an amount that exceeds the unexplained pay gap between men and women based on the average height difference between men and women. Back of the envelope math then implies that women get paid more than men of the same height who do the same job.
If companies knew they could just hire a woman with the same talents and education for as little as all of these reports claim, why don't we see startups filled with women being hired at this low rate? If it's really a systematic problem as claimed all over the Internet, we would see at least some example of this.
"After social reforms they slowly entered the workforce, but they were not paid as well and not given as good jobs."
How many years ago was this? I've worked at many tech companies over the years and the women that were hired were paid just as much as any man in the same position. Of course this is my own personal experience, but again, I would think if it was as wide-spread as many claim, I would have seen it at least once.
Particularly in elementary school and pre-K. Daycares tend not to hire males because of parents and insurance. Add in changes in play that are not boy friendly and you have a trend. At this point, I am starting to lean to separate schools. Twenty years ago, I would have thought that insane.
Well what should we expect? In the last 20-30 years, a huge amount of effort has (rightly) been put into bringing girls' performance up. Examples include substituting practical classes for theory, exams for courseware, and so on. Also, for quite unrelated reasons, there are fewer male teachers (i.e. role models) than ever before.
So if I was interested in gender equality then I might suggest that maybe the balance has swung too far and we need to reverse some of these changes just a little bit, but I'm actually a feminist so I'm just going to declare victory and move on.
I rather expect these results will be used as proof of sexism at the next level. Women outperform men in school (not a problem) therefore men are only achieving through the patriarchy in business.
I say that I expect it, but I've already had friends telling me this is the way it is.
That's a true statement, but it's not a basis for action, much less legislation.
Another true statement, "women are achieving by sleeping their way to promotions."
Most of us, however are at a place of employment where men and women do get along. An imbalance of men/women in the workplace isn't by itself proof of anything. I'm in a shop with an imbalance, but we're hiring and can't find anyone. If women were out there making 77% of men, we'd love to talk to them. But they're not, and at the same time we're lumped in as the problem because our industry has some "brogrammers" which is a phenomenon I've never actually witnessed. Of course the next thing I'll hear is that because I claim not to have witnessed it is because the culture is so deep it is invisible and I'm a part of it.
Well, I'm sorry, 30+ years of hearing how I'm the problem really gets old. Of course some people aren't talking about all men, but if I say "not all men", I've hit another trigger.
It's a minefield and I'm sure just by writing more than a single line of agreement I've stepped on one.
Until these results trickle through to the workplace as well. When I was still in school, girls were outperforming boys at secondary level, but not at further or higher levels, then they started out-performing boys at further level. Now women outperform men in higher education as well.
There is already evidence that this trend is starting to be observed in the workplace as well. If fathers start to take paternity leave, as they are now entitled to do in the UK, this trend may continue through parenthood as well.
I really don't know anymore. I've been listening to a lot of feminist activists on the radio recently, probably because of the lead up to international women's day, and they can barely conceal their misandry, and it's been getting on my nerves. This may have affected the tone of my reply.
ah yes, standard issue anti-male shaming tactic #7. if they don't agree with you, call them immature! it's so easy! you don't even have to respond to what they say! or even read what they say!
also, try these handy dandy variants, always just a mouse click away:
* call them virgins
* call them bitter
* call them angry
* call them cowards
* call them jealous
* call them gay
* call them crazy
* call them selfish
* call them ugly (ouch!)
and of course, everyone's favorite:
* call them creepy! there's literally no recourse for that one! super effective!
Thankfully people don't tend to get away with such blatantly dishonest tactics on HN, in my opinion. At least they would have to be much more indirect about it.
I would be more impressed by this if I thought academic success was any indicator of aptitude. As a hiring manager I have completely stopped looking at things like GPA and in some cases even if you have a degree, they are such poor indicators of aptitude. So who cares if girls are doing better in school I still won't hire 90% of them.
We really need to stop caring about how boys are girls are doing in school and start caring why so many people are being given degrees and can't get a job in their chosen field.
As someone who has been in school for his entire life, I've always noticed that the average girl typically outperforms the average male in my classes. But it seems like the distribution of males was much wider.
For example, if each gender's academic capabilities were normally distributed, then I would expect the mean for girls to be higher than the mean for boys, but the variance for boys to be larger than the variance for girls. I say this because I tend to see many boys at the very bottom of my classes, but also at the very top.
Of course this is all based on my experiences in school, and I have no data to back this up. But I'd be interested in seeing distributions of academic performance for each gender.
We all have our sore spots, and one can't always stop feeling something simply by deciding one shouldn't. So that expectation might be too high. One can, though, be aware of them and stop oneself from responding reflexively when they come up. (Or, more easily, edit the defensiveness out of one's comments after writing them.)
The quantity and range of posts to HN—plus the fact that there's one big site/community and not a bunch of little siloed ones—guarantee that whatever buttons you have will eventually get pushed here, just like any exposed spot will eventually get wet in a rainstorm. This isn't personal; it's a statistical process. But we're not hard-wired to experience statistical processes, so unless one is careful, it feels like one is dealing with a person—usually an annoying adversary with demonic powers to drive one crazy. I think this is why people often post comments personifying "HN". We each have a different imaginary arch-enemy in our heads.
I mention this in the hope that it might be helpful to anyone else who recognizes the pattern. In our case, exposure to it is an occupational hazard, so we've had little choice but to learn about it.
I have to agree to this , i have to mention that i am just now in my last semester for my bachelor , and my school life is now only about 2 years in the past and I am from Germany so may be still different from the experiences in other countrys.
What I recall is that most of the time the absolut top performers have been men and not woman , but contrary to this I dont really recall many woman being at the bottom of the class in any subject. This effect i woud say was because most of the girls did almost all assignments and maybe tried to not leave the given path in a way, but also did not try to stand out that much so they were willing to work more for school. While the boys generally were good in some subjekt and focused on their strengths but we were not as willing to pull up our efforts in those subjects we thought of as not really needed for our future.
I really can relate with this I since I myself was really strong in all science and math related subjects as well as in english and art... but regarding languages like latin i did fail , sometimes even handing in a completly white paper, since i could choose which subjekts were going to count in my Abitur ( think of it as A levels ).
A good essay on this phenomenon: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm. In short, evolutionary biology; variance of number of children in men is much higher and it makes sense to take risk (both in terms of genes and behaviour).
Just trying to think back to my schooling... I went to a mixed secondary school and I think there the girls generally outperformed the boys at all levels. I went to a different school at 6th form and there I think the best achievers were mostly boys, but they all came from the local boys-only school.
I think that it is true statistically that boys perform better if they go to a boys-only school. I don't remember if the same is true for girls or not.
The problem is not boys. The problem is school. School is like a modern day prison for kids, particularly boys. Kids were not meant to sit still for 8 hours/day listening to lectures, then go home and complete hours and hours of bullshit assignments and busy-work. I hated school back then, and if I had to go back now, I'd probably hate it just as much.
I think the gap in income in the first years after leaving University, is at one point because a lot of woman at least a higher percentage then from men may have not enough confidence in themselfs so at one point dont struggle for higher payed jobs, those jobs they still dont completly satisfy the qualifications for, while a higher percentage of men is more willing to just try to get such jobs even without appropriate qualifications.
Also in my opinion a higher percentage of woman then men are not willing to get a job which has a lot of conflict potential , so at least a higher percentage of men are willing to try more stressfull and demanding jobs which also pay better.
These effects add up showing why there may just be a gab in the first years. This is mainly a problem of preferences.
The gaps later on and in higher positions i think are still really a huge problem for woman in all professions, so i would certainly not include them in this really simplified explanation.
This is truly only my opinion regarding the small gap right after getting a degree.
It seems like society is facing two serious problems on both edges of the bell curve: 1) undereducated men can't find good jobs and 2) well-educated women are still not getting the share of CEO, politician, and other top professional jobs that they deserve. I cannot think of any sense in which one problem cancels out, compensates for, or assists with the other.
They're both very serious problems, and we should all be looking at solutions for both.
The most interesting part of the article ot me was the discussion of income in the workplace in contrast to the performance in school. They point out that women tend to select subjects in college that result in less income and that they seem to care less about that. I wonder how much of that attitude results in the income difference between men and women. I also believe that some of the behavior typically associated with boys and their bad performance in school leads to them succeeding in the workplace. Trying to be in control and showing typical alpha-male behavior causes nothing but trouble in school. In the workplace on the other hand,it's something that might lead to some conflict, but also to higher income. On the flip side, following orders diligently is great in school and leads to a stable career, but you might lose out to the pushy alpha-male.
Obviously like pretty much everything on this topic, those are very broad generalizations, that are not indicative of any one individuals behavior.
All true, but aside from risk, school has little relationship to modern workplaces.
The public school system was designed to squirt out interchangeable cogs for the regimented institutionalized factory / sweatshop workplace with the ability to act as cannon fodder as military industrial complex profits dictate. That workplace is dead in this country other than blue collar style criminality (WRT entering for-profit prisons).
There is the interesting analogy of high school study hall vs open office concept. Nothing ever got done in study hall other than goofing around and socializing. Real job (aka not an open office) of a higher social status are more like the silent study tanks at uni or studying at home (office job as opposed to open office)
"The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet."
I think it shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to gender gap in tech. The sad (and short) story is that a lot of teaching is uncoupled from the future career life. Vide http://xkcd.com/519/
Note that the article does not do a breakdown by subject, an interesting ommission. It is possible that the data might show girls out performing boys because they are taking easier courses, so in aggregate it looks like they're ahead, since a high grade in $hardsubject is taken as equivalent to a high grade in $easysubject.
Hard to know without the data to analyse for this.
> “IT’S all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,”
What's funny is that is precisely the reason that girls and boys compete in separate classes in athletics. It's why there's a women's olympic medal in swimming and a men's.
So when are schools going to begin grading the girls on one curve and the boys on their own?
It isn't even true that it's all to do with brains and bodies and chemicals.
Sure there are underlying sex differences, but the best boy at anything is a lot better than the average girl, in the same way the best girl at anything is a lot better than the average boy. Where athletic championships are concerned the differences in the distributions make a difference, but to organize a society around the tails of the distribution is a mistake.
Men are shaped by social expectations as much as anything else, and those expectations are communicated to them violently and in no uncertain terms. To be a successful man you must over-produce so you can take care of your family. You must defend something: your family honour, your country, your personal integrity. And you must do so violently, or you aren't a good man.
These characteristics are pretty much universal, but once upon a time kingship was pretty much a universal characteristic of human societies, and we don't see too many of them around any more. Kingship was also considered "natural" and "inevitable" at the time when it was merely common. So I'd be wary of arguments that simply because beating the hell out of boys and men until they are shaped into a particular mold is common, that it reflects more than relatively weak proclivities on the part of the people being beaten.
Until we recognize that boy's poor performance in school is due to masculinity being socially constructed in ways that fail boys and men academically, we will continue to perpetuate this systemic injustice, and we won't really know what boys and men are capable of.
Thank you dude. I really needed a good comment on HN.
I personally never had time for school, I needed to earn money and I am glad I didn't go to school/university longer. It would have been a huge waste of my time and it would have massively inhibited my professional success.
Or, "Men and women deserve equal respect
as persons but are not the same" (E. Fromm,
The Art of Loving, love and its connections
with emotions, psychology, and religion).
The article is awash with phrases
that constitute lying with statistics";
basically the article is a case of trying
to get attention based on nothing
very solid or new.
So, (1) a lot of what the article is
saying about so many women in college
doing so well can
be explained by:
"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."
and
"A big reason is the choice of subject:
education, the humanities and social work
pay less than engineering or computer
science."
So, a lot of women are in college getting
Bachelor's and Master's degrees
as preparation for K-12 teaching.
Add in the women there on the way to
a nursing RN and have some more.
Law? Get some more.
Social science for work in HR?
Got some more.
The rest of the humanities?
Women on the way to their Mrs. degree.
Business? A CPA is a good career
career path, especially for women.
Women doing well in math in college?
Sure: They want to be K-12 math
teachers.
But, from the OP, apparently still
"whereas men take up computing,
engineering and the exact sciences"
so that the men are still there for
technical training for hard work
of applications, not just teaching,
in a career.
To be more clear,
for the "academically" part of the title here,
we're talking
the real goal of academics, chaired profs
at the top research universities, maybe?
Nobel prize winners in the physical sciences?
Fields Medal winners (math)? The girls/women
are doing better there -- gee, why'd I not
notice?
Oh, I understand! In part we're talking K-6
where the girls have better manual dexterity,
better hand writing, better verbal talent,
better social skills (how to please instead
of piss off the teachers, nearly all woman),
better clerical talent (keep those columns
in long division nicely lined up),
much more interest in fictional reading,
better social skills working in groups,
much more eager to behave well* in
class. Ah, now that's much of what is meant
by "academically"!!
Gee, what's that got to do with high
end academic success? Well, let's see:
Good starting attitude for such success is,
"That old stuff is junk.
Pitch it.
Let's do some much better, new
stuff. E.g., Maxwell did really
well, but he was never clear on
what would happen if the lab
were moving rapidly, say, near
the speed of light. So, looks
like need to tweak Maxwell's equations.
Or, the Riemann integral? Gotta be kidding!
Looks like we can redo integration theory
and integrate darned near anything and
show that a function on a finite
closed interval has a Riemann integral
if and only it is continuous everywhere
except on a set of length 0.
Control theory? Sure. But what about
in gusty winds? Now what? How
'bout some stochastic optimal
control?
Malaria caused by bad air? Gotta
be kidding. Let's find out what
the real cause is. How about
something from all those mosquito
bites?
I can't do linear regression because
some variable was listed twice or
some variables are linear combinations
of some of the others? Silly. Yes,
I know, the normal equations matrix
does not have full row rank and, thus,
doesn't have an inverse,
but why do we have to go through
that matrix inverse stuff? We don't!"
In the 10th grade I had such a case:
My plane geometry teacher was
a very ugly and angry woman.
It was a good high school,
and she actually could mostly work
the exercises, but otherwise she
was not much of a mathematician.
So, no way did I want to have my
knowledge of plane geometry, a subject
I ...
> "Well, I reinvented it in the 10th grade, and the teacher said I couldn't do that."
I love when you realize these things. I had a similar moment recently when I showed some amateur set operations library I wrote for fun a couple years ago to a friend who I am teaching to program. So she's a mathematician and she pointed out that my source code was actually the exact definition of some of the set operations. Which, in retrospect is funny because what I did was try to emulate a subset of math using linked lists and predicate functions.
I have had first-hand experience with this: video games are largely made for males - partly due to video game developers being largely male. When boys prioritize playing video games, this impacts their academic performance.
Also, the rise of at least one series of books targeted towards females (twilight saga) has likely had a huge impact on the reading levels of girls since 2005, while the last best-seller books targeting boys (Harry Potter) was made back in 1997 and has since lost much of its appeal. Also, Harry Potter didn't outright exclude girls with its content, while Twilight saga was hated almost unanimously by boys. As a result, you find more girls reading for pleasure.
The effects of arts and culture are probably as important as the genetics/hormones of growing children.
76 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadNot entirely convinced that success in these channels is conducive to anything.
Adherence to a specific structure is just one way to provide merit to youth.
Let's see a gender comparison in lucrative web project creation?
1) Nope, this doesn't mean girls are good as boys.
or
2) That's nice but this doesn't mean we have achieved gender equality.
Facts cannot be sexist. However I cannot help that feel like this one gets bounced around because people have some type of agenda. This just further goes to prove how powerful of a force patriarchy is. Woman do better in academia but get lower paying jobs and promoted at a lower rate.
I certainly wouldn't. I'd assume that he's intentionally misinterpreting people in an attempt to shut down discussions that go against his preferred narrative.
I don't see why it wouldn't be because of patriarchy. Look at history.
"Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
The entire issue is just politics. For example, studies have shown that taller people make significantly more money than shorter people, by an amount that exceeds the unexplained pay gap between men and women based on the average height difference between men and women. Back of the envelope math then implies that women get paid more than men of the same height who do the same job.
[1] http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...
"After social reforms they slowly entered the workforce, but they were not paid as well and not given as good jobs."
How many years ago was this? I've worked at many tech companies over the years and the women that were hired were paid just as much as any man in the same position. Of course this is my own personal experience, but again, I would think if it was as wide-spread as many claim, I would have seen it at least once.
So if I was interested in gender equality then I might suggest that maybe the balance has swung too far and we need to reverse some of these changes just a little bit, but I'm actually a feminist so I'm just going to declare victory and move on.
I'm not a feminist, but I wonder if you're really representing the feminist point of view, at least as most feminists would like to be seen.
I say that I expect it, but I've already had friends telling me this is the way it is.
That's a true statement, but it's not a basis for action, much less legislation.
Another true statement, "women are achieving by sleeping their way to promotions."
Most of us, however are at a place of employment where men and women do get along. An imbalance of men/women in the workplace isn't by itself proof of anything. I'm in a shop with an imbalance, but we're hiring and can't find anyone. If women were out there making 77% of men, we'd love to talk to them. But they're not, and at the same time we're lumped in as the problem because our industry has some "brogrammers" which is a phenomenon I've never actually witnessed. Of course the next thing I'll hear is that because I claim not to have witnessed it is because the culture is so deep it is invisible and I'm a part of it.
Well, I'm sorry, 30+ years of hearing how I'm the problem really gets old. Of course some people aren't talking about all men, but if I say "not all men", I've hit another trigger.
It's a minefield and I'm sure just by writing more than a single line of agreement I've stepped on one.
There is already evidence that this trend is starting to be observed in the workplace as well. If fathers start to take paternity leave, as they are now entitled to do in the UK, this trend may continue through parenthood as well.
I fall back to Carmack on this issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmbW4ueGdg
also, try these handy dandy variants, always just a mouse click away:
* call them virgins
* call them bitter
* call them angry
* call them cowards
* call them jealous
* call them gay
* call them crazy
* call them selfish
* call them ugly (ouch!)
and of course, everyone's favorite:
* call them creepy! there's literally no recourse for that one! super effective!
I just don't think this place can handle the divisive nature of the passion inherent to the subject.
And it's not like any forum really can, as Aloisius says.
What's so wrong with dispassionately noting that this topic is going to be a toxic flame war?
We really need to stop caring about how boys are girls are doing in school and start caring why so many people are being given degrees and can't get a job in their chosen field.
For example, if each gender's academic capabilities were normally distributed, then I would expect the mean for girls to be higher than the mean for boys, but the variance for boys to be larger than the variance for girls. I say this because I tend to see many boys at the very bottom of my classes, but also at the very top.
Of course this is all based on my experiences in school, and I have no data to back this up. But I'd be interested in seeing distributions of academic performance for each gender.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153685
No personal jabs, please. This comment would be much better without the second sentence.
Maybe I shouldn't.
The quantity and range of posts to HN—plus the fact that there's one big site/community and not a bunch of little siloed ones—guarantee that whatever buttons you have will eventually get pushed here, just like any exposed spot will eventually get wet in a rainstorm. This isn't personal; it's a statistical process. But we're not hard-wired to experience statistical processes, so unless one is careful, it feels like one is dealing with a person—usually an annoying adversary with demonic powers to drive one crazy. I think this is why people often post comments personifying "HN". We each have a different imaginary arch-enemy in our heads.
I mention this in the hope that it might be helpful to anyone else who recognizes the pattern. In our case, exposure to it is an occupational hazard, so we've had little choice but to learn about it.
I really can relate with this I since I myself was really strong in all science and math related subjects as well as in english and art... but regarding languages like latin i did fail , sometimes even handing in a completly white paper, since i could choose which subjekts were going to count in my Abitur ( think of it as A levels ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_be...
I think that it is true statistically that boys perform better if they go to a boys-only school. I don't remember if the same is true for girls or not.
"According to the OECD, the return on investment in a degree is higher for women than for men in many countries, though not all."
I think this is enough explanation and no more analysis is necessary.
Idea: Compare and contrast school behaviour with behaviour in the wild (youtube comments, videogames teamspeak)
Also in my opinion a higher percentage of woman then men are not willing to get a job which has a lot of conflict potential , so at least a higher percentage of men are willing to try more stressfull and demanding jobs which also pay better.
These effects add up showing why there may just be a gab in the first years. This is mainly a problem of preferences.
The gaps later on and in higher positions i think are still really a huge problem for woman in all professions, so i would certainly not include them in this really simplified explanation.
This is truly only my opinion regarding the small gap right after getting a degree.
They're both very serious problems, and we should all be looking at solutions for both.
Obviously like pretty much everything on this topic, those are very broad generalizations, that are not indicative of any one individuals behavior.
The public school system was designed to squirt out interchangeable cogs for the regimented institutionalized factory / sweatshop workplace with the ability to act as cannon fodder as military industrial complex profits dictate. That workplace is dead in this country other than blue collar style criminality (WRT entering for-profit prisons).
There is the interesting analogy of high school study hall vs open office concept. Nothing ever got done in study hall other than goofing around and socializing. Real job (aka not an open office) of a higher social status are more like the silent study tanks at uni or studying at home (office job as opposed to open office)
I think it shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to gender gap in tech. The sad (and short) story is that a lot of teaching is uncoupled from the future career life. Vide http://xkcd.com/519/
Hard to know without the data to analyse for this.
What's funny is that is precisely the reason that girls and boys compete in separate classes in athletics. It's why there's a women's olympic medal in swimming and a men's.
So when are schools going to begin grading the girls on one curve and the boys on their own?
Sure there are underlying sex differences, but the best boy at anything is a lot better than the average girl, in the same way the best girl at anything is a lot better than the average boy. Where athletic championships are concerned the differences in the distributions make a difference, but to organize a society around the tails of the distribution is a mistake.
Men are shaped by social expectations as much as anything else, and those expectations are communicated to them violently and in no uncertain terms. To be a successful man you must over-produce so you can take care of your family. You must defend something: your family honour, your country, your personal integrity. And you must do so violently, or you aren't a good man.
These characteristics are pretty much universal, but once upon a time kingship was pretty much a universal characteristic of human societies, and we don't see too many of them around any more. Kingship was also considered "natural" and "inevitable" at the time when it was merely common. So I'd be wary of arguments that simply because beating the hell out of boys and men until they are shaped into a particular mold is common, that it reflects more than relatively weak proclivities on the part of the people being beaten.
Until we recognize that boy's poor performance in school is due to masculinity being socially constructed in ways that fail boys and men academically, we will continue to perpetuate this systemic injustice, and we won't really know what boys and men are capable of.
I personally never had time for school, I needed to earn money and I am glad I didn't go to school/university longer. It would have been a huge waste of my time and it would have massively inhibited my professional success.
If this were true, then why is it only recently that boys are falling behind? This isn't explained by the article at all.
College admissions for all the top schools already do this.
Or, vive la différence.
Or, "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same" (E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, love and its connections with emotions, psychology, and religion).
The article is awash with phrases that constitute lying with statistics"; basically the article is a case of trying to get attention based on nothing very solid or new.
So, (1) a lot of what the article is saying about so many women in college doing so well can be explained by:
"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."
and
"A big reason is the choice of subject: education, the humanities and social work pay less than engineering or computer science."
So, a lot of women are in college getting Bachelor's and Master's degrees as preparation for K-12 teaching. Add in the women there on the way to a nursing RN and have some more. Law? Get some more. Social science for work in HR? Got some more.
The rest of the humanities? Women on the way to their Mrs. degree.
Business? A CPA is a good career career path, especially for women.
Women doing well in math in college? Sure: They want to be K-12 math teachers.
But, from the OP, apparently still
"whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences"
so that the men are still there for technical training for hard work of applications, not just teaching, in a career.
To be more clear, for the "academically" part of the title here, we're talking the real goal of academics, chaired profs at the top research universities, maybe? Nobel prize winners in the physical sciences? Fields Medal winners (math)? The girls/women are doing better there -- gee, why'd I not notice?
Oh, I understand! In part we're talking K-6 where the girls have better manual dexterity, better hand writing, better verbal talent, better social skills (how to please instead of piss off the teachers, nearly all woman), better clerical talent (keep those columns in long division nicely lined up), much more interest in fictional reading, better social skills working in groups, much more eager to behave well* in class. Ah, now that's much of what is meant by "academically"!!
Gee, what's that got to do with high end academic success? Well, let's see: Good starting attitude for such success is,
"That old stuff is junk. Pitch it. Let's do some much better, new stuff. E.g., Maxwell did really well, but he was never clear on what would happen if the lab were moving rapidly, say, near the speed of light. So, looks like need to tweak Maxwell's equations.
Or, the Riemann integral? Gotta be kidding! Looks like we can redo integration theory and integrate darned near anything and show that a function on a finite closed interval has a Riemann integral if and only it is continuous everywhere except on a set of length 0.
Control theory? Sure. But what about in gusty winds? Now what? How 'bout some stochastic optimal control?
Malaria caused by bad air? Gotta be kidding. Let's find out what the real cause is. How about something from all those mosquito bites?
I can't do linear regression because some variable was listed twice or some variables are linear combinations of some of the others? Silly. Yes, I know, the normal equations matrix does not have full row rank and, thus, doesn't have an inverse, but why do we have to go through that matrix inverse stuff? We don't!"
In the 10th grade I had such a case: My plane geometry teacher was a very ugly and angry woman. It was a good high school, and she actually could mostly work the exercises, but otherwise she was not much of a mathematician.
So, no way did I want to have my knowledge of plane geometry, a subject I ...
I love when you realize these things. I had a similar moment recently when I showed some amateur set operations library I wrote for fun a couple years ago to a friend who I am teaching to program. So she's a mathematician and she pointed out that my source code was actually the exact definition of some of the set operations. Which, in retrospect is funny because what I did was try to emulate a subset of math using linked lists and predicate functions.
Also, the rise of at least one series of books targeted towards females (twilight saga) has likely had a huge impact on the reading levels of girls since 2005, while the last best-seller books targeting boys (Harry Potter) was made back in 1997 and has since lost much of its appeal. Also, Harry Potter didn't outright exclude girls with its content, while Twilight saga was hated almost unanimously by boys. As a result, you find more girls reading for pleasure.
The effects of arts and culture are probably as important as the genetics/hormones of growing children.