Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university, and the gap is wide

[GennGreymane]

http://www.economist.com/news/intern...d/theweakersex

“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. One school charges £25,000 ($38,000) a year and has a scuba-diving club; the other serves subsidised lunches to most of its pupils, a quarter of whom have special needs. Yet both are grappling with the same problem: teenage boys are being left behind by girls.

It is a problem that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.

The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling.

xx > xy?
The OECD deems literacy to be the most important skill that it assesses, since further learning depends on it. Sure enough, teenage boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to achieve basic proficiency in any of maths, reading and science (see chart 1). Youngsters in this group, with nothing to build on or shine at, are prone to drop out of school altogether.


To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. 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. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter.

Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it. They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late. Just as teachers used to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement. “There are different pressures on boys,” says Mr Yip. “Unfortunately there’s a tendency where they try to live up to certain expectations in terms of [bad] behaviour.”

Boys’ disdain for school might have been less irrational when there were plenty of jobs for uneducated men. But those days have long gone. It may be that a bit of swagger helps in maths, where confidence plays a part in boys’ lead (though it sometimes extends to delusion: 12% of boys told the OECD that they were familiar with the mathematical concept of “subjunctive scaling”, a red herring that fooled only 7% of girls). But their lack of self-discipline drives teachers crazy.

Perhaps because they can be so insufferable, teenage boys are often marked down. The OECD found that boys did much better in its anonymised tests than in teacher assessments. The gap with girls in reading was a third smaller, and the gap in maths—where boys were already ahead—opened up further. In another finding that suggests a lack of even-handedness among teachers, boys are more likely than girls to be forced to repeat a year, even when they are of equal ability.

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.

Some countries provide an environment in which boys can do better. In Latin America the gender gap in reading is relatively small, with boys in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru trailing girls less than they do elsewhere. Awkwardly, however, this nearly always comes with a wider gender gap in maths, in favour of boys. The reverse is true, too: Iceland, Norway and Sweden, which have got girls up to parity with boys in maths, struggle with uncomfortably wide gender gaps in reading. Since 2003, the last occasion when the OECD did a big study, boys in a few countries have caught up in reading and girls in several others have significantly narrowed the gap in maths. No country has managed both.

Onwards and upwards
Girls’ educational dominance persists after school. Until a few decades ago men were in a clear majority at university almost everywhere (see chart 2), particularly in advanced courses and in science and engineering. But as higher education has boomed worldwide, women’s enrolment has increased almost twice as fast as men’s. In the OECD women now make up 56% of students enrolled, up from 46% in 1985. By 2025 that may rise to 58%.


Even in the handful of OECD countries where women are in the minority on campus, their numbers are creeping up. Meanwhile several, including America, Britain and parts of Scandinavia, have 50% more women than men on campus. Numbers in many of America’s elite private colleges are more evenly balanced. It is widely believed that their opaque admissions criteria are relaxed for men.

The feminisation of higher education was so gradual that for a long time it passed unremarked. According to Stephan Vincent-Lancrin of the OECD, when in 2008 it published a report pointing out just how far it had gone, people “couldn’t believe it”.

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.

Social change has done more to encourage women to enter higher education than any deliberate policy. The Pill and a decline in the average number of children, together with later marriage and childbearing, have made it easier for married women to join the workforce. As more women went out to work, discrimination became less sharp. Girls saw the point of study once they were expected to have careers. Rising divorce rates underlined the importance of being able to provide for yourself. These days girls nearly everywhere seem more ambitious than boys, both academically and in their careers. It is hard to believe that in 1900-50 about half of jobs in America were barred to married women.

So are women now on their way to becoming the dominant sex? Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men and the Rise of Women”, published in 2012, argues that in America, at least, women are ahead not only educationally but increasingly also professionally and socially. Policymakers in many countries worry about the prospect of a growing underclass of ill-educated men. That should worry women, too: in the past they have typically married men in their own social group or above. If there are too few of those, many women will have to marry down or not at all.


INTERACTIVE: The glass-ceiling index - the best and worse places in the world to be a working woman
According to the OECD, the return on investment in a degree is higher for women than for men in many countries, though not all. In America PayScale, a company that crunches incomes data, found that the return on investment in a college degree for women was lower than or at best the same as for men. Although women as a group are now better qualified, they earn about three-quarters as much as men. A big reason is the choice of subject: education, the humanities and social work pay less than engineering or computer science. But academic research shows that women attach less importance than men to the graduate pay premium, suggesting that a high financial return is not the main reason for their further education.

At the highest levels of business and the professions, women remain notably scarce. In a reversal of the pattern at school, the anonymous and therefore gender-blind essays and exams at university protect female students from bias. But in the workplace, says Elisabeth Kelan of Britain’s Cranfield School of Management, “traditional patterns assert themselves in miraculous ways”. Men and women join the medical and legal professions in roughly equal numbers, but 10-15 years later many women have chosen unambitious career paths or dropped out to spend time with their children. Meanwhile men are rising through the ranks as qualifications gained long ago fade in importance and personality, ambition and experience come to matter more.

The last bastion
For a long time it was said that since women had historically been underrepresented in university and work, it would take time to fill the pipeline from which senior appointments were made. But after 40 years of making up the majority of graduates in some countries, that argument is wearing thin. According to Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, the “last chapter” in the story of women’s rise—equal pay and access to the best jobs—will not come without big structural changes.

In a recent paper in the American Economic Review Ms Goldin found that the difference between the hourly earnings of highly qualified men and their female peers grows hugely in the first 10-15 years of working life, largely because of a big premium in some highly paid jobs on putting in long days and being constantly on call. On the whole men find it easier than women to work in this way. Where such jobs are common, for example in business and the law, the gender pay gap remains wide and even short spells out of the workforce are severely penalised, meaning that motherhood can exact a heavy price. Where pay is roughly proportional to hours worked, as in pharmacy, it is low.

There will always be jobs where flexibility is not an option, says Ms Goldin: those of CEOs, trial lawyers, surgeons, some bankers and senior politicians come to mind. In many others, pay does not need to depend on being available all hours—and well-educated men who want a life outside work would benefit from change, too. But the new gender gap is at the other end of the pay spectrum. And it is not women who are suffering, but unskilled men.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Gotta love that a wall of text on the topic of "education only catering to women these days" is 50%* about how bad women have it and that it means they might not be able to marry up :P.

*Edit: Okay, it's less, seemed more when I first read that wall of text, it's just the last few paragraphs.

[Sunseeker]

It's a social issue. We promoted women getting jobs, getting out of the house, standing on their own for decades, so we've raised little girls who want to learn, some who may even have direct relatives who didn't. We've never done that for boys, so big surprise!

[Independent voter]

College is a great place to pick up girls, enjoy it while you can.

[Arenis]

As someone in the comments states correctly: the average schoolcourses have little of interest to your average teenage boy. Their interests are in complete conflict with that they get "offered" (aka forced to learn to and comply to). It is only later in life, near the young adolescent border, that they will more start to understand the potential these courses have for the rest of their lives.

[gyrados]

College is a great place to pick up girls, enjoy it while you can.

also enjoy the false rape accusations yay college haha <3

[THE Bigzoman]

Am I the only one who thinks the entire "boys just don't wanna learn" is a huge copout for educators to use?

Yeah, there is peer pressure for guys to not perform well, but the same peer pressure exists for girls as well. Academics are boring and seem meaningless, but social functions and popularity are fun.

I'd be willing to bet that theres a lot more encouragement and role models for girls to overcome this peer pressure, whereas not nearly the same amount of encouragement and role models are there for boys.

Having educators say "they just don't want to learn" is going to have them completing self-fulfilling prophecies and tragically failing young boys. But educators taking any responsibility seems foreign nowadays.

Once the spotlight hits them, they walk out of it and place someone else in it.

[Deletedaccount1]

Placing educational emphasis on anything other than the individual is just dumb in my opinion. And it's not because half of our population conveniently has some sort of "learning disorder".

[Deleted]

Am I the only one who thinks the entire "boys just don't wanna learn" is a huge copout for educators to use?

Yeah, there is peer pressure for guys to not perform well, but the same peer pressure exists for girls as well. Academics are boring and seem meaningless, but social functions and popularity are fun.

I'd be willing to bet that theres a lot more encouragement and role models for girls to overcome this peer pressure, whereas not nearly the same amount of encouragement and role models are there for boys.

Having educators say "they just don't want to learn" is going to have them completing self-fulfilling prophecies and tragically failing young boys. But educators taking any responsibility seems foreign nowadays.

Once the spotlight hits them, they walk out of it and place someone else in it.

I'd say you are pretty close, there has been studies indicating that young men, learn less efficient from a female educator and the reverse, so that could likely be a part of the issue, seeing as the educator field is largely female. That and the way that education works today (or rather how it hasn't changed much but has become more expansive and more material in shorter time), is less efficient for young men, since it is largely based on reading, memory based learning and writing, things that the male brain finds "boring" more quickly than the female brain.

It is something that currently is being looked into here in Denmark, and one of the first things that came from it was proven somewhat problematic, because the way that men learn more easily also takes longer to teach (movement, more example based teaching and other things in that category). So the education system will either have to finally bend and say that education will have to take longer for the same amount of material, or we are going to neglect men in the education system.

And just a thing to remember, negligence isn't always an -ism (not pointed at you Bigzo).

[Deleted]

Coming from an arts background it is quite difficult to match up on some things, for example it's pretty much an easy 2:1 for women to get if they do something regarding feminism and take a few pictures of women looking sad. In my case for certain modules it wasn't that the men were struggling, it's that there was an obvious retributive bias and certain lines of thinking were simply shunned.

[Endus]

Am I the only one who thinks the entire "boys just don't wanna learn" is a huge copout for educators to use?

As an educator myself, that's exactly what it is. Boys and girls have the same drive to learn. Schooling was very much focused on male success, back when this first became an issue, and as a result, they shifted a lot of things to try and encourage girls to see similar support and gains. The pendulum swung back a little too far. That doesn't mean we need to start harshing on girls' success, now, but we can't just abandon the boys; their needs have to be fostered just as well, and a system that rewards one gender over the another is just straight-up built wrong.

This doesn't mean there was some anti-male plot going on; these kinds of things take more than a decade to shake out, since we're talking about cultural phenomena that stretch back into early childhood, and we're measuring "success" by secondary and post-secondary performance. It's just a case where things were overcorrected, and we didn't realize it at the time.

I don't really see the "boys don't want to learn" thing happening, but if it does, it's no different than when educators tried to argue that women's brains just couldn't handle complex thought, a century ago. Literally the same thing.

[Arthas242]

I'd say you are pretty close, there has been studies indicating that young men, learn less efficient from a female educator and the reverse, so that could likely be a part of the issue, seeing as the educator field is largely female. That and the way that education works today (or rather how it hasn't changed much but has become more expansive and more material in shorter time), is less efficient for young men, since it is largely based on reading, memory based learning and writing, things that the male brain finds "boring" more quickly than the female brain.

It is something that currently is being looked into here in Denmark, and one of the first things that came from it was proven somewhat problematic, because the way that men learn more easily also takes longer to teach (movement, more example based teaching and other things in that category). So the education system will either have to finally bend and say that education will have to take longer for the same amount of material, or we are going to neglect men in the education system.

i can agree/believe this, as pretty much all my favorite teachers have been MALE yet most of my teachers are female.

and no i am not sexist, i just found all the male ones better, specially my anatomy teacher in high school.

also i hate memorization, i LEARN BEST BY HANDS ON AND DOING IT/USING IT. But that is because memorization only teaches you to spit out the right answer, not on how to find it and use it....

sad thing is i am trying to get into IT which is being replaced by foreign workers who work for less or even minimal wage. Also thank you obama for making a law that gives businesses 12k for hiring a foreign worker in a STEM degree/field over a american citizen! *also he wants to bring in more foreign hb1 workers. *republicans are no better on this because they both want cheap labor/votes*

And i am not going back to school because i do think it was a waste of time as i learned nothing i didn't already know how to do or find the answer, BUT GOTTA HAVE THE DEGREE*which i have 2 now* or your worthless.....

but at least i got a interview wednesday.... for a sales position at verizon......*which does make good money 12.41 a hour + Commision(average around 40-50k a year, can be more if you sell A LOT), hoping maybe i can wait inside for a position in IT.

[Frozen Death Knight]

From my own personal experience growing up with two sisters, my youngest sister had the best references from the teachers compared to me and my other sister when when we were younger, but I was the one who outperformed in grades and will be the one graduating university before Summer this year. I also have good enough grades from my gymnasium days to study just about anything I want if I so desired.

When I was 12 I was told that I was pretty much average by my then current teacher (who I was even related to), but I was the only one from my old class that studied the Nature Science program at a gymnasium level while a huge bunch of the guys I grew up with studied music and arts or other less theoretical programs. At no point did society encourage me to be better, but I had to get that encouragement from myself and my parents. Luckily I had enough intelligence and liked learning new things that I had it much easier than most. I even managed to encourage my two sisters to study Nature Science as well and they are among the few from their old classes that did.

Anyway, I can understand why boys are under-performing. We don't get a lot of encouragement to study at a higher level. If I had listened to every time that I was told I wouldn't be able to perform better then I wouldn't be where I am today for sure.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

As an educator myself, that's exactly what it is. Boys and girls have the same drive to learn. Schooling was very much focused on male success, back when this first became an issue, and as a result, they shifted a lot of things to try and encourage girls to see similar support and gains. The pendulum swung back a little too far. That doesn't mean we need to start harshing on girls' success, now, but we can't just abandon the boys; their needs have to be fostered just as well, and a system that rewards one gender over the another is just straight-up built wrong.

This doesn't mean there was some anti-male plot going on; these kinds of things take more than a decade to shake out, since we're talking about cultural phenomena that stretch back into early childhood, and we're measuring "success" by secondary and post-secondary performance. It's just a case where things were overcorrected, and we didn't realize it at the time.

I don't really see the "boys don't want to learn" thing happening, but if it does, it's no different than when educators tried to argue that women's brains just couldn't handle complex thought, a century ago. Literally the same thing.

Wouldn't focusing on the boys needs just swing the pendulum right back? Unless classrooms are split, I guess?

[Deleted]

Wouldn't focusing on the boys needs just swing the pendulum right back? Unless classrooms are split, I guess?

There's no reason we can't focus on both, understanding the needs of each individual is what defines a good educator.

[Deleted]

i can agree/believe this, as pretty much all my favorite teachers have been MALE yet most of my teachers are female.

and no i am not sexist, i just found all the male ones better, specially my anatomy teacher in high school.

Well it is only natural to feel that way, and nothing can likely ever change that. It becomes somewhat problematic for young male students, since the teacher job have lost a lot of men over the years and it doesn't seem to be reversing.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

There's no reason we can't focus on both, understanding the needs of each individual is what defines a good educator.

I feel like that would be too much for a single teacher in a single classroom.

[Mitters]

College is a great place to pick up girls, enjoy it while you can.

My college is 95% guys so not really. And i'm not even studying engineering.

[THE Bigzoman]

I'd say you are pretty close, there has been studies indicating that young men, learn less efficient from a female educator and the reverse, so that could likely be a part of the issue, seeing as the educator field is largely female. That and the way that education works today (or rather how it hasn't changed much but has become more expansive and more material in shorter time), is less efficient for young men, since it is largely based on reading, memory based learning and writing, things that the male brain finds "boring" more quickly than the female brain.

It is something that currently is being looked into here in Denmark, and one of the first things that came from it was proven somewhat problematic, because the way that men learn more easily also takes longer to teach (movement, more example based teaching and other things in that category). So the education system will either have to finally bend and say that education will have to take longer for the same amount of material, or we are going to neglect men in the education system.

And just a thing to remember, negligence isn't always an -ism (not pointed at you Bigzo).

I wouldn't go as far and say that boys only male educators/role models, but I will say that a teenage boy is likely to look up to say, his football coach, than his female english teacher fresh out of college, simply because the football coach can better relate and knows how to handle male emotion better from experience.

This isn't to say that female educators have no role in educating boys. They have their place.

[Demeia]

This probably isn't the educator's fault at all. Girls who get good grades are socially neutral; boys who get good grades are considered geeks or nerds. You can be a popular girl and get straight A's; that's extremely hard to do as a boy, unless you happen to be the quarterback of the football team. You'd fix the problem by axing athletics but...let's face it, not only is that not going to happen for reasons having to do with Friday night football games, but it would also be absolutely insane with the US obesity problem.