Boys at school

When I was growing up, I heard a lot about girls not doing as well as boys in school. Girls were less likely to participate in class, I read somewhere-- maybe that explained why they showed less grasp of important concepts on standardized tests. Perhaps the problem was that teachers and parents had lower expectations of girls' math and science ability and didn't encourage girls as much. Or maybe it was gender stereotypes which made girls want to be ditzy rather than brainy, in order to be more attractive to boys. Something was going wrong for girls, anyway. Everyone agreed on that.

But when I went to college, most of my fellow math majors were women. I went to grad school in biostatistics, and again, it was mostly women. In fact, these days 57% of college students are women, and most bachelor's degrees being awarded nationwide go to women. That may now be true of master's degrees as well. If the trend continues, in just a few more years PhDs and professional degrees will also go disproportionately to women.

Younger boys and girls also show differences in academic performance, almost exclusively in one direction: girls do better. In 4th, 8th, and 12th grades girls test higher in writing and reading than do boys (see this page for a list of relevant charts/statistics), and are roughly equal with boys in math scores in those three grades. Girls used to be behind in math, so again, if the trend continues, they will eventually solidly outperform boys in math throughout the K-12 years.

One hypothesis I have for why boys don't do as well in school is that girls are socialized to be better behaved, quieter, more obedient, etc. than are boys. School places a heavy emphasis on obedience, conformity, and passivity (it's the only way one adult can direct and manage 25 kids-- it's just a structural necessity given the way we've arranged our classrooms). If girls do better, perhaps it's for behavioral reasons, since parents and society in general cultivate different behavior in boys and girls. Supporting this idea, I note that boys are more likely to be disciplined in school. And they are dramatically more likely to be diagnosed with learning disorders, or with behavioral disorders like ADHD or Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

A potential problem with this idea is that girls have always had their behavior tailored differently than boys. They've generally been taught to be quieter and more "ladylike" and more docile. What may have changed, though, is that children's lives are more scheduled and supervised than ever before, and schools are making increasing demands on children's self control. In this pressure cooker climate, girls' behavioral advantage over boys may have increased. (Well, I say "advantage" in the narrow context of traditional schooling, not because I consider it actually advantageous in life in general. Actually I think being ladylike is a hindrance. For example, 80% of Fortune 500 female executives say they were tomboys as children. I guess "demure" doesn't go over too well in the boardroom.)

Another idea is that girls and boys really do develop differently, gaining skills on different timelines (on the average). The theory here is that kids are learning certain skills earlier than they used to, for instance beginning reading in kindergarten or preschool instead of in first or second grade. Boys, due to biological differences in development, don't (again, on average) learn on that schedule. They tend to get labeled as behind, inadequate, or somehow disordered because their natural developmental timeline doesn't mesh with the new academic timeline schools want to impose. I'm not saying I buy this, I'm just saying it's a possibility.

When Anya was in preschool, I once heard a couple of moms talking about their kids' writing skills. One of them said: "Well, my daughter was writing her name at age 3, and he's 4 and he can't make his letters yet... but that's just how it is with boys." The other mom chimed in with "Yeah, boys are about a year behind." On another occasion I heard a mom explaining that she was going to keep her son out of kindergarten until he was 6. She stated angrily that she'd been reading about female and male development and that it was preposterous to think that boys had the manual dexterity to start writing at age 5, the ways girls do.

Once that becomes the common opinion, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Boys won't start writing until a year later than girls because boys' mothers aren't concerned about encouraging them to write. They won't learn to read until later because they enter school later. This idea can cement itself just as harmfully as the old "Girls are bad at math" idea.

On a slightly different topic, I found survey results for the question "How do you feel about school?" (Figure A in the list of charts I linked to above.) This question was asked in the senior year of high school, so keep in mind that it excludes students who hated school so much that they dropped out. In 1980, 42% of boys and 50% of girls said they liked school "very much" or "quite a lot". Only 14% of boys and 13% of girls said they didn't like school very much or didn't like school at all. Interestingly, girls' enjoyment of school has fallen faster since 1980 than boys' enjoyment. In 2001, 29% of girls said they enjoyed school very much or quite a lot (a 21% drop), while 30% of boys enjoyed school (only a 12% drop). The percentage who say they don't like school much, or don't like it at all, increased for both sexes (up to 24% of boys and 21% of girls by 2001). In other words, boys aren't falling behind academically because they dislike school more than girls. Actually, girls' satisfaction with school has fallen much more precipitously in the past two decades. Yet still they have overtaken boys in academic achievement.

Boys' lower test scores and more problematic existence at school is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I don't think it's fair that the new "gender gap" is garnering so little attention. And I'm a bit shocked that some mothers would accept the idea that their sons are inferior to their daughters quite so easily. It seems to me that the women's movement and the men's movement could come together with one basic message for the schools: Stop trying to socialize, label, pigeonhole, test, and cramp our children. Problem is, you'd have to start completely over and redesign schools from scratch, if you want a new generation of public schools to follow that advice.