Just completing some Equality Act 'training' and apparently I got this question wrong...

“A research experiment in which 1,200 secondary school pupils in England placed bets on their examination results found boys reduced their stakes when female teachers did the marking – and were right to do so. Women teachers ‘did tend to award lower marks to male pupils than external examiners.’

“One purpose of higher education is to bring out the potential of all students, irrespective of their gender or other characteristics. But past research has suggested that the lower attainment of men is often explained by those working in universities through a‘deficit model’, in which a lack of success is linked to students’own characteristics. In contrast, explanations for the relative performance of students from different ethnic groups tend to mix the deficit model with other reasons to do with institutional processes and discrimination.”

“Women outperforming men is a worldwide trend. In Education at a Glance 2015, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported:
Women make up the majority of entrants into tertiary education in all [OECD] countries except Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Turkey. On average across OECD countries, 54% of new entrants are women.”

“According to UCAS, by 2015, an 18-year old woman was 35 per cent more likely to enter higher education than an 18-year old man. This means 36,000 fewer 18-year old men entered higher education than if the rates for men and women had been equal.”

“Among applicants who have been in receipt of free school meals, young women are 51 per cent more likely to make it to higher education (19.8 per cent compared to 13.1 per cent for men). Entry rates for disadvantaged boys are also relatively worse compared to non-disadvantaged boys than the equivalent picture for girls.”

“It is not only at entry to higher education that men underperform. Data kindly provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency for this report show that, in 2013/14, the proportion of (HESA), full-time, first-degree students no longer in higher education following their year of entry was 8 per cent for men and 6 per cent for women. Earlier work by the Higher Education Academy also found a higher proportion of male students withdrew with a lower level qualification than they had originally hoped to achieve or no award than women in nearly all disciplines. One of the biggest gaps was in Education, which men were much less likely to enter in the first place: one- in-ten (10 per cent) men withdrew without their award against one-in-17 (6 per cent) women.”

“The new HESA data also show that, in 2014/15, 73 per cent of female and 69 per cent of male first-degree qualifiers secured a so-called‘good’degree of a 2:1 or above.33 The Higher Education Academy’s analysis of earlier data for 2010/11 suggests men’s degree results are worse than women’s in nearly all disciplines:
Women achieved higher percentages of upper degrees in 27/30 disciplines; only in Built Environment, Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Social Work and Policy did men secure one more
often and their advantage over women in these disciplines was marginal in all cases – only a 1-2% lead. Conversely, in some of the disciplines where women secured higher percentages of upper degrees than men, their lead was more substantial; for example, it was 13-14% higher in GEES [Geography, Earth and Environmental Science], Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism, Marketing, and Veterinary Medicine.”

www.hepi.ac.uk/

Makes me so angry I actually want to punch something, OP.

Reminds me of having to sit Level 1 City and Guilds maths and English tests before being able to take a course at a college not so long ago. I have A-level English and a degree that required me to be highly literate. Failed both tests. Maths because I did all the calculations in my head and although I'd got the answers right had failed to 'work them out the correct way'. English because the online test was so full of ambiguity and ill-thought-through questions (like the OP's) that most didn't have one correct answer. According to the woman administering the tests everyone knows they're ridiculous. She showed me the required answers and I filled them in.

Visual representation.

? Sure it is. You can have positive racism as well as negative. We Asians are racially stereotyped as very smart and studious.

the average ‘Attainment 8’ score for pupils in England was 50.2 out of 90.0 in the 2019 to 2020 academic year – Attainment 8 measures pupils’ results in 8 GCSE-level qualifications

pupils from the Chinese ethnic group had the highest score out of all ethnic groups (67.6)

Statistics speak for themselves. Pupils from Asian backgrounds, especially Chinese and Indian, backgrounds do better. The attainment level of traveller and Irish traveller communities were way below.

www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/gcse-results-attainment-8-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest#by-ethnicity

Advantage isn’t results in exams. It’s the opportunity to even go to higher education. University is majority women at 55% of university students. Women are also the beneficiaries of targeted women only bursaries and scholarships that makes university possible for poor women but not poor men.

There are specific projects that target male applicants too. I've worked on a number of projects aimed at white working class boys.

I deliver an entire lecture on women's career development as part of a masters course I run.... the whole session is based on the fact that women are still disadvantaged in the work place.

The idea the women are not disadvantaged in education as they outperform their male counterparts is a bit disingenuous too as there is a huge amount of evidence showing that stereotypes and societal expectations impact course preference and choices from a very young age.

This training provider sounds very suspect.

he fact that white children perform better in school and university doesn’t mean they have an advantag

White working class boys in seaside towns are the worst performing group for education.

It’s well studied that girls get more one on one attention than boys and more praise than boys.

Are you sure about that? In my (admittedly a few many years ago) university career, we replicated Dale Spender's research into this. The exact opposite to your claim is what we found. Boys get way more attention than girls. I suggest you read her books "Invisible Women, The Schooling Scandal" "Learning to Lose" and "Man Made Language"

You’re still focusing on “advantage” in education to mean “perform better in exams at school as children”. Why?

Listen to yourselves!
The fact that girls perform better in school and university doesn't mean they have an advantage

Just insert white people...
the fact that white children perform better in school and university doesn’t mean they have an advantage

YES it does. Whenever any one demographic performs better by a larger margin, there is always some outside advantage at work. Because all children of both sexes and all races start out with exact same potential. If you disagree with this and say one demographic just happens to “work harder” than the others then that is a sexist or racist belief.

Oh and Asian girls do statistically the best at exams so not just a case of simple race bias.

And women are disadvantaged when it comes to Ph.D.

www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/10/when-you-re-only-woman-challenges-female-phd-students-male-dominated-cohorts

Women are less likely to pursue a Ph.D are drop out at a higher proportion compared to males.

Better teaching?

More likely that girls generally do more homework, take better notes, are more attentive in class, apply themselves and hit maturity levels earlier.

As for men getting paid more than women because of motherhood, the pay gap just widens after motherhood and is not caused by it.

The pay gap is a motherhood penalty, not a woman penalty.

Only woman are mothers.

I wouldn't take advantage to mean that. I would take it to mean who gets a helping hand or a head start.

Exactly. The fact that girls perform better in school and university doesn't mean they have an advantage. It means that they perform better. Arguably boys have an advantage, because they have more access to top schools (Eton, Harrow etc), they tend to receive more attention from teachers and they aren't hindered by students of the opposite sex sexually harassing and assaulting them.

“but when men are paid more than women, it is not due to “hard work”?”

Not necessarily, no

Advantage isn’t results in exams. It’s the opportunity to even go to higher education. University is majority women at 55% of university students. Women are also the beneficiaries of targeted women only bursaries and scholarships that makes university possible for poor women but not poor men.

That’s your definition of advantage. Men have the advantage of being able to walk home safely when at university. Men have the advantage of not being asked to give a blowjob in exchange for a favourable grade. Men have the advantage of being able to piss wherever they like on campus and women can’t do fuck all about it. Men have the advantage of dominating University societies. In the USA, men’s college sport has the advantage of billions of dollars more funding per year than women’s sport.

The question said “advantage”. It did not define it as “opportunity to go to even higher education.”

I'd raise both points OP, I don't think I could let those lie!

At best, it's a poorly worded question where 'advantage' isn't defined and the correct 'false' answer completely detracts from the important point that men are advantaged in the work place. It's like it's trying to catch you out and make the point that men aren't as advantaged as people think. But they are.

Goes without saying that better exam results doesn't equal an advantage. Honest to god. It's something that's obviously difficult to measure and I'm not sure what studies there have been, but from my own experiences I would say the fact that girls are made to feel that STEM is for boys and that they need to dumb themselves down so boys will find them attractive are two definite disadvantages.

Better teaching. Same reason why white people do better than black people. It’s not due to white people “working harder”.
Nice bit of massively oversimplification there. If only solving educational outcome gaps was as simple as that.

Of course women and girls are disadvantaged in education. Women are more likely to be sexually assaulted on campus, more likely to be abused, cancelled or no-platformed for having different views, more likely to be victims of sexual harassment from supervisors, more likely to lose their female only spaces on campus, and more likely to have fewer total education days due to female-specific health issues.

Why is “advantage” just results in exams?