
Girls perform better academically in almost all countries - lettergram
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being-outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/pe/theweakersex
======
walru
There was discussion on this the other day.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812)

------
ajmurmann
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.

~~~
stared
"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/](http://xkcd.com/519/)

------
matt-attack
> “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?

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

~~~
mrottenkolber
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.

------
fragsworth
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.

------
kennethh
One factor that have changed is earlier puberty for women. It is an advantage
in School With early maturity.
[http://www.cwhn.ca/en/node/39365](http://www.cwhn.ca/en/node/39365)

------
spcoll
As a woman in this industry, you have to be twice as good as men to be taken
seriously. Thankfully that is easy.

~~~
vixen99
Adults only here!

------
graycat
Short version: Boys and girls are different.

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
loved, owe anything to her. So, I slept in class and refused to claim to do
any of the homework.

But, I no doubt did by far the most homework of anyone in the class, solved
every non-trivial problem in the book including the more difficult
supplementary problems in the back.

So, on the state test, I came in second in the class (the same guy beat me by
a few points on the Math SAT also).

But on that test the last problem was about inscribing a square in a semi-
circle -- two corners were to be on the diameter and the other two, on the
arc. How to do that?

I said, go off on the side and construct a square, bisect one side, use that
point as center and the distance to an opposite corner as radius, and draw a
circle. Extend the bisected side to a diameter. Now have a figure similar to
the desired one. So, for the given figure, just need, say, the length of half
a side. So, that will be a forth proportional. So construct that and, ...,
done.

So, I wanted to check this and insisted over her objections that the teacher
see me after school. She said I couldn't go off on the side and construct that
other figure. Sounded like nonsense to me.

As a college freshman, a girl asked me, given triangle ABC, construct D on AB
and E on BC so that AD = DE = EC. Hmm .... Go off on the side and construct a
figure similar to the desired one and for the crucial length AD, get that from
a fourth proportional.

The girl asked, "How'd you know to do that?"

I told her it'd figured it out in the 10th grade.

She said, "That's the advanced technique _smilitude_ we are studying."

"Well, I reinvented it in the 10th grade, and the teacher said I couldn't do
that."

No wonder I didn't much pay attention to the teacher.

High end academics is about research, research, and research. There have to do
some things that are new, and typically have to be the first one ever to do
that thing. So, have to be able to say that not everything from the past is
the best possible and can stand up as the first person ever to say how to do
better, and that's not what gets good grades in K-6 or most of K-12 or most
subjects in college.

Looks like the OP is talking about nothing very new, different, or surprising.

Or maybe: Men went for the technical fields hoping to use such as a foundation
for a career, but now the main _technical_ career is computing, and there most
of what a student needs on a job they have to learn themselves with/without
course in computer science. So, a lot of people are concluding that college is
not really essential for a good start in computing. For engineering as a
career, that's less popular than before.

Physics? A lot of the interest there was in work in US national security, but
that work less hot as a field than some decades ago.

But for K-12 teaching, nursing, pharmacy, law, HR, CPA, etc., those _female_
fields have remained relatively solid. So, women are still doing well in their
fields while the men are having to build careers heavily outside of what is
taught in college.

~~~
mrottenkolber
> "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.

