A new NBER paper tries to answer the above question for the US. They cite lots of reasons, most of which explain why female participation has increased including discrimination reduction, career expectations etc., Behavioural differences among teenagers were also a big factor with boys displaying far more "behavioural problems" and lower non-cognitive skills allowing girls to leap-frog in the race for college access. They note that female participation exceeds males in almost all OECD countries now. Interestingly, they argue that the gender ratio is returning to pre WW-II levels when more women attended college than men, for example large teacher training colleges for women.
http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html
8 comments:
The girl-boy gap in school attainment (girls doing better) seems to be a trend.Its very evident in Ireland. Feminization of the teaching profession is sometimes mentioned as a factor but I haven't seen any hard evidence.
Cognitive ability is pretty much the same by sex (I think) so its not that: effort,perhaps? The Leaving Cert seems to largely rely on memory anyway. I don't know what the evidence is of sex differences in memory ability? Whenever I check for sex differences amongst the classes I teach, I find none.
At the risk of being provocative (that's me folks!) I can't help wonder would there be a bigger hullabaloo if the gap was the other way around?
The teaching feminisation argument is always there alright but doesn't feel like the type of thing that would do it. For example, if we were to take a school level index of achievement among boys and correlated it with degree of feministaion at the school level as measured by, for example, teacher gender ratio and perhaps even observational evidence on some metric of masculinism/feminisation (if these are the words!) i would be surprised if this would be massively significant.
The issues of implusivity, concentration, study motivation etc., among teenage boys is one that definitely demands great attention in Ireland. There has to be ways to channel the energies of teenage boys in ways that promote them achieving in domains other than sport. Also, road-deaths, suicides, major alcohol-related harm, crime are hugely young-male issues. I suppose the one argument is that we need to start earlier but I still believe that incentives operate whether or not you've had an early child-hood intervention. If private executives can get an entire planet to watch something like pop-idol surely there must be a way to get young men to channel their energies to the long-term benefit.
sorry once again for the photo, i think i might take it off
Martin, Kevin
Would be interesting to use the results from your paper with Colm to examine what areas in particular were generating the gender gap in school attainment.
Leave the photo.Always wanted to know what you looked like on your confirmation day.
Any explanation of the female/male gap in Ireland has to explain why its increasing over time. It would be useful to know whether the gap exists across the range of abilities or just towards one tail (i.e. is it only smart girls that are smarter than smart boys?). It would also be useful to know when does it kick in:do we observe the same at Junior Cert?
My conjecture is that it is a bigger issue for the Leaving. I also conjecture that this is not such an issue at 3rd level. This could be because a different form of learning is required or because boys finally grow up in college.
The PISA data (which I have) which is for 15 year olds might be informative.
kevin,
would be really interested in seeing some of the key gender differences in the PISA data. In what specific areas are girls outperforming boys? Also, is it the case that there are skills differences or is it simply that the system is now geared more toward girls. Perhaps worth thinking of as a research note?
Orla and I are looking at impulsivity among toddlers and gender/sex differences will be a big part of this.
PISA measures attainment in science,maths & English (or wahtever the native language is) but has information on lots of other stuff at individual and schol level.I have the 2001 data but there is also the 2003 wave so one could look at changes and the 2006 wave will be out at some point.
On the sex differences in toddlers,you probably know of the work by Baron-Cohen (not Borat) on new-borns. Doreen Kimura is also good.
a paper on the ssrn shows that in britain women are more likely to finish their degree and get honours but are less likely to get firsts
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=320552
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