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Girls and Boys and Science
“But Miss Lenhart, that’s not true. Don’t you read Ricochet?”
One of the more irritating — and destructive — clichés we’re all forced to endure in newspapers, on television, and everywhere else is the idea that girls, somehow, need extra help in the classroom, or through special programs and more encouragement. Of course, women outnumber men in college, law school, and medical school. And now we know that girls outperform boys in technology and engineering subjects, too. From the AMI Newswire:
Girls outperformed boys, on average, in the first test measuring technology and engineering literacy in the nation’s schools.
The study of eighth-grade students, released this week, also found that many of those who live in rural and suburban areas outpaced their city-dwelling counterparts, according to findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an assessment of subject matter skills dubbed the Nation’s Report Card.
Which means we should be done now, I think, with all of this “girls need special attention” or “girls have it harder in school” stuff. And we should be done now, I think, with all of this “girl power” nonsense. Done because it worked, apparently. Problem solved. And done because we now have proof that any extra special attention or emphasis on girls’ scholastic achievement, whether in middle school or medical school, only reinforces a gender imbalance and serves to perpetuate a status quo.
And that’s bad, right? I mean, we’ve been told for years that these things are bad, right?
Published in Education
That’s just silly Rob – think of all those people in the grievance industry who’d be out of work if we shut those programs down!
I always thought girls were smarter about everything, at least that is what my wife always says.
Rob, why do you hate women?
Be brave, PH! you are not alone :)
It looks increasingly like boys need help, especially white middle-class boys. Not diverse enough, not female, and apparently guilty of a lot of things already at birth.
I have a niece that could out run, out wrestle, out ski, skate board any of the guys in her school or neighborhood, she was also a better student, as an adult and mother of four, reviewing those years with us, she said, “then I became a girl” Beating them was no longer important. The girls were always smarter, better students, better artists, then it all changed. I’m not an endocrinologist but the effect seems different, ours make us single minded, in love with abstraction and stupid about most things, especially girls; theirs broaden them, bring balance and make abstractions less interesting than real people. It really works out rather well, this one flesh business. It’s a shame some want so badly to change it.
Apparently Original Sin only affects white males now. As the doting grandmother of a 3-year-old white male, I seriously worry how he will fare in an increasingly hostile society.
Well, there is that.
My wonderful granddaughter is enrolled in ATOMS camp in Blair County PA this year. It’s a summer program, and the acronym stands for “Advanced Training for Outstanding Mathematics and Science Scholars Program. It’s for boys and girls. She’s having a whale of a time.
Her mother tells me that my granddaughter came home very full of herself on Monday because the kids were doing some sort of experiment about leverage, and she explained to them how she and her mother, and another adult, were on a seesaw at the park one day figuring out how a heavier person could sit on one end, and a lighter person could sit on the other, and how they could move their positions on the bench so the lighter person could move the heavier one up in the air.
She’s just finished second grade. She has no idea that girls are supposed to be victims of science and math. That just wouldn’t ever occur to us, or her.
Kids are accepted to this program based on an application that they themselves write.
In part, she wrote:
Such a proud Granny.
My granddaughter lives in small-town America, and I’m sure her school still has boys’ rooms and girls’ rooms. Also, they salute the flag, celebrate national holidays, and are allowed to bring cookies or cupcakes to school when it’s someone’s birthday.
So I’m not surprised to read in the OP that girls who live rurally or in the suburbs outperform their big-city sisters, because the oppressive victim mentality isn’t as strong, and perhaps the school and family support is stronger outside the urban areas.
outperform… at least in part because of all the extra emphasis on women’s success.
The downside is that little boys are ignored. Unless feminists admit that men are more intelligent and more capable, then they are knowingly and willingly preferring one sex to the clear detriment of the other. Of course, we already knew that about feminism. It has never been about equality.
A lot of jobs and federal funding depend on sustaining the female grievance industry. Patriarchy has been pushed from the real world into myth from whence it exerts its invisible pernicious influences that only federal spending/mandates and tenure can resist.
I’d be interested in knowing exactly how they measure ‘technology and engineering literacy’….does it include, for example, knowing how a car engine works, or does it mean ‘computer stuff’?
My wife was like this, too… Of course, it doesn’t really say much of anything. At jr. high she stopped growing and all the boys started to become men. The two biggest players on my son’s t-ball team this year were girls. There’s a reason sports are mixed right up these kids hit puberty.
This all acknowledges that boys and girls are different, they have different priorities, they grow at different rates, they want different things.
The dogma of feminism is a false premise.
It’s simply proof that women should run the planet, since they’re testing so much better than stupid boys. – Random Hypothetical SJW
Girls are so smart that they can master these subjects and decide that pursuing careers in them is not a good idea.
As just one example of a government program that I’ve run across in my work in the architecture/building industry here in Virginia that perpetuates this trend in the business world:
SWaM: Small, Women-owned, and Minority-owned Business
The basic gist is if you are a business that either has less than 250 employees or ownership is at least 51% female or 51% minority, then you get preferential treatment when bidding for projects for the state of Virginia.
I worked on a project that was bid in Virginia, and as a result of this we had to parcel out the contract to 15 different consultants. Without these requirements we would have had 11, so we either “made up” work for those 4 extra consultants (“architectural support”) or farmed out work that we could have done more efficiently in-house (interiors, structural, electrical). Additionally, two of the consultant jobs that would have been needed anyways (landscape & culinary) were given to firms that were specifically woman-owned. Lastly all the drawing set submission printing was done by a local minority-owned firm as opposed to a more reputable national printer.
The SWaM hire result was a mixed bag. Most of the SWaM consultants were actually really great and we would have used them anyways due to their good work. Others were either less than stellar or else a bit of a disaster.
Yes, this should be it, but we hear the tired rhetoric anyway. But then, we also lump our entire population together and cherry pick the data we want. When you have third world nations, living next to advanced societies, I’m looking at you east new york and park slope, you come to useless conclusions.
The boys in these neighborhoods do not go to school, they go to “child care” for eight hours then leave. The girls do quite better in these environments, since they tend to behave better, and receive more attention.
But even in good neighborhoods, girls out perform boys due to the massive gender bias towards women. I’ve seen it first hand, boys getting second tier grades to girls due to teacher preference.
She. My 12 year old granddaughter just finished the six grade. She got 100% on all her finial exams. I once had a 100 % on one exam and I think it was my Sr year in college. To top it off she is beautiful and good but I am prejudice .
Someone mentioned to me that the military is concerned that more women make it into the higher officer ranks.
The solution to the “problem” is obvious: increase the pool of candidates by instituting a women-only draft.
My company avoids doing business with any companies that advertise this. We figure that if they are marketing on this basis, then they are not prioritizing actually being good at what they are supposed to do. This is a bit unfair, of course. It often just means that they do a lot of gumint work – which is itself a disqualifier for us.
When you say enough is enough, you’re forgetting about the gender pay gap. Until that has been addressed I don’t see how progressives can do anything but keep pouring on the steam.
The one that doesn’t exist between men and women who make similar choices in human capital formation?
No, the one that’s been illegal since passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
Both me and my fiance are engineers in the same industry. We do similar work, but she gets paid a little bit more (and is definitely better at it).
However, the issue that comes up the most when I talk to her about her experience is the way that people treat her. We both spend a lot of time working with contractors and facility people, but I never have to worry about them not taking me seriously. A lot of the people she deals with are incredibly nice to her, but she comes away feeling like the men treat her like their daughter (she is mid 20s and small). She finds it a lot harder to be taken seriously than I do by others in the industry.
How do they test these subjects?
What I’ve seen so far is that girls are better at memorizing things, so they tend to do well in subjects such as biology. But when it comes to deep understanding, say math or physics, they don’t fare as well as the boys.
I suspect prejudice doesn’t have a thing to do with it. I suspect it’s just a state,net of fact.
I think it’s highly variable and probably has a great deal to do with the way, and the things, they are taught.
I do a lot of physics and astronomy outreach, including an annual event called Expanding Your Horizons, which is for middle school aged girls. Note the Venus symbol in their logo. I’m happy to help them (and doing this outreach creates opportunities for me, too), but I’m increasingly uneasy with the prevelance of girls-only events like this. They’re nothing new; I remember my high school calculus teacher advertising a girls-only science event, back about 1989. I wouldn’t mind it if there were separate boys’ and girls’ events (kids act differently when they’re around their own sex), but aside from the Boy Scouts, I can’t think of any boys-only science outreach.
As Rob points out, girls actually do better in these subjects, at least in school. I’d noticed it as a kid—we had more girls in my advanced math classes. But the premise of these programs seems to be not that girls need any extra help to reach par with boys in ability, but that it’s unacceptable that girls don’t choose to go into these fields as often. It would seem, from the evidence, more justifiable to have this kind of outreach aimed at boys to help themimprove their actual abilities to catch up to girls.
I happened to notice a few years ago that about 90% of the students from my local high school who have become doctors in the last 25 years or so are women. (Before that time it was probably 100% the other way with all male students becoming doctors.)
I know one male student from my high school class who talked about nothing else in school as his father was really the only local thoracic surgeon, but when I saw he at a class reunion he said that he was frightened away from the quarter million dollars or so of college loan payments. However, his sister did become a doctor.
I remember hearing one very liberal mother complain that all of the students in medical school are now women. That’s from a family with a least three male doctors, but her son could never get into medical school she complained as female students are taking up all the available slots.
However, when I took calculus (or tried to take calculus) around this time in school the male to female ratio seemed to be about 50:1 as I only remember maybe one female in those classes, although I think one of my calculus professors was female…
That is a silly premise when you actually look at those fields as careers. I mean, excepting the T & E in STEM, those fields all involve lots of education and work in return for very little pay.
I studied chemistry as an undergrad not that long ago. Most of my female classmates (of which there were many) were there to prepare for med school to become doctors and pick their tax bracket. I think that’s a better choice than grad school to become a scientist, spending the first decade of your career competing with lots of people around the world for the privilege of making less than $40k/year until maybe you get tenure.