
Where Boys Outperform Girls in Math: Rich, White and Suburban Districts - poster123
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/13/upshot/boys-girls-math-reading-tests.html
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ardent_uno
Except given the data they provide, boys in middle class families also seem to
be doing better than girls.

Boys in general like math more than girls. Math is a competitive exercise and
women are in general less competitive than men. It's you vs the formula, at
least at the level of grade school math. There's less room for error than a
subject like Literature which is more open to interpretation, where
assignments often can't be "wrong", at least in an obvious way.

I believe that striving for equality in math outcomes, especially at high
levels, ignores the way many women think.

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SamReidHughes
95th percentile boys will outscore 95th percentile girls, so if your school
district is affluent and full of high IQ parents, you'll have boys' average
outscore girls' average because you've got a lot more 90-100th percentile
kids.

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neaanopri
So I'm quite confused by this article's emphasis on boys outperforming girls
more in richer school districts. If you look at the scatter plot, girls
outperform boys in English by a much larger margin.

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scott00
The fact that girls outperform boys academically is relatively well known. The
article is about the (lesser known) fact that the math gender gap is
correlated to the socio-economic status of the district, while the English
gender gap is not. Which isn't to say the overall gender gap isn't important
or interesting, it's just not what the article's about.

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seatdrummer
it seems strange that the one intersection of economic status and subject that
boys excel at is being attributed to environmental factors like gender
roles(which western culture is seeking to reduce/eliminate) but there is no
investigation to the massive discrepancy in the reading gap.

>High-income parents spend more time and money on their children, and invest
in more stereotypical activities, researchers said, enrolling their daughters
in ballet and their sons in engineering

>The gender achievement gap in math reflects a paradox of high-earning
parents. They are more likely to say they hold egalitarian views about gender
roles. But they are also more likely to act in traditional ways – father as
breadwinner, mother as caregiver

>There is also a theory that high-earning families invest more in sons,
because men in this socioeconomic group earn more than women, while low-
earning families invest more in daughters, because working-class women have
more job opportunities than men.

When boys start outperforming girls, the authors attribute it in part to
parental bias towards boys, or societal expectation, but girls succeeding
across entire economic ranges in reading is just par for the course.

Even at the end of the article the focus is on undoing what the authors
consider to be the boys' edge in mathematics by balancing expectations between
genders (read, encourage girls and manage boys expectations) to increase
achievement for girls, even though they admit these expectation support boys
flourishing just slightly.

>One way to boost achievement in math, researchers say, is to avoid mention of
innate skill and stress that math can be learned. Another is to expose
children to adults with different areas of expertise, and offer a wide variety
of activities and books. Gaps are smaller when extracurricular activities are
less dominated by one gender.

