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Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

• endisneigh 6y ago
  How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent then you’d think. I suppose all three could be true.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • refraincomment 6y ago
    Or simply that boys don't take education seriously until 10 years later?
  • 0xy 6y ago
    Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less, and under conditions that pay less (part time, contract work, etc). How many deep sea welders are women? Less than 0.1%. How many oil rig workers are women? Less than 1%. Good deep sea welders earn over $300k.
    • krisdol 6y ago
      Hard to live up to the expectation of being a good mother and spending months on an oil rig at the same time.
      • throwaway894345 6y ago
        I doubt it's "expectations of being a good mother". Countries with the most liberal attitudes toward gender have some of the most extreme occupational gender disparities and vice versa.
      • Dirlewanger 6y ago
        You're being disingenuous and you know it. Most women don't take the high risk jobs. They never have, they're not evolved for it. This isn't sexist to point this out, this is just how things are. Why do people here struggle to understand concept of gender roles that have been in place (and have worked) for hundreds of thousands of years? This isn't the "patriarchy" boogeyman, this is how societies started and thrived.
    • wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Define “naturally”.
      • 0xy 6y ago
        Meaning on average, most women list towards them. There are large differences between genders in terms of career motivations, interests etc. Proven in many studies repeatedly.
        • wizzwizz4 6y ago
          > There are large differences between genders in terms of career motivations, interests etc. I think this would be the case for the hypothetical “party if you're a man, standing outside in the rain if you're a woman” job, too. How do you know you're describing something about the people you're measuring, as opposed to the people around them?
    • La1n 6y ago
      >Because women naturally list towards jobs that pay less, Couldn't one then also argue that jobs women list towards get paid less? E.g. instead of asking why women gravitate to those jobs that are paid less, ask why the jobs women gravitate towards are paid less.
      • missedthecue 6y ago
        The fact that daycare workers (a job dominated 97% by females) earn $35k a year while carpenters, welders, and electricians (jobs dominated 98% by males) earn $80k is not a fact that I think is attributable to bigoted sexism.
    • BobbyJo 6y ago
      I don't think those are what the parent was referring to as 'top tier'. Those pay well, but in both cases they are highly paid because of risk and life disruption (having to spend extended time away from home on rigs). It's my understanding that men are naturally less risk-averse, so the gender differences there seem natural to me. I'm betting they meant CEO positions, board positions, and high ranking corporate officers.
    • Dirlewanger 6y ago
      Only on HN will facts like these get downvoted. Why is this community so allergic to discussing this topic in an unbiased manner?
  • noir_lord 6y ago
    It's also possible that the distribution is different. i.e there are more men who are total geniuses at one end and total dumbasses at the other but the average would be the same. https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-dumber-and-smarter-than-women/ https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-dumber-and-smarter-than-w... No idea if it's true though - not my field and not an expert.
    • endisneigh 6y ago
      Even if this were true it still wouldn't explain the difference. This could only be the explanation of two conditions are met: 1. Your cited article is correct. 2. The jobs that are "top tier" indeed require this "top tier" level intelligence. This second point would require some pretty extraordinary evidence to prove. Women have representation (only filtering among women under 40) in jobs that require "high intelligence" yet the discrepancy persists. doctors: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-women-now-outnumber-men-in-medical-schools/2019/12/20/8b9eddea-2277-11ea-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html#:~:text=For%20the%20first%20time%2C%20women,students%20in%20U.S.%20medical%20schools.&text=Its%20survey%20of%2018%2C000%20physicians,younger%20than%2035%20were%20women https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-women-n.... lawyers: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers... (just to use two popular examples. if you extend this out to a lot more professions the pattern persists) You could be right, but I personally doubt it.
  • curiousgal 6y ago
    I think the answer lies in the fact that in countries like Tunisia for example, women represent over 60% of people working in STEM. Why? Because STEM jobs are the highest paying jobs. So from my perspective, the lack of women in STEM in the U.S. is not an issue but a symptom of a strong economy, as in you don't have to decipher someone's spaghetti code for a living, you can pay the bills doing other things that you are more passionate about.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Related reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
    • ku-man 6y ago
      Indeed. The number of women in STEM fields is also low in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries compared to in-development ones. And, nobody in his/her right mind will accuse the Scandinavian countries of being patriarchal sexists societies.
  • LeegleechN 6y ago
    Girls get higher grades (perhaps due to higher conscientiousness), but do not do better in standardized tests.
    • micdr0p 6y ago
      That's interesting. Got a source?
    • hc-taway 6y ago
      My graduating class was remarked on through multiple schools as an exceptionally smart class. We had lots of very bright boys and girls. Maybe our class was unusual in other ways so this isn't part of a broader trend or tendency, but practically all the smart girls did all their homework and maintained a 3.5GPA or higher (most more like 3.8+), while probably half or more of the smart boys skipped lots of it and pulled Cs and Bs (with the occasional A in classes that had little homework). Meanwhile, those same boys who skipped much of their homework scored in the top percentile or two when it came time for ACTs and SATs and achieved excellent marks on annual state testing (not that the latter matters whatsoever for students), were often in gifted programs or active on "smart kid" extracurriculars, et c. So those boys "did poorly in school" (which, to be sure, wasn't a great thing for e.g. college admissions above high-tier state schools) but that didn't give the full picture.
    • tester756 6y ago
      It seems to confirm my experience over whole education
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    I don't know if this is a good faith question, but the big obvious reason you've omitted is that women frequently drop out of the work force (or shift to part-time work) because they want to be directly involved in raising their children.
    • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      Societal expectations that women do child rearing rather than men probably has some impact on that decision.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    There are other familial factors that are often at play. For example, many choose to delay their careers in lieu of raising children. Not all women make this decision, but a sizable number do. That said, there is likely no single cause for the disparity, there are likely many factors at play at the same time.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    Depends on how you define top tier jobs. They are solidly in the majority of students in medicine, law, accounting, etc.
  • micdr0p 6y ago
    A suggestion from the article: > 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.
  • carnagecity786 6y ago
    I guess it also has to do with the fact that this is a relatively recent change. Probably we'll see the effects of this in future generations of industry demographics, for now though the research and statistics are pretty clear in that women are underrepresented in STEM across the board; but this is something changing rapidly, especially in tech.
  • marklubi 6y ago
    Perhaps a fourth explanation... The vast majority of teachers are female, so maybe their teaching methods are favorable to girls
    • endisneigh 6y ago
      I suppose this is possible - how exactly do you think teaching methods are more favorable to girls compared to boys?
      • esja 6y ago
        A great deal of teaching is built around the idea of students sitting still in one place for a long period of time, listening intently and working quietly. Boys seem to have a lot more difficulty with this (on average) than girls do. That's one example but there are plenty of others.
        • endisneigh 6y ago
          yes I would agree that boys have trouble with this, as that's what the featured article effectively states. however, saying that the methods themselves somehow are predisposed to benefit women is one that I'd like to see research on.
          • esja 6y ago
            How can they not benefit women? The article is about the relative performance of men and women, and this factor reduces the performance of men.
            • endisneigh 6y ago
              You're stating that there exists teaching methods that somehow benefit women, and not men as a function of their gender. That's an extraordinary claim and requires evidence. You can't assert your claim is true and look at the article to justify the original claim that you're asserting to begin with.
  • hddu 6y ago
    Top tier jobs are subjective. Women have less interest in engineering.
    • cobraetor 6y ago
      This shouldn't be a controversial take. It is Occam's razor after all. We know that before the tech industry became popular and a way to make good money, women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds. This was mostly an American phenomenon, and other countries did not share this social hierarchy, hence the data on girls performing better academically outside of the US.
      • throwaway3699 6y ago
        > women displayed little to no interest in being associated with programming "nerds" which were predominantly men to the extent that men over-represented the group of socially outcast nerds When did this change? I either missed it or this was always an exaggeration in media.
        • bluescrn 6y ago
          I think attitudes changed a lot in the late 90s/early 00s. The Internet suddenly became a big thing, PCs massively growing in popularity, and the image of gaming was changing, becoming a less nerdy pastime with the arrival of the Playstation. Not really sure if it encouraged a more diverse set of youngsters to develop a serious interest in computing though, as by then we'd already got to the point where 'learning to use a computer' now meant Word+Excel rather than BASIC or LOGO
  • disgrunt 6y ago
    Or possibly, academia and the general workforce optimize for different things not included in your list? Does anyone here think their academic experience was a direct analog for their workforce experience?
  • proc0 6y ago
    > women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs Correct. I've yet to impress with my math skills, just saying.
  • Rabei 6y ago
    Women face a tradeoff in their relation to their careers and pregnancies that men do not. Even in the countries where child bearing is highly protected in the workplace i would suppose this can explain at a significant chunk of the gap.
  • kashkhan 6y ago
    or this is the cumulative effect of systematic discrimination for decades and centuries.
    • CydeWeys 6y ago
      This is the right answer, certainly a larger factor than anything else being discussed here. In the US, women were only granted the right to vote a century ago, and a time when it was considered improper for well-to-do women to work is within the memory of many living Americans.
    • wing-_-nuts 6y ago
      I'm not denying it's true, but I have little patience for this argument because we can't actually do anything about it. Injustice today? Yes, we should absolutely stop that where ever we find it, but what am I supposed to do today about the fact that women could not vote in 1920? Words are cheap, actions matter. I'd much rather focus on current discrimination than dig up injustices from the past.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    Or, people pursue their passions as young people without much regard for what a professional career would look like. I fiddled with programming and computers as a young teen because I found it interesting, not because I thought I could eventually make money with it. My good friend wrote fantasy stories all the time, because that was her interest. 20 years later, I can retire whenever I want because of the choices I made as a nerdy 13 year old, whereas my friend is getting paid $40k/yr editing a small newspaper.
  • iagovar 6y ago
    Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues. There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it. Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it. There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life. Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.
    • aklemm 6y ago
      Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it well--is not avoiding work.
      • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        >Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it well--is not avoiding work. It was pretty obvious from the context that the person you're replying to meant "working" as in "working a job for money".
      • iagovar 6y ago
        You're right, but you ain't making the big bucks. Even then, they seem to find it rewarding enough. If I was woman and I decided to have baby, I'd probably be either very stressed with my current job, or looking for something part time. Now imagine if I live in Sweden or the like where the state hands out money for raising children.
        • jhasse 6y ago
          wait, there are countries where the state does NOT hand out money for raising children?
          • iagovar 6y ago
  • kache_ 6y ago
    Most of my money is attributable to my negotiation skills and assertiveness, rather than my programming skill that I bent over backwards to develop.
    • ImprovedSilence 6y ago
      I would agree with this. However Ive seen very assertive women take advantage of that as much as men or even more, and where I work its probably <10% of my co workers of either sex take active roles in “managing” their career as opposed to just showing up and hoping their work gets noticed, or just coasting and enjoying the paycheck they have (while still grumbling about fading benefits, of course)
  • burlesona 6y ago
    I don’t know how true this is, but one thing I’ve seen referenced a few times is that students perform better under teachers of their gender, especially at younger ages. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the same applies for employee performance in the workplace. If that were true, given that K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female, then you would expect females to do better in school. Conversely I believe managerial jobs skew male, which you would expect to benefit the performance of males in such workplaces. Again I don’t have a study handy so I’m not sure how empirical that is, it may just be conjecture.
  • barbacoa 6y ago
    I don't understand why people ignore the role children play in the life ambitions of women.
  • 29athrowaway 6y ago
    In part, because salary has to do with agreeableness and many cultures have stupid expectations for women such as them expected to be more agreeable. Also, the likelihood of career advancement is lower for people perceived as being more neurotic, and many cultures have stereotypes consisting of women being more neurotic than men.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • dekhn 6y ago
    In many subfields of biology, women have achieved numerical parity at all levels (IE, there are roughly 50% women in entry and leadership positions). It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination. It's unclear what the full set of contributing factors are.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      You also can’t have mathematical equality with some fields dominated by women, like nursing. If every field is 50% or better in women, you need a heck of a lot more women.
      • esja 6y ago
        This is often forgotten. In aggregate, for every woman persuaded to become a bricklayer instead of a kindergarten teacher, a man must be persuaded to do the reverse. This is just never going to happen across all industries.
      • Robotbeat 6y ago
        Unless you just have a lot of incarcerated and jobless men.
    • rajin444 6y ago
      How do you know 50% is the correct amount of women at all levels?
      • pseudalopex 6y ago
        They didn't say it is.
        • rajin444 6y ago
          > It seems like some highly quantitative fields which have traditionally been male-dominated (CS, physics) may very well be practicing some sort of entry discrimination Maybe I misread, but I interpreted this follow up statement as "50% is correct, here's why (CS, physics) may not be at this level".
  • TimPC 6y ago
    No interest in money is an extreme position to take. Small differences in interest can lead to big differences in outcome. There is also some time lag with this data, studies have shown boys doing worse academically over time (relative to girls) so the age group in 2015 is largely in school, university, or just entering the workforce. Women in their 20's already outperform men in their 20's in earnings and we don't yet know if that trend is going to carry on into later years given new ability gaps. It hasn't carried on historically due to a wide variety of reasons including the adverse affects of maternity leave on careers but we haven't seen an academic gap of this magnitude between the genders either before so that may be changing. It's also worth noting that a lot of top earning careers are looking at a slice of top performers academically, and the distribution of academic performance for males tends to be higher variance so even with a lower average we may see similar numbers of top performers in both genders.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • cphajduk 6y ago
    I'd like to point out that the workplace values are different from academics values. The top performers in my college class, struggled to get internships within my internship-mandatory program.
  • itronitron 6y ago
    Performing well academically usually means that the student is good at at completing assignments in a way that aligns with the teachers grading rubric. I think boys have a certain contempt for that for a variety of reasons (at least mine do) so they focus their attention on how to work around the system, which probably yields an advantage later in the workplace.
    • visarga 6y ago
      Like when you solve the arithmetic problem with algebra and the teacher says it's wrong because you didn't use the official method?
      • tester756 6y ago
        on the test that's testing whether you're proficent with _official method_? or maybe because your _official method_ was "under some assumptions" or "by guessing that" I've heard that complain countless times from friends and I think always the reason was that it wasn't formally correct.
        • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
          Why do you need to use a specific method to solve a problem? Especially with something broad like algebra, there are often many ways to solve a problem.
          • tester756 6y ago
            Because teacher on previous lesson tried to teach the class e.g about using derivatives to find extremas, and now he's testing whether you managed to learn it. his job is mainly to teach you stuff. Of course there are also tests where you can use anything you want as long as it is formally correct e.g leaving school exams, end of semester exams and many more... It's not the greatest approach but I guess it scales?
            • 6y ago
  • paperwasp42 6y ago
    There's also the major factor of children. Women get a lot of scolding from society if they prioritize their career over children. Men generally aren't shamed to such a degree, and workaholic dads are even lauded as being "diligent bread winners." Also, for many moms, working late in the office isn't even an option. They have to leave the office before day care closes. Or, in the case of women who can't afford day care, they have to take inferior job offers with inferior hours to work around their kids' school and care schedule. These things can make it extremely hard to be viewed as "managerial material" and rack up promotions. (Of course, dads face these issues too, and single dads have it especially hard. But it's statistically more likely to impact moms.) Also, men just aren't as concerned over how much their significant other makes. Women, on the other hand, tend to more heavily judge the worthiness of a date on their career and income. So there's more incentive for men to chase after high paying, high power careers.
  • SkyBelow 6y ago
    Another reason people don't often take into account is that men have an extra incentive for earning more money as their worth as a person is judged more upon what they make than it is for a woman (women have other things they are judged more upon). So each dollar, beyond the utility of having an extra dollar, also makes them 'more of a man' to use a phrase that tries to condense all of complexities of society's judgements down into 10 letters. Many of the explanations commonly given, like men being willing to take on more dangerous jobs, can be partly explained by their judgment as a person (and as a parent) being derived from what they make to a stronger extent than for a woman. >women have no interest in money Just to clarify, there is a difference between no interest and less interest, and also a difference between interest in money and interest in the status associated with a certain level of salary/income beyond what comes just from the money earned.
  • neffy 6y ago
    Lags in real time systems. To get into high paying jobs in most fields requires a 20-30 year apprenticeship. So if by 2015 girls are performing better academically, then the expected time to see this in society would be 2035 or so. Just as with universal education, it starts to be available from the early 20th century, but it's not until post-war that large numbers of men from previously uneducated families start making it into the skilled workforce. Our limited view at any given point is just a snapshot on eternity.
  • cperciva 6y ago
    There are couple more explanations which haven't been mentioned: 1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn men. 2. Grading bias. To the extent that success in the workforce correlates with academic success, one would expect it to correlate primarily with the extent of skills and knowledge acquired rather than with the grades received; it may be that girls' academic success does not reflect particularly greater academic skills. This hypothesis is supported by studies comparing coursework to exams; girls vastly outperform on homework but only very slightly on exams.
    • collias 6y ago
      Source for the stats in #1?
  • xyzelement 6y ago
    Someone commented that it's about "babies" and that's so incredibly right. But I think it's more benign than it may sound. We're seeing this right now in my family as we have a young child. Both my wife and I are in demanding STEM fields (me in tech and she in medicine.) My wife is seeing an opportunity to cut back on her hours/pressure so she can spend more time with the baby. She's not "forced" to do it (plenty of women w. kids do her current job) but that's where her heart is leading her and we're lucky to be able to make this tradeoff. I do think think this is a pretty universal thing. In two income families, if one parent wants to step back to do more family stuff, it's much more likely to the the woman who wants to do that. Similarly if one parent is much more naturally inclined to go conquer the work world, it's the father. There are plenty of cases where that goes the other way but I think that is way less common. To be clear, it's not about the work place being hostile to women, it's not about "I wear the pants around here so you stay home w the babies" - it's about where our natural interests lie and how we act on them when we have a choice. Which to me sounds fine even if the outcome of it can be read as systemic imbalance.
  • Hermel 6y ago
    Maybe the most talented women prefer pursuing a career academics over one in the real sector?
  • cullinap 6y ago
    I don't if we can conclude that top academic performance directly results in high performers in top tier jobs
  • tomjen3 6y ago
    I think Jordan Peterson is correct on that one: the real question isn't why women don't go after those kinds of jobs, but why anybody is willing to work so hard and to give up so much for incomes that allow a marginally better life (e.g going from 40k a year to 100k a year is a huge improvement, going from 200k to 300k?). Also, for women anyway, the kind of work it takes to get to the top effectively means they aren't going to be having babies. A man aged 45 can marry a women aged 30 and become a dad - women who marry younger men aren't more likely to have kids because of it and at 45 it is unlikely for a woman to have kids at all.
    • jhatemyjob 6y ago
      I wish I had the option of being a stay at home dad. Fuck working
  • xenihn 6y ago
    >academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs This is a big part of it. Let's look at what "academic skills" means specifically in the US: - you perform well on standardized tests - you perform well on rubric-graded essays - you do all of your homework, and you get As on every assignment this leads to: - you get into a good university - you (presumably) perform adequately or well at said university Every student who performs well academically has a similar path to this point, but then there's divergency. Tech is the only top tier job where your educational pedigree is not going to hold you back throughout your entire career. It's not going to hurt to have a degree from a top school, but it won't cripple your opportunities, unlike finance, law, and medicine. Based on how top tier tech companies hire for engineering positions that aren't internships, it seems that they do not see a link between academic performance and engineering competency. I agree with the approach taken by said companies. Thus (imo) for tech, it is fully expected for there to be no correlation between academic performance and representation in the top tier of jobs, because tech is the most meritocratic top tier industry. It's obviously not perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the other big industries.
  • dijit 6y ago
    Men are over represented at the top _and_ at the bottom. So the average may be higher for girls, but that’s across all girls. This is what the bell curves are and a result of men’s being very wide and girls’ being very narrow. This is known as the variability hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=s...
    • drdec 6y ago
      Now consider the fact that there is a limit on the top grade and much more more at the bottom of the grading scale. If you assume the variability hypothesis is true, it seems inevitable that the average for girls would be higher.
  • SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Top tier jobs need to use top tier statistics. The top 10% of male test-takers and top 6% of female test-takers score at least 700 on the math SAT. Over twice as many boys as girls get 800 on the math SAT. The ratio gets even higher beyond that. This is despite the systemic bias in the school system against boys.
    • albntomat0 6y ago
      That's an interesting statistic. Do you have a source? I'd be interested in learning more
      • SamReidHughes 6y ago
        The first is from a table of percentiles published by the College Board, I remembered that statistic off-hand, I think you find it by googling, or on their website. The second is something you can find somewhere, I know I've seen the raw data at some point. Some googling will at least find articles referring to that ratio, like this one: https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598 https://economics.mit.edu/files/7598 Interestingly enough, that has a graph of the AMC math contest breakdown by sex. Check out page 7 (page number 115). When you start getting in the upper percentiles there I think that culture might magnify the male/female ratio a bit (this is based on personal experience), but at least in my high school the center mass of the scores up to 100+ or so was filled out by teachers just signing up a bunch of good students with no particular involvement in mathematical extracurriculars.
    • throwaway3699 6y ago
      Isn't this the standard bimodal distribution we expect? Boys make up the majority of CEOs but they also make up the vast majority of criminals. Median girls are smarter than median boys, but the distribution is less wide on a population level.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • P_I_Staker 6y ago
    Many of the above are true. Especially, academic skill is one of the most overrated abilities out there. You're better off with zero skill or being actively harmful, if you know how to play the game and have the right face (I don't mean literally, though sometimes that too. Do you say the right things and have the correct manners?) I'd add that most men really don't have the opportunity to be a homemaker. So most men don't even have the option of ruining their career to take care of kids. It might be seen as "okay" for men to be stay at home dads, but I know all it's going to do is be devastating for my social status. It's actually interesting to talk about because technically these things are true for women too, but we have a whole industry and philosophy around motherhood; it's seen as a more important role than fatherhood. I'm a guy that doesn't really care about money and it hasn't occurred to me to try being a full time father. It might be the better fit for me, but I don't see that as even an option. I'd be worried that I'd be judged as unuseful and unattractive, discarded, and left without any compensation (alimony, child support, ect.) or say in anything. We need to be doing way more to soften the blow of parenthood for anyone. I also think we need some kind of way of honoring fatherhood, as we've done for motherhood, or to do so in a non-gendered way. It's not just about women not taking jobs that result in less pay, it's men refusing to take jobs (parenthood) that are harmful to their career, because their career is all they have.
  • BurningFrog 6y ago
    > Either women have no interest in money This is close, but too strong. You only need women to have less interest in money than men to cause a difference. A likely cause of such a difference is that men with high income and prestigious careers are very popular as romantic partners for women. To spell it out, women in high paying jobs get a lot of money. Men in high paying jobs get a lot of money and improved romantic success.
  • qu4ku 6y ago
    They choose not optimal collage majors is one of the answers: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
  • ThrustVectoring 6y ago
    Tournament theory - top tier jobs (particularly executive ones) are a competition where rank-ordering contestants is relatively easy, but quantifying performance is hard. So one solution is to give the winner a big prize, the losers a smaller consolation prize, and if you ignore risk-aversion this is as economically efficient in terms of incentives as paying for piece-work. The problem is that people are risk adverse, and have varying levels of commitment towards continuing to winning the tournament. This variation has a gender skew, too, which IMO does a lot to explain much of gender disparity in multiple fields. FWIW I count software development in here, as tournament theory explains both developer wages, the number of unqualified applicants, and the gender disparity.
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    A lot of literature seems to focus around the gap being mostly that girls - Behave better (lower energy and "disruptive behavior" in school) - Are better at following instructions These two traits, while rewarded in the school system, are not really relevant at the top tier of jobs. There's no instructions to follow when you are building the next Google: nobody did it before you.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    Psychology. Few years ago at a meeting (carbon emission reduction association) it was asked for the people in the room to send proposals / ideas on a google forms. After 5 minute the guy in charge of the meeting started to cough saying 'ok we found a few things we could do but we have a problem because there is not a single lady in the list'. We were all newcomers, all unknown to each others, the tone was as chill as any meetup I've attended (no male dominated topic, no a-priori tribes or groups to scare new people from joining). My only idea so far is that women and men have different instincts on how to come forward with their ideas/desires.
  • frongpik 6y ago
    Academic grades measure skills that are only applicable at entry level jobs that are about following simple known rules. I knew many female students in school and college that got top marks on every subject, and yet they were mediocre in real life and never achieved much 10 years after graduation. I think that's precisely because their patience to follow silly rules didn't help them to compete in the world where there are no rules. On the other hand, I also knew many guys from the same classes who absolutely sucked at every subject except one or two where they shined and they have made impressive careers.
  • PunchTornado 6y ago
    Or, another question, why don't we, as a society, help boys perform as well as girls.
  • chlodwig 6y ago
    How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? I'd argue mostly for 1) and 2). Here is my model: 1. Men have higher variance on any skill, even if men and women have the same average level, men will outnumber women at the highest and lowest levels by 2 or 3 to 1. 2. The median girl is much more likely to do her busy work because her teacher tells her to. Boys are more likely to do some bit of work only because they see some advantage to themselves. Boys are more likely to do unassigned work if they see some sort of long-term advantage to it (eg, learning programming on the side). The boy of 40th percentile aptitude, who knows he will never have a job doing math, isn't going to try that hard at his math homework. But that same boy might tinker with his car on the side and become a great mechanic. When we reach the real world, males are finally doing work that has a pay-off, not just busy work. So they actually start trying hard, as compared to schoolwork where the median girl does more homework than the median boy. The median girl works harder than the median boy at busywork. But when we reach the real world, the top man in a given career path is working just as hard as the top woman, and because of higher male variance, there are more men of top abilities that get the top positions. On top of that, in my experience, women do make different choices with career paths. Men do seem to seek career paths that pay well, women often want to go into "non-profits" and areas with a "social mission." It's interesting how we moved toward an expectation that women work instead of staying home -- but we taught girls that the purpose of work is "self-actualization", while more men still have the expectation that they are to find a job that can support a family. (These are gross generalizations, and broad trends I have observed, obviously, many exceptions exist). And as others pointed out, many women, correctly IMO, would much rather stay home with their babies or take a "mommy track" job than take a high-powered career path.
  • B-Con 6y ago
    I'd like to see data on academic performance in specialties. Most well-paying first world countries employ specialists (eg, doctors, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc). Recall Simpson's paradox in statistics, where a general distribution doesn't have to apply to the individual sub-sets. FTA: > 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. This paragraph seems to support the idea of my above musing. > academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs I highly doubt that there is no correlation, but I doubt that education is the sole factor. Girls performance over boys is a slight, but significant, edge, but since success likely draws from a handful of other factors, a few of them having a counter slight, but significant edge, might be enough to swing the other direction.
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    I decided to underrepresent myself in the top tier of jobs because I do not want to live a life of a workaholic. You won't get into the top tier by doing 40 hours of work weekly. Perhaps women have better work/life balance on average.
  • 7_my_mind 6y ago
    Women have different incentives. Having a career is not really necessary and the reasons to have one are different. Us men need to compete with each other to be the best providers. Women just need to pick one of us, and then their goal is to retain that man in their lives. Having a career does not factor much into that. Especially having a high stress career would maybe even hurt such goals. Some men and some women get so caught up spinning the hamster wheel, that they loose track of why they are spinning the wheel in the first place. But most of us in general are aware of the reasons.
• micdr0p 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20210309182923/https://www.economist.com/international/2015/03/07/the-weaker-sex https://web.archive.org/web/20210309182923/https://www.econo...
• codevark 6y ago
  That's right, the women are smarter.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• f430 6y ago
  lower testosterone is beneficial - less sexual ruminations - emotional intelligence and organization - cooperation over leadership - retains better short and long term memories - female adult role model is more likely to be available and present Unfortunately HN is dominated by testosterone driven gender so its impossible to have any sort of civilized discussions about this.
  • The_rationalist 6y ago
    Source your extraordinary claims (probably BS).
    • f430 6y ago
      I think your comment confirms my original points. downvote away to confirm your self fulfilling biases.
      • lamp987 6y ago
        Evidence is a male thing? Thats rather sexist.
  • tester756 6y ago
    >- cooperation over leadership In full women environments too? I always felt or heard that e.g team made fully/majority of women tends to be anything but cooperative. I felt like a lot of dishonesty was in those teams
    • f430 6y ago
      nash equilibrium
  • lamp987 6y ago
    Nice b8
  • tqi 6y ago
    I dislike this line of reasoning. Gender equality is important because equality is important in and of it self. When people point to studies that show "teams with women perform better" as the reason to push for diverse hiring, I think it subtly implies that if this were not true then we would not need to worry about it, and creates an opening for people to quibble over research methodology.
• refraincomment 6y ago
  Whatever the results say, women are discriminated and they need a pay rise and more acknowledgement. Data will say whatever we tell them.
• throwaway53086 6y ago
  Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better. Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.
  • endisneigh 6y ago
    I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women compared to men? Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
    • visarga 6y ago
      The difference in teaching style is putting accent on cooperation vs competition.
    • xhkkffbf 6y ago
      * Lots of sitting still. My local school canceled recess several years ago to make sure the kids had more studying time. * Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often explicitly as part of the grade. * Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks students to write and make a presentation about their math answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as long as the presentation is professional and impressive.
    • aviraldg 6y ago
      The rules and grading are different. In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.) At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
• pixel_tracing 6y ago
  This title seems click baity we should be asking the question as to why our system allows one gender to outperform the other. Not blanket statements of correlation == causation. Something is clearly wrong with our system which is resulting in one gender receiving more support. The distribution curve should mostly be equal, yes we are different gender wise. But for large majority of people our brains function mostly the same (it’s not like girls are a different species than boys).
  • ihsw 6y ago
    There is no system allowing one gender to outperform the other.
• puddingnomeat 6y ago
  I find it curious when people agree that X doesn't matter, but then they go about and compare outcomes based on X in this case X=sex but it could be race, age, etc.
  • learn_more 6y ago
    Actions speak louder than words.
• kashkhan 6y ago
  And yet this the first time a woman has become Veep.
• firefoxd 6y ago
  This is anecdotal but I'm sure many people are seen this increasingly. In the past 10 years on the job, I'm seeing more guys make jokes about how stupid they are. Every time they make a single mistake they say "oh my God, if my head wasn't attached to my shoulders..." Then it becomes a competition of who has done the dumbest thing. I know it's just being playful, but you rarely see the opposite. Turn the tables, I was in a meeting with a male and female coworker. The guy was saying how stupid he was, and the female stopped him and said: You shouldn't say that about yourself, in a serious tone. I don't ever remember a girl telling me how dumb she is.
  • TimPC 6y ago
    I've had a significantly different experience with this. I know a few men who self-deprecate when they make a mistake, but I know more women who do. I haven't seen it turn into a competition on who's done the dumbest thing because I'm seldom in groups where self-deprecation is widely encouraged. I've been the person encouraging people not to self-deprecate in this way, so I don't think it's really a gendered thing. I'm curious if this is trending differently in different age groups I'm almost 40.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Haha this is likely some sort of selection bias effect because I need constant validation and I have a group of friends who are all like that and a group of friends who are all not like that. If I were in one group, I reckon I'd form one opinion and if I were in the other I'd form the other opinion. I'd be wary of making population generalizations when one uses sample populations highly susceptible to selection bias: one's friends and one's coworkers - both of whom are usually selected for agreeableness with the group, either directly for friends or indirectly through culture fit for coworkers.
  • hn8788 6y ago
    That's even a common trope in sitcoms. The husband is a loveable but bumbling idiot, while his wife is the voice of reason who frequently needs to save him from his own bad decisions. I wonder if the shows are imitating life, or the other way around. My wife did her master's thesis on discrimination based on communication, and in her research she found a study showing that the constant depiction of people with a southern accent as being stupid leads the majority of southern children, as young as 10 years old, to view themselves as inferior to people without the accent. Maybe the same is true with TV shows and movies frequently showing males as stupid.
• paxys 6y ago
  This has historically been true in India, but mostly because only smarter, more upper-class girls (so those actually interested in education) were allowed to study beyond the primary school level. Boys need a college degree no matter the circumstance, and thus drag the average down.
• sriku 6y ago
  From a personal perspective (Indian here), it feels odd that this would make news. I've been a fairly good "performer" at high school and have always had a hard time getting the better of my girl classmates. The acad stuff just seemed too easy for them. They'd remember and recall things so well and that would make me curse under my breath. Their language and general maturity was also much better that I could hope for at that point.
  • cobraetor 6y ago
    Hacker News has a progressive Silicon Valley bias, where Critical Race Theory provides a religious explanation ("systemic bias") for under-representation of women in tech. Data from other countries are considered "news" because they invalidate our neoracist beliefs.
• The_rationalist 6y ago
  I wonder if a reason behind it is the fact that girls become hormonally mature earlier than boys. Hormone supplementation on boys could be tested to assess the hypothesis.
  • ihsw 6y ago
    What's true one gender must be true for the other, as there is no biological difference between males and females. Right?
• thepete2 6y ago
  What's probably missing from the article is the giant caveat of almost all educational research, which is: *as measured by grades*
  • guerrilla 6y ago
    It's in the title. That's what it means.
    • after_care 6y ago
      Grades aren’t great at measuring real learning, but it’s the best we have.
      • Enginerrrd 6y ago
        Not really. I'd argue that standardized tests are much better than grades. Particularly for any grade level below university. At university level, the grades are more accurate (but still flawed) because the grade is typically 70-80% test and quiz based. My experience in the US with grades for middle school and high school is that it's 85-90% non-examination based-- Meaning it's essentially a measure for how well you can complete and turn in the busy work on time. That's a great measure for conscientiousness, but the standardized tests will show who actually learned the material.
        • boringg 6y ago
          Then you have a population training for the test and you end up with people that are overfit for the standardized test and underfit for reality.
          • thepete2 6y ago
            Yes, this. Not to say that fitness for test and fitness for reality aren't correlated. They just aren't the same. All in all I just wonder if we don't overvalue competition (the reason I we probably have grades) and undervalue passion.
• tester756 6y ago
  some dead comment here wrote >That's right, the women are smarter. I think that's right, especially at young ages like before 20? 25? then this difference seems to be closing I always felt like girls were like 0-3 years ahead but I tend to believe that the gap tends to be closing over time
• m1117 6y ago
  Because guys spend their time playing videogames, drinking and watching sports.
  • njdullea 6y ago
    Yeah all those beer drinking 12 y.o. boys should know better
• The_rationalist 6y ago
  Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
  • f430 6y ago
    the mind has no gender so how can cognition be considered different across genders? hmmm
    • guerrilla 6y ago
      The linked article is about sex differences, not gender differences.
    • The_rationalist 6y ago
      Male and female brains while similar have some significant differences that goes beyond the androgen proportion differences. This has nothing to do with the gender identity as someone else pointed out.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• blank_fan_pill 6y ago
  I recognize that my experience is probably not average - but at my high school (2004-2008 US public school) the advanced/AP classes were 80%-90% female. This was true for all subjects, the student government, and the academic after school activities. Also anecdotal - but I've seen a lot of the boys who were academically behind seem to get their shit together ~3-5 years after graduating and ended up going to college, grad school, getting white collar jobs, etc. It appears that if you have the resources and privilege its not too hard to overcome having dicked around in your primary education - but I'm willing to bet most people who aren't in that position never catch up.
  • jl2718 6y ago
    Raising animals has made me think a lot about maturation. Our babies are helpless and incompetent longer than any other species on earth. Compare a human to a dog at 3 months and clearly the dog is smarter and more capable. Slower maturation often ends up as better total cognitive adaptation as an adult. For some reason, boys are hormonally behind by about 4 years now, also with significant differences between haplotypes. But I see same thing over and over, the fast ones stall and the slow ones just keep growing in their area of interest. This is true even in college students. If I had to bet on one of my students for the Turing award, it would be my worst at the time, already quite famous. It’s a little upsetting for me because I was more on the precocious side, and this observation has greatly humbled me. Specifically because I think you’re right; catching up is probably rare for institutional reasons, and maybe half the people turning wrenches would be much better than me at whatever I’m feeling challenged by. Maybe we have it all wrong, and we should be looking for the slowest learners, as in, the ones that have to take in everything and won’t accept anything until it’s 100%.
    • bopbeepboop 6y ago
      Another conclusion is that we’re badly stunting our best and brightest. Raising plants you get the same effect if you transplant as a batch rather than as each plant matures — because the fast growers end up damaging their roots by over growing by the time you replant the bulk because that’s the average rate. Slow to average growers never encounter that problem. It may not be that we’re seeing something fundamental so much as our own malpractice. If you examine the negative outcomes of precocious students, most involve some form of self-harm rooted in boredom. Like a dog chewing itself because you keep it too idle. That’s a sign we’re not seeing a fundamental fact of growth patterns.
• johnx123-up 6y ago
  https://archive.vn/AIMT2 https://archive.vn/AIMT2
• jvanderbot 6y ago
  What's the metric? Average GPA? Average graduation rate? It seems so. It is well documented that men drop out at higher rates and are in general more prone to failing. Having a few extra "zeros" in the GPA rankings would skew the mean down for males. It's tempting to say that "Girls are better than boys in academic things", but if you look at the performance of a cohort of graduates, I'd expect you'd see we're all about equal. After graduation, there's a couple other well documented attrition filters for women, unfortunately. There was this old essay about it, which is now quite old and probably cancelled, called "Is there anything good about men" that discussed various life tradeoffs that affected the genders differently.
  • ipnon 6y ago
    On a random individual basis men and women perform equally well at college. On the aggregate there are now 3 to 4 million more female than male college graduates in the US.[0] And now that more women than men are enrolled in college we might expect this trend to continue.[1] [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_302.60.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_302.60.a...
    • jvanderbot 6y ago
      It'd be interesting to see a time when people study why men fail at school, and are a minority of successful graduates. I find it fun to share that my boss is a woman, her boss is a woman, and _her_ boss is too. And they're all at or past mid career and highly successful managers at a world-class technology company. JPL is a wonderful place though.
  • thepete2 6y ago
    As always we don't measure what matters, but what is measurable. There are actually very good arguments against giving grades at all, but it's sadly way out of the mainstream ...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• bopbeepboop 6y ago
  We’ve known misandry in academia is real for a generation. Let’s get organized.
• GNU_James 6y ago
  White guy here. No regular male is silly enough to stay on University here. Think about it. There are lots of foreigners but no locals.
  • coolspot 6y ago
    How your skin color is relevant?
    • selimthegrim 6y ago
      The point is that status is low and working conditions poor and you're not respected - see the lack of American STEM grad students who realize they are basically pawns of the profs and administration who just listen to the lawyers and undergrads who pay the bills (outside of top research institutions)
      • coolspot 6y ago
        But foreigners can be white too (Europe, Russia, Asia) with all the implications, so the OP’s skin color is not relevant here.
        • pattakak 6y ago
          Stop being so pedantic about this and take it from an American perspective. The amount of grad students in my school's department from Europe is very low, and the amount of American grad students is also very low. That's what he's trying to get at here.
        • GNU_James 6y ago
          I am in eastern Europe and our foreign students are all from Asia. Huge mental shortcut.
          • selimthegrim 6y ago
            All my groupmates were and most of my doctoral committee are from Russia/Ukraine (the remaining member will be from China) but only one has non-North American (USSR) PhD
• ganzuul 6y ago
  Bypass paywall: https://archive.is/E6NWK https://archive.is/E6NWK I kinda suspect not a lot of people are reading TFA since no one has noticed it's paywalled.
  • guerrilla 6y ago
    To be fair, it wasn't paywalled for me. But you're right, nobody is addressing the explanations given in the article and instead making up their own.
• omot 6y ago
  The amount of insecurity in the thread is a little embarrassing gentlemen. Let's be open minded and entertain the possibility that women are indeed more capable and that societal constructs drag down their career opportunities.
  • esja 6y ago
    Imagine reading that men perform better in their careers, and saying to women: "The amount of insecurity in the thread is a little embarrassing ladies. Let's be open minded and entertain the possibility that men are indeed more capable and that societal constructs drag down their educational opportunities."
    • ceejayoz 6y ago
      I don't have to imagine it; you can see that sentiment on HN threads about gender pretty regularly.
      • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        You regularly see condescending comments about male career/educational opportunities being oppressed on HN? We must be reading very different HN posts.
    • standardUser 6y ago
      To do so, you would first have to imagine a world where women were not an oppressed and disadvantaged group throughout all of history. Congrats to anyone who has such a vivid imagination.
    • wonnage 6y ago
      This is not the smart comment you thought it was? Men do perform better, you don't have to imagine it. And it's clearly not because men are any more capable.
  • dudul 6y ago
    Maybe men are just more capable in a professional setting, and women more capable at school?
• amelius 6y ago
  Then why do boys/men seem better at inventing things (edit: from past statistics)?
  • ipnon 6y ago
    If schools could teach invention then art school graduates would be lining the halls of the Louvre.
  • wonnage 6y ago
    where did you get that idea
    • amelius 6y ago
      Just think of any random invention, then look up on Wikipedia who was the inventor. Repeat a bunch of times, and you get the idea. (And please don't respond with cherry-picked examples.)
      • wonnage 6y ago
        Why do you think the explanation is that men are better inventors?
  • standardUser 6y ago
    I am sure that if men were had been subjugated by women for all of civilization the outcomes might have been a little different. We'll never know, since the only civilization we know is one that has oppressed women for its entirety.
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      Jewish people were subjugated and kept in ghettos for a millennium or so, even subject to pogroms and genocides. All this suffering did not seem to reduce their academic and technological aptitude.
  • jpxw 6y ago
• carolina_33 6y ago
  There are a lot of problems with this- this study doesn’t include all womxn, only cis womxn. And what about latinx womxn? Or bipoc/mena womxn?
  • carolina_33 6y ago
    Downvoted by transphobes.
• viach 6y ago
  Isn't this considered incorrect nowadays - to publicly generalize a superiority of a group of humans with dimension by race or gender?
  • FactCore 6y ago
    I find your sentiment interesting, but we can't ignore a fact in favor of not hurting people's feelings. Of course, more research is always being done, so I'm sure in a few years a new research paper will come out and we will hear a different facts about a certain gender's academic performance. Then next big paper comes out and the cycle repeats. That's just my two cents anyways.
    • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
      Have you been living in a cave for the past 10 years?
      • tester756 6y ago
        What makes you think that he's been living in cave?
        • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
          Because culturally the world (At least the western world) has the complete opposite attitude. Feelings are more important than facts to many people nowadays.
          • tester756 6y ago
            >Feelings are more important than facts to many people nowadays. is it good or bad in your opinion?
            • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
              From what I've perceived it seems like in general it harms discourse more than it helps.
• 99_00 6y ago
  It's because women are better at school.
• kderbyma 6y ago
  This is one of those cases where you get the outcome you design for....they don't know they designed a system that is better suited for women. biology affects men's and women differently. that's why if you notice. most of the difference shows up during and after puberty. small children are not very different (when controlled for environmental bias)
• hcurtiss 6y ago
  I realize that this isn't terribly PC, but isn't it possible that testosterone is negatively correlated with attention span and compliance and positively correlated with risk taking? You certainly see it in other species. Without any value judgment at all, I would expect this would manifest in different outcomes in academic settings versus competitive markets. That is, it seems likely to me that some of this is due to innate differences between men and women.
  • waterheater 6y ago
    PC or not, academic literature supports your views. http://psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publications/stantonetal2011.pdf http://psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publica... "Thus, high levels of testosterone are associated with willingness to incur greater risk in both sexes." In my experience, this view has loose ties to ADHD, specifically regarding the hunter-farmer hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis Doesn't say it in the article, but Hartmann's main book on ADHD discusses how he tested an African tribe for ADHD. 100% of those tested were "positive" for ADHD. I believe we're looking at evolutionary aftereffects of generations of family-based societies where men hunt and women run the family.
    • hcurtiss 6y ago
      Thanks. I don't have any education in this arena, but I know for certain why we geld male riding horses. It radically changes their disposition.
      • musingsole 6y ago
        It takes a skilled rider to even think about riding a stallion. Geldings are puppies in comparison.
    • websites2323 6y ago
      I don’t have any background is psychology. This information you provided increases my skepticism of ADHD as being a thing at all. In short, I’ve felt since becoming an adult that ADHD is simply the result of forcing people into situations that are poorly suited to their brains, implemented by people who happened to fair well in those situations. That is, the humans themselves aren’t broken, just a different neuro-variant.
• twgp123 6y ago
  Throwaway because this is one of the data points you are required to ignore in polite society. Girls receive better grades until you blind the teachers. Teachers are biased in favor of girls, maybe because their behavior is better. The effect of biased grading is enormous and a huge disadvantage to our boys. > Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. [1] [1] https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents/SEII-Discussion-Paper-2016.07-Terrier.pdf https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Doesn’t that mean that 79% of the difference is not due to bias? So boys would still be behind girls even if the bias didn’t exist. Or am I misunderstanding this?
    • twgp123 6y ago
      Tables 1-6 show you the actual results on the page labeled 40 (PDF page 42) and the page prior shows actual numbers. In blinded effects, boys overperform in math and underperform in literacy. In non-blinded effects, boys underperform everywhere.
      • andromeduck 6y ago
        I wonder how this plays with the experiments that found that that girls tended to score much closer to boys on math tests when primed with the idea that they would do better and worse when primed with the idea that they would do worse.
        • haihaibye 6y ago
          This is called stereotype threat and there is clear publication bias in the literature. It's not replicating well in pre registered trials: https://replicationindex.com/tag/stereotype-threat-and-womens-math-performance/ https://replicationindex.com/tag/stereotype-threat-and-women...
• gordian-mind 6y ago
  Who could have guessed that having a majority of female teachers while constantly telling boys that they were born the wrong sex and should shut their mouths would have an impact?!
  • JKCalhoun 6y ago
    I have never heard anyone say that to me.
• dmayle 6y ago
  > “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. Which is it? Their brains/bodies/chemicals? Or the social pressure? Testosterone doesn't really kick in until high school, and the article (at least the part outside of the paywall) seems to suggest the problem exists in adolescents, not young children, so that would suggest that it's the former not the latter. The next question is... what has changed in the last 30 years? The answer to that is most likely going to be social, and not chemical, unless you mean less lead in the air. Maybe the answer is more complicated. Finally, what has changed in the last 30 years that might be linked to both? Well, easier access to pornography could be a factor. It's a social change that lines up with male adolescence that could be related. In any case, the 'answer' is to try to combat the change, and wait for statisticians and scientists to study the problem to understand the root causes.
• throwgender123 6y ago
  I've noticed throughout my life that negative outcomes that primarily affect females (math test scores, wage gap, etc) are Huge Problems That Demand Immediate Action, and negative outcomes that primarily affect males (language test scores, life expectancy gap) are just kind of how it is. I'm not bitching about it or pushing an agenda, but it's not subtle.
  • standardUser 6y ago
    Generally speaking, the clearly oppressed and disadvantaged group is the one we focus on in terms of equity. Men are not, nor have they ever been, that group.
    • zepto 6y ago
      This is the problem with making it about sex or gender. ‘Men’ as a category may not be that group with respect to ‘Women’ as a category. But there are a huge number of men who are in fact, just as disadvantaged as a huge number of women even if that number is marginally smaller. There is no reason at all why those men’s problems should not be receiving the same attention that women’s problems are receiving, other than the framing as a response to oppression of groups.
      • LanceH 6y ago
        This is the issue with scoping our solutions based on identity rather than to those suffering the symptoms we would like to address.
    • DC1350 6y ago
      Men are the disadvantaged group when you look at things they do worse than women though. There’s no such thing as being disadvantaged overall.
    • busterarm 6y ago
      You know that the article is about a study demonstrating that women are outachieving men academically, right? It's outright suggesting that there is some as-of-yet-identified disadvantage there. So while you say "no, not ever", I say "are you even having the same conversation we are?"
• del_operator 6y ago
  Interesting, I wonder how skewed my perspective of high school was by finding a community college high school hybrid program that gave me freedom and access to better electives. It didn’t hurt that community college tutoring was a huge bonus: provided hours of free tutoring per course and then rewarded with opportunities to get paid tutoring the subject if I did well. Meeting older community college students through tutoring was also very formative. Tutoring money as a 15/16 year old helped my independence and motivation. Meanwhile, I could have easily dropped out, parents even suggested I could given the strain of me getting me to school freshman year similar male peers did at 13/14, so just I lived with friends and couch surfed through all of HS. As a youngster though I did not show much academic connection and was suspended each week in a charter school, failing 2nd grade, but never going to 4th grade after switching schools. After a parent teacher conference where my mom embarrassingly tried to fight my teacher I realized things might go easier if I took time after school or during lunch to just wrap up my homework. Through middle school the boys and girls club created an atmosphere where I could continue that behavior and get access to computers and printers for written assignments. It was still a hassle though. Without a few key teachers in middle school I probably also wouldn’t have kicked a bad habit of ditching school.
• Inu 6y ago
  Off topic, but why is this thread (207 points | 5 hours ago | 474 comments) on page 2, rank 37, and the thread about Italo Calvino (62 points | 7 hours ago | 19 comments) on page 1, rank 23?
  • belval 6y ago
    The HackerNews algorithm uses velocity (I don't know the exact equation) to rank posts so a post with 20 points acquired in a 5 minutes span will generally outperform a 400 points post for which the points are only trickling in.
  • alexpetralia 6y ago
    I believe threads which are heavily upvoted & downvoted (i.e. potential flame war) are penalized.
    • b0afc375b5 6y ago
      But doesn't this discourage discussion?
• neonate 6y ago
  https://archive.is/E6NWK https://archive.is/E6NWK
• dang 6y ago
  Discussed at the time: Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158812 - March 2015 (70 comments)
  • supergirl 6y ago
    > HN is not mature enough to hold a discussion related to gender issues. underrated comment from the old thread
    • dennis_jeeves 6y ago
      Agreed, on HN most members are castrated/low testosterone/nerd boys.
      • jl2718 6y ago
        N of 1 here, but, you may be right. My activity on this board is inversely proportional to my success and virility on the outernet.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Either you can ignore the data that suggests there are differences between girls and boys, or it might be worth considering some problem solving. E.g. at any point do we think about optimizing some learning environments for boys? When college graduation rates in the US are 70/30 girl/boy, is that okay? I know it feels weird asking the question since those ratios were flipped a few years ago, and we fixed it...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
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• hvJ4kN 6y ago
  Any research on gender past infancy has a problem in that it's hard to untangle what is "innate" and what is a result of differentiated socialization based on gender. There's a lot of speculation in this forum about whether this is because of different distributions of IQ, effects of testosterone, etc., but how can we possibly determine if these are true differences or the result of parents, teachers, and other people in society treating young children differently based on their gender?
  • wassenaar10 6y ago
    Modern progressivism has apparently solved that issue already. I'll demonstrate: Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka "the patriarchy". On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance that benefits women, such as sentencing/incarceration rates, suicide rates, or academic performance, it seems that often people are satisfied with an explanation that says the disparity is due to some innate behavioral difference in men. Occasionally, in the case of poor academics or crime rates among men you'll hear justifications along the lines of "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them", which in my opinion is a statement that subtly implies that these men's misfortune is their own fault. Also in some cases you see outright deflection; bring up how women generally make better grades than men, and how they outnumber men by nontrivial amounts at universities? The response it "well, better education doesn't necessarily translate into better employment for women". Bring up the substantially higher male suicide rate? You'll often hear "well actually women attempt suicide more often, but use less effective methods" - and that's supposed to be the end of the conversation, as though attempting suicide with a bottle of pills (where you could still wake up in the hospital surrounded by family and friends) has the same sort of finality as shooting yourself in the head or jumping in front of a train.
    • klyrs 6y ago
      [baleeted]
• nemo44x 6y ago
  Girls on average are more likely to be competent due to the lower variance in their intellectual ability. Boys on average have a greater variance so you have fewer overall that will perform because there's more that are on the lower end and more that are on the higher end.
• dudul 6y ago
  Some studies seem to have found a bias towards girls when it comes to grading: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672 https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672
• ipnon 6y ago
  Do we want equality in this area? Should we change schooling to make it easier for boys than girls until we get to 50/50 achievement? Or should we retain the status quo to boost the chances of women succeeding later in their lives when they do not achieve in their careers at the same level as men?
  • TrackerFF 6y ago
    In some countries, various (college/uni) majors/programs have their own quotas or bonus "entrance points" for gender, if the majors are very unbalanced. If/when over time this balance gets closer to 50/50, those quotas/points are removed.
  • tomp 6y ago
    I often considered that... in particular, because I (as a white male) am more bothered by the girl-boy discrepancy than by the black-white-Asian discrepancy (in the US). Why? Is it just self-serving prioritization? Reflecting more, I don't think it is. I'm naively assuming that the girl-boy difference is likely biological (either female brains are different than male brains, or the differences in sex & reproduction result in equivalent human brains pursuing different life strategies in different bodies), while black-white-Asian difference is likely social, probably related to culture and poverty level (i.e. no brain differences). It follows that in order to optimize for social good & progress, we should adapt the education system so that both female-ish and male-ish types of brains flourish (note that there is likely significant overlap) yet we should help people out of poverty (which might involve changing education, but also probably other, much more significant efforts) and change culture (make schooling & achievement more important and popular) to reduce white-black-Asian gap.
  • ganzuul 6y ago
    Yes. No. No. We have known what the problem is and what the solution is for a long time. - Standard curriculum for non-standard children, and finding out what makes a child special and encouraging that at the expense of other things.
  • BlargMcLarg 6y ago
    Don't disadvantage young men for the troubles older generations have caused. They did not want to be the scapegoat of women of older generations being held back by society in any form. Frankly, all the quotas and other artificial constructions to help women should already tip people off that disadvantaging young men further will only cause more and more resentment.
• nottorp 6y ago
  Well yeah, I have a daughter who finished high school and I've observed: - when I was in school I only cared about results for the subjects that interested me; otherwise i did just enough to pass - when she was in school she cared about high grades for all subjects
  • ganzuul 6y ago
    We can't attribute any meaning to your post unless you tell us your gender.
    • njdullea 6y ago
      I think the poster is making a comparison, and is therefor presumably male.
      • ganzuul 6y ago
        We are on NH, so we can assume everyone's gender with reasonable accuracy... But this type of assumption seems to have unforeseen consequences. We should question it.
      • nottorp 6y ago
        Yep, it would have made no sense otherwise. But yes, to make it explicit, i'm the father.
• hntrader 6y ago
  This could be a consequence of the variability hypothesis[1] interacting with the way grades are distributed. If grades tend to have a lot of negative skewness, that means that it pays to be in a group that has the least number of extreme underperformers, since your group's outperformers are handicapped due to the upper bound existing near the mean. That means we expect men to underperform in domains that have lots of negative skewness in the outcome distribution, assuming [1] holds. In domains where there's a lot of positive skewness in the outcomes distribution, we would expect the opposite result. As a first step, we would want to check how grades are actually distributed in the raw data, and whether there is an inter-country correlation between its grades' skewness and its male-to-female differences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
  • abhyudaya63 6y ago
    Variability hypothesis seems to downplay the cultural aspects a lot. Males were generally thought to have better visual sense of an object but the advantage was nullified when females were tested with objects that they are most familiar with. And you are right that we should check for inter-country data. It will provide a more accurate view.
    • hntrader 6y ago
      "better visual sense" This example pertains to mean skill level which doesn't seem relevant to the variability hypothesis (which pertains instead to variance of traits/skills/interests). If your point is that the empirical findings underpinning the variability hypothesis may have some cultural causes instead of being only genetic, then we don't disagree. But I wouldn't agree that the culture-over-genes perspective is undersubscribed, that's the most fashionable and socially acceptable perspective to take.
• andrewzah 6y ago
  Anyone who has ever taught young boys and girls has almost certainly experienced a marked difference in behavior. Schooling as a whole needs to be overhauled to better accommodate young boys. Until then, we're going to see wider and wider gaps at highschool and university levels. Regardless of gender, schooling as a whole needs to move away from this factory-like system with underpaid teachers and an emphasis on test scores. It would be nice if there were an easy solution...
• jpxw 6y ago
  Given that the current trend is to blame any disparate outcome on discrimination, are we to believe that this is sexism?
• z77dj3kl 6y ago
  I find it very curious that at high school level, it seems females outperform males in grades, and there is higher female participation/caring about the content (participation is rarely voluntary in high school); but as soon as you go to university level (STEM in particular), participation rates do a complete switch in that a lot of STEM fields have a huge over representation of males.
• wisty 6y ago
  Meta comment, a lot of comments here are not as measured, accurate, or carefully worded as the Damore "memo". Damore was sacked for his memo. Well, arguably he was sacked for people (at his workplace, using company resources and time) making disingenuous and vicious attacks on him (often misrepresented what he actually said), far less accurate or polite or measured than anything Damore said, creating enough of an internal activist movement that the boss had to cancel his trip to the Maldives IIRC.
  • DobryMorozov 6y ago
    Damore lost credibility in my eyes when he lied about being chess national master. Such a bold and egregious lie
• GoodJokes 6y ago
  sweet another boys vs. girls thread.
• nsainsbury 6y ago
  Reading this reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favourite essays "On the Wildness of Children" by Carol Black - http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children It's definitely influenced how we raise our kids - boys in general really seem to need to be active, exploring, and heavily engaged in physical activity otherwise they turn that energy towards destructive activities.
• p0nce 6y ago
  Super interesting page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
• TedShiller 6y ago
  That's not good for diversity.
• randyrand 6y ago
  No surprise there, it's genetic..
• supergirl 6y ago
  so many sexists on HN, it's surprising. whenever there is a thread about some differences in genders, it gets bombarded with "men are actually the ones being oppressed" comments. just look at this thread. 400 comments in 3 hours. it's because of the title. the idea that girls are doing better than boys triggered a whole mob. pretty worrying.
• Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  And the gap is only growing. There's a budding problem for gender equality growing, and it's not the usual story. We're not quite ready to talk about it openly though, without the stated cause being toxic masculinity or something - as if that's a problem that has been getting worse, not better, and is somehow only now taking its biggest toll on boys under 15 (and even under 5). Alas, the answer must be doubling-down on that narrative and pumping the boys who can't function like girls full of ADHD meds - I was on Ritalin before age 12, and it does "solve the problem" to a workable enough degree for everyone to keep on keeping on.
• serjester 6y ago
  This is just my experience but these days I read 50ish books year - back in school I would do everything possible to avoid assigned reading. None of them spoke to me, I wasn't particularly interested in figuring out a books underlying theme. Out of my friends, none of us enjoyed this. All my teachers were always women and I have to wonder if the curriculum was designed by someone more like us would we have gotten more from it? I honestly don't know.
• acenes 6y ago
  It seems most commenters here think that the results can be explained by bias (e.g. on the part of teachers), or cultural factors / environment (e.g. schools are set up for women to do better), or personality differences (e.g. girls are more obedient etc), and so on. But isn't the most straightforward explanation that women are simpler smarter than men on average?
  • dudul 6y ago
    Can we apply the same logic and say that women are not as successful in their career because they're not as good in a professional setting as men? Maybe there are so few female inventors because women are not as good at inventing/creating things? Also, this is assuming grades are good at measuring how smart someone is.
• astrophysics 6y ago
  In Norway, girls outperform boys in every subject - but the opposite is true when tests are anonymized. It turns out teachers give boys lower grades because can't sit still during class.
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