9 ms·

Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university

42 points by stared 12y ago

grayfox 12y ago
As someone who proceeded through institution, then was employed by institution... Not entirely convinced that success in these channels is conducive to anything. Adherence to a specific structure is just one way to provide merit to youth. Let's see a gender comparison in lucrative web project creation?
- sukilot 12y ago
  Why so defensive?
  - kelukelugames 12y ago
    We can interpret the comments in two different ways. 1) Nope, this doesn't mean girls are good as boys. or 2) That's nice but this doesn't mean we have achieved gender equality.
    - Jimmy 12y ago
      I'm sure there's some defensiveness going on in this thread. But there's also some truth to the fact that people place undue emphasis on certain quantitative measures of academic performance. This is why I don't like it when, for example, people are overly concerned that America's standardized test scores are lower than those of other nations. What matters is what you achieve, not what you are predicted to achieve (although there is certainly a correlation between the two).
      - Dewie 12y ago
        Maybe certain Americans should get over their we-need-to-be-nr-one-at-everything desire.
        Jimmy 12y ago
        "Need to be" number 1? Sure, I suppose that would be a bad desire to have. It's impossible for anyone, individual or nation, to be the best at everything. But what about "want to be number 1"? I would love to be number 1 at everything. Balanced with some reasonable expectations, I think this is great; in fact, I think we should encourage more people to feel this way.
      - sanxiyn 12y ago
        I think people should be more concerned about standardized test scores like PISA. Because you need good evaluation of education to improve education. Education is just one input variable to achievement, so measuring achievement is not good for evaluating and improving education.
Someone1234 12y ago
It seems like whenever someone brings this up, they have an untone of sexism within their point. Like "See! Women are fine, let's ignore pay imbalance, the lack of female CEOs, lack of woman in tech', and every other problem." Facts cannot be sexist. However I cannot help that feel like this one gets bounced around because people have some type of agenda. This just further goes to prove how powerful of a force patriarchy is. Woman do better in academia but get lower paying jobs and promoted at a lower rate.
- ebfe 12y ago
  If a guy told you that he detected an undertone of anti-male sexism by anyone who brought up the lack of female CEOs, that all discussion of female issues carries an implied "See! Men are fine, let's ignore suicide, homelessness, incarceration, and every other problem", would you consider this a reasonable interpretation? I certainly wouldn't. I'd assume that he's intentionally misinterpreting people in an attempt to shut down discussions that go against his preferred narrative.
- mingusdew 12y ago
  you are ignorant if you think the pay gap is a function of male patriarchy.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    How would it not be? Women weren't in work at first, because of patriarchy. After social reforms they slowly entered the workforce, but they were not paid as well and not given as good jobs. Things have improved over time, but there's still a gap. I don't see why it wouldn't be because of patriarchy. Look at history.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      The U.S. Department of Labor looked at the actual reasons.[1] It's predominantly because men statistically choose to enter higher paying professions and specialties, work longer hours and take fewer days off. Accounting for such things leaves the pay gap in the neighborhood of 5%, and the DoL concludes that it could in principle explain more of it if they had better data available. Here's the last paragraph of the summary: "Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers." The entire issue is just politics. For example, studies have shown that taller people make significantly more money than shorter people, by an amount that exceeds the unexplained pay gap between men and women based on the average height difference between men and women. Back of the envelope math then implies that women get paid more than men of the same height who do the same job. [1] http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...
klipt 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the problem is lack of role models. There are very few male teachers.
- protomyth 12y ago
  Particularly in elementary school and pre-K. Daycares tend not to hire males because of parents and insurance. Add in changes in play that are not boy friendly and you have a trend. At this point, I am starting to lean to separate schools. Twenty years ago, I would have thought that insane.
slackstation 12y ago
I'm waiting for the chorus of feminists to fight this evil of gender inequality.
marrs 12y ago
Well what should we expect? In the last 20-30 years, a huge amount of effort has (rightly) been put into bringing girls' performance up. Examples include substituting practical classes for theory, exams for courseware, and so on. Also, for quite unrelated reasons, there are fewer male teachers (i.e. role models) than ever before. So if I was interested in gender equality then I might suggest that maybe the balance has swung too far and we need to reverse some of these changes just a little bit, but I'm actually a feminist so I'm just going to declare victory and move on.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- orblivion 12y ago
  > if I was interested in gender equality ... I'm actually a feminist so I'm just going to declare victory and move on. I'm not a feminist, but I wonder if you're really representing the feminist point of view, at least as most feminists would like to be seen.
  - LanceH 12y ago
    I rather expect these results will be used as proof of sexism at the next level. Women outperform men in school (not a problem) therefore men are only achieving through the patriarchy in business. I say that I expect it, but I've already had friends telling me this is the way it is.
    - sanxiyn 12y ago
      I wouldn't say "only" there, but isn't it true that men are achieving through the partriarchy in business?
      - LanceH 12y ago
        "men are achieving through patriarchy" That's a true statement, but it's not a basis for action, much less legislation. Another true statement, "women are achieving by sleeping their way to promotions." Most of us, however are at a place of employment where men and women do get along. An imbalance of men/women in the workplace isn't by itself proof of anything. I'm in a shop with an imbalance, but we're hiring and can't find anyone. If women were out there making 77% of men, we'd love to talk to them. But they're not, and at the same time we're lumped in as the problem because our industry has some "brogrammers" which is a phenomenon I've never actually witnessed. Of course the next thing I'll hear is that because I claim not to have witnessed it is because the culture is so deep it is invisible and I'm a part of it. Well, I'm sorry, 30+ years of hearing how I'm the problem really gets old. Of course some people aren't talking about all men, but if I say "not all men", I've hit another trigger. It's a minefield and I'm sure just by writing more than a single line of agreement I've stepped on one.
sukilot 12y ago
HN is not mature enough to hold a discussion related to gender issues.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Your concern is duly noted sir/ma'am.
- walru 12y ago
  I would instead gather it's entirely too superfluous and divisive for the HN crowd who is routinely above such pettiness. I fall back to Carmack on this issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmbW4ueGdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmbW4ueGdg
  - throwawaymaroon 12y ago
    Quickly proving sukilot's point, are you? Gender issues are petty and superfluous?
- Aloisius 12y ago
  Is there a online forum anywhere that is?
- beachstartup 12y ago
  ah yes, standard issue anti-male shaming tactic #7. if they don't agree with you, call them immature! it's so easy! you don't even have to respond to what they say! or even read what they say! also, try these handy dandy variants, always just a mouse click away: * call them virgins * call them bitter * call them angry * call them cowards * call them jealous * call them gay * call them crazy * call them selfish * call them ugly (ouch!) and of course, everyone's favorite: * call them creepy! there's literally no recourse for that one! super effective!
  - Dewie 12y ago
    Thankfully people don't tend to get away with such blatantly dishonest tactics on HN, in my opinion. At least they would have to be much more indirect about it.
dkhenry 12y ago
I would be more impressed by this if I thought academic success was any indicator of aptitude. As a hiring manager I have completely stopped looking at things like GPA and in some cases even if you have a degree, they are such poor indicators of aptitude. So who cares if girls are doing better in school I still won't hire 90% of them. We really need to stop caring about how boys are girls are doing in school and start caring why so many people are being given degrees and can't get a job in their chosen field.
ac1294 12y ago
As someone who has been in school for his entire life, I've always noticed that the average girl typically outperforms the average male in my classes. But it seems like the distribution of males was much wider. For example, if each gender's academic capabilities were normally distributed, then I would expect the mean for girls to be higher than the mean for boys, but the variance for boys to be larger than the variance for girls. I say this because I tend to see many boys at the very bottom of my classes, but also at the very top. Of course this is all based on my experiences in school, and I have no data to back this up. But I'd be interested in seeing distributions of academic performance for each gender.
- pokpokpok 12y ago
  I think this is a misnomer, in my experience boys just telegraph their academic ability more than girls do.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    A greater variance among men is a widely-noted phenomena. But by all means, keep selling the narcissism[1]-line if it's more soothing to you. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153685
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
      Lots of widely-noted phenomena do not stand up to actual evidence. (http://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rtx120100010p-2.pdf http://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rtx1...)
      - sanxiyn 12y ago
        Thank you for a great reference. It seems to me that Figure 1B (girls' versus boys' variance scatter plot) clearly shows greater variance for boys.
    - dang 12y ago
sanxiyn 12y ago
From the article: "According to the OECD, the return on investment in a degree is higher for women than for men in many countries, though not all." I think this is enough explanation and no more analysis is necessary.
im3w1l 12y ago
Hypothesis: School doesn't allow natural Homo Sapiens adolescent male behaviour. Is therefore disliked. Idea: Compare and contrast school behaviour with behaviour in the wild (youtube comments, videogames teamspeak)
shorttime 12y ago
[Serious] So, why, exactly, is this a problem?
JDiculous 12y ago
The problem is not boys. The problem is school. School is like a modern day prison for kids, particularly boys. Kids were not meant to sit still for 8 hours/day listening to lectures, then go home and complete hours and hours of bullshit assignments and busy-work. I hated school back then, and if I had to go back now, I'd probably hate it just as much.
- marrs 12y ago
  Well, at least it prepares you we for a career in programming :)
- ajmurmann 12y ago
  But that's what work life is likely going to be. Work life is not going to be building a fort in the forrest.
Issac 12y ago
I think the gap in income in the first years after leaving University, is at one point because a lot of woman at least a higher percentage then from men may have not enough confidence in themselfs so at one point dont struggle for higher payed jobs, those jobs they still dont completly satisfy the qualifications for, while a higher percentage of men is more willing to just try to get such jobs even without appropriate qualifications. Also in my opinion a higher percentage of woman then men are not willing to get a job which has a lot of conflict potential , so at least a higher percentage of men are willing to try more stressfull and demanding jobs which also pay better. These effects add up showing why there may just be a gab in the first years. This is mainly a problem of preferences. The gaps later on and in higher positions i think are still really a huge problem for woman in all professions, so i would certainly not include them in this really simplified explanation. This is truly only my opinion regarding the small gap right after getting a degree.
dankohn1 12y ago
It seems like society is facing two serious problems on both edges of the bell curve: 1) undereducated men can't find good jobs and 2) well-educated women are still not getting the share of CEO, politician, and other top professional jobs that they deserve. I cannot think of any sense in which one problem cancels out, compensates for, or assists with the other. They're both very serious problems, and we should all be looking at solutions for both.
ajmurmann 12y ago
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.
- VLM 12y ago
  All true, but aside from risk, school has little relationship to modern workplaces. The public school system was designed to squirt out interchangeable cogs for the regimented institutionalized factory / sweatshop workplace with the ability to act as cannon fodder as military industrial complex profits dictate. That workplace is dead in this country other than blue collar style criminality (WRT entering for-profit prisons). There is the interesting analogy of high school study hall vs open office concept. Nothing ever got done in study hall other than goofing around and socializing. Real job (aka not an open office) of a higher social status are more like the silent study tanks at uni or studying at home (office job as opposed to open office)
- stared 12y ago
  "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/
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
spcoll 12y ago
As a woman in this industry, you have to be twice as good as men to be taken seriously. Thankfully that is easy.
- vixen99 12y ago
  Adults only here!
matt-attack 12y ago
> “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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
graycat 12y ago
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.
fragsworth 12y ago
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 12y ago
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

42 points by stared 12y ago

As someone who proceeded through institution, then was employed by institution... Not entirely convinced that success in these channels is conducive to anything. Adherence to a specific structure is just one way to provide merit to youth. Let's see a gender comparison in lucrative web project creation?

sukilot 12y ago
Why so defensive?
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  We can interpret the comments in two different ways. 1) Nope, this doesn't mean girls are good as boys. or 2) That's nice but this doesn't mean we have achieved gender equality.
  - Jimmy 12y ago
    I'm sure there's some defensiveness going on in this thread. But there's also some truth to the fact that people place undue emphasis on certain quantitative measures of academic performance. This is why I don't like it when, for example, people are overly concerned that America's standardized test scores are lower than those of other nations. What matters is what you achieve, not what you are predicted to achieve (although there is certainly a correlation between the two).
    - Dewie 12y ago
      Maybe certain Americans should get over their we-need-to-be-nr-one-at-everything desire.
      - Jimmy 12y ago
        "Need to be" number 1? Sure, I suppose that would be a bad desire to have. It's impossible for anyone, individual or nation, to be the best at everything. But what about "want to be number 1"? I would love to be number 1 at everything. Balanced with some reasonable expectations, I think this is great; in fact, I think we should encourage more people to feel this way.
    - sanxiyn 12y ago
      I think people should be more concerned about standardized test scores like PISA. Because you need good evaluation of education to improve education. Education is just one input variable to achievement, so measuring achievement is not good for evaluating and improving education.

Someone1234 12y ago

It seems like whenever someone brings this up, they have an untone of sexism within their point. Like "See! Women are fine, let's ignore pay imbalance, the lack of female CEOs, lack of woman in tech', and every other problem." Facts cannot be sexist. However I cannot help that feel like this one gets bounced around because people have some type of agenda. This just further goes to prove how powerful of a force patriarchy is. Woman do better in academia but get lower paying jobs and promoted at a lower rate.

ebfe 12y ago
If a guy told you that he detected an undertone of anti-male sexism by anyone who brought up the lack of female CEOs, that all discussion of female issues carries an implied "See! Men are fine, let's ignore suicide, homelessness, incarceration, and every other problem", would you consider this a reasonable interpretation? I certainly wouldn't. I'd assume that he's intentionally misinterpreting people in an attempt to shut down discussions that go against his preferred narrative.
mingusdew 12y ago
you are ignorant if you think the pay gap is a function of male patriarchy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  How would it not be? Women weren't in work at first, because of patriarchy. After social reforms they slowly entered the workforce, but they were not paid as well and not given as good jobs. Things have improved over time, but there's still a gap. I don't see why it wouldn't be because of patriarchy. Look at history.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    The U.S. Department of Labor looked at the actual reasons.[1] It's predominantly because men statistically choose to enter higher paying professions and specialties, work longer hours and take fewer days off. Accounting for such things leaves the pay gap in the neighborhood of 5%, and the DoL concludes that it could in principle explain more of it if they had better data available. Here's the last paragraph of the summary: "Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers." The entire issue is just politics. For example, studies have shown that taller people make significantly more money than shorter people, by an amount that exceeds the unexplained pay gap between men and women based on the average height difference between men and women. Back of the envelope math then implies that women get paid more than men of the same height who do the same job. [1] http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

klipt 12y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the problem is lack of role models. There are very few male teachers.

protomyth 12y ago
Particularly in elementary school and pre-K. Daycares tend not to hire males because of parents and insurance. Add in changes in play that are not boy friendly and you have a trend. At this point, I am starting to lean to separate schools. Twenty years ago, I would have thought that insane.

slackstation 12y ago

I'm waiting for the chorus of feminists to fight this evil of gender inequality.

marrs 12y ago

Well what should we expect? In the last 20-30 years, a huge amount of effort has (rightly) been put into bringing girls' performance up. Examples include substituting practical classes for theory, exams for courseware, and so on. Also, for quite unrelated reasons, there are fewer male teachers (i.e. role models) than ever before. So if I was interested in gender equality then I might suggest that maybe the balance has swung too far and we need to reverse some of these changes just a little bit, but I'm actually a feminist so I'm just going to declare victory and move on.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
orblivion 12y ago
> if I was interested in gender equality ... I'm actually a feminist so I'm just going to declare victory and move on. I'm not a feminist, but I wonder if you're really representing the feminist point of view, at least as most feminists would like to be seen.
- LanceH 12y ago
  I rather expect these results will be used as proof of sexism at the next level. Women outperform men in school (not a problem) therefore men are only achieving through the patriarchy in business. I say that I expect it, but I've already had friends telling me this is the way it is.
  - sanxiyn 12y ago
    I wouldn't say "only" there, but isn't it true that men are achieving through the partriarchy in business?
    - LanceH 12y ago
      "men are achieving through patriarchy" That's a true statement, but it's not a basis for action, much less legislation. Another true statement, "women are achieving by sleeping their way to promotions." Most of us, however are at a place of employment where men and women do get along. An imbalance of men/women in the workplace isn't by itself proof of anything. I'm in a shop with an imbalance, but we're hiring and can't find anyone. If women were out there making 77% of men, we'd love to talk to them. But they're not, and at the same time we're lumped in as the problem because our industry has some "brogrammers" which is a phenomenon I've never actually witnessed. Of course the next thing I'll hear is that because I claim not to have witnessed it is because the culture is so deep it is invisible and I'm a part of it. Well, I'm sorry, 30+ years of hearing how I'm the problem really gets old. Of course some people aren't talking about all men, but if I say "not all men", I've hit another trigger. It's a minefield and I'm sure just by writing more than a single line of agreement I've stepped on one.

sukilot 12y ago

HN is not mature enough to hold a discussion related to gender issues.

Dewie 12y ago
Your concern is duly noted sir/ma'am.
walru 12y ago
I would instead gather it's entirely too superfluous and divisive for the HN crowd who is routinely above such pettiness. I fall back to Carmack on this issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmbW4ueGdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmbW4ueGdg
- throwawaymaroon 12y ago
  Quickly proving sukilot's point, are you? Gender issues are petty and superfluous?
Aloisius 12y ago
Is there a online forum anywhere that is?
beachstartup 12y ago
ah yes, standard issue anti-male shaming tactic #7. if they don't agree with you, call them immature! it's so easy! you don't even have to respond to what they say! or even read what they say! also, try these handy dandy variants, always just a mouse click away: * call them virgins * call them bitter * call them angry * call them cowards * call them jealous * call them gay * call them crazy * call them selfish * call them ugly (ouch!) and of course, everyone's favorite: * call them creepy! there's literally no recourse for that one! super effective!
- Dewie 12y ago
  Thankfully people don't tend to get away with such blatantly dishonest tactics on HN, in my opinion. At least they would have to be much more indirect about it.

dkhenry 12y ago

I would be more impressed by this if I thought academic success was any indicator of aptitude. As a hiring manager I have completely stopped looking at things like GPA and in some cases even if you have a degree, they are such poor indicators of aptitude. So who cares if girls are doing better in school I still won't hire 90% of them. We really need to stop caring about how boys are girls are doing in school and start caring why so many people are being given degrees and can't get a job in their chosen field.

ac1294 12y ago

As someone who has been in school for his entire life, I've always noticed that the average girl typically outperforms the average male in my classes. But it seems like the distribution of males was much wider. For example, if each gender's academic capabilities were normally distributed, then I would expect the mean for girls to be higher than the mean for boys, but the variance for boys to be larger than the variance for girls. I say this because I tend to see many boys at the very bottom of my classes, but also at the very top. Of course this is all based on my experiences in school, and I have no data to back this up. But I'd be interested in seeing distributions of academic performance for each gender.

pokpokpok 12y ago
I think this is a misnomer, in my experience boys just telegraph their academic ability more than girls do.
- Dewie 12y ago
  A greater variance among men is a widely-noted phenomena. But by all means, keep selling the narcissism[1]-line if it's more soothing to you. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153685
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    Lots of widely-noted phenomena do not stand up to actual evidence. (http://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rtx120100010p-2.pdf http://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rtx1...)
    - sanxiyn 12y ago
      Thank you for a great reference. It seems to me that Figure 1B (girls' versus boys' variance scatter plot) clearly shows greater variance for boys.
  - dang 12y ago

sanxiyn 12y ago

From the article: "According to the OECD, the return on investment in a degree is higher for women than for men in many countries, though not all." I think this is enough explanation and no more analysis is necessary.

im3w1l 12y ago

Hypothesis: School doesn't allow natural Homo Sapiens adolescent male behaviour. Is therefore disliked. Idea: Compare and contrast school behaviour with behaviour in the wild (youtube comments, videogames teamspeak)

shorttime 12y ago

[Serious] So, why, exactly, is this a problem?

JDiculous 12y ago

The problem is not boys. The problem is school. School is like a modern day prison for kids, particularly boys. Kids were not meant to sit still for 8 hours/day listening to lectures, then go home and complete hours and hours of bullshit assignments and busy-work. I hated school back then, and if I had to go back now, I'd probably hate it just as much.

marrs 12y ago
Well, at least it prepares you we for a career in programming :)
ajmurmann 12y ago
But that's what work life is likely going to be. Work life is not going to be building a fort in the forrest.

Issac 12y ago

I think the gap in income in the first years after leaving University, is at one point because a lot of woman at least a higher percentage then from men may have not enough confidence in themselfs so at one point dont struggle for higher payed jobs, those jobs they still dont completly satisfy the qualifications for, while a higher percentage of men is more willing to just try to get such jobs even without appropriate qualifications. Also in my opinion a higher percentage of woman then men are not willing to get a job which has a lot of conflict potential , so at least a higher percentage of men are willing to try more stressfull and demanding jobs which also pay better. These effects add up showing why there may just be a gab in the first years. This is mainly a problem of preferences. The gaps later on and in higher positions i think are still really a huge problem for woman in all professions, so i would certainly not include them in this really simplified explanation. This is truly only my opinion regarding the small gap right after getting a degree.

dankohn1 12y ago

It seems like society is facing two serious problems on both edges of the bell curve: 1) undereducated men can't find good jobs and 2) well-educated women are still not getting the share of CEO, politician, and other top professional jobs that they deserve. I cannot think of any sense in which one problem cancels out, compensates for, or assists with the other. They're both very serious problems, and we should all be looking at solutions for both.

ajmurmann 12y ago

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.

VLM 12y ago
All true, but aside from risk, school has little relationship to modern workplaces. The public school system was designed to squirt out interchangeable cogs for the regimented institutionalized factory / sweatshop workplace with the ability to act as cannon fodder as military industrial complex profits dictate. That workplace is dead in this country other than blue collar style criminality (WRT entering for-profit prisons). There is the interesting analogy of high school study hall vs open office concept. Nothing ever got done in study hall other than goofing around and socializing. Real job (aka not an open office) of a higher social status are more like the silent study tanks at uni or studying at home (office job as opposed to open office)
stared 12y ago
"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/
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

spcoll 12y ago

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

vixen99 12y ago
Adults only here!

matt-attack 12y ago

> “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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

graycat 12y ago

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.

fragsworth 12y ago

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 12y ago

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