Why do boys underperform

[sidress]

This is partly in response to a comment on another forum with someone saying that in our lea there is an all girls state school that perform better in league tables than theirs (and disproportionately with levels of deprivation pupils come from) but the girls in the mixed comp outperform the girls in the single sex school.

With two sons and daughters each, I can see the same trend with all except eldest son who doesn't mind revising and less time to go out with friends (though we make sure he has a 'life' out of school as well). Girls have been outperforming boys at all levels of curriculum for about a decade.

Personally I blame it on the teaching styles used that obviously suit girls more than boys. No surprise when 99% of primary teachers are women, at the most formative stage of a child's life, and secondaries seem heading the same way. Also our secondary has much more boys on disciplinary records than girls, so whether they all deserve to be or the school take a heavier handed approach to boys, there is something different about how they are being treated. Or is there another plausible reason boys find it harder so I can prevent mine having a similar fate?

The same is true across the top business schools in America. Many people are shocked by it because it is not often mentioned.

poetsandquants.com/2011/04/28/why-do-men-outperform-women-at-harvard-business-school/

The comments made at the bottom of the article are more insightul than the analysis in the article. This is because the whole subject is in essence political and progressive.

Just googled to see if it is also the case for IQ test scores, and it seems that at the highest level men outperform women.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm

I often wonder if the biological requirement on girls to get their act together at a certain age impacts on their organisational and therefore learning skills. If you start your periods at 9 or 10 which is quite common these days, you just need to start thinking ahead, organising, being responsible. A 9 or 10 year old boy can still be very immature in those areas.

FWIW, I think it's a lot more to do with expectations and acceptable behaviours than any genetic stuff. Genetics obviously plays a part but it's become the norm to argue that boys are like X and girls are like Y and there's no societal effect. I have a boy and a girl and people are constantly trying to say "oh that's girls" or "oh that's boys" for almost any behaviour you can think of.

What wordfactory said

margoandjerry - LOVE your username first of all!

It's an interesting point about girls having to 'get their act together' with managing periods at what is really a very young age. They are also expected to be super-discreet about it too which means they also learn that periods are something to be ashamed of. I remember getting an almighty bollocking of my mum because I merely mentioned periods in front of my then 13-year old brother!

thanks josierosie .

Here's my "it's all cultural" example. You can't buy craft kits for boys. Because boys apparently don't do craft. Craft kits are all aimed at girls (make a butterfly, make a fairy etc). Even colouring-in is a girly pursuit these days.

There's this expectation that boys should be running around doing sport and not indoors concentrating on doing something detailed and dexterous and creative. But men dominate the world of high end restaurant chefing. And they dominate the art world. So actually they are able to do focussed, dexterous, creative things and, because of the advantages that society gives to men in work, they become dominant in these fields. So why do we persist in saying that boys don't/can't/won't do this sort of thing?

Kirsty Bloody Alsopp was saying that her boys won't sit down or do craft. But, she said, they love cooking because "I think they love the numbers". No Kirsty. They are little boys. They love cooking. All children love cooking. Why do you have to make it a testament to their boyishness and inherent mathematical skills? So suddenly boys like cooking because of the maths and, by extension, girls like cooking because it's nurturing and non-competitive

Perhaps - but most of the boys I know love Lego, and spend hours gladly producing detailed and dexterous models. Perhaps this is the "crafts" outlet of many boys? My own ds creates monorails and buildings with sliding doors kitless from Lego, as well as robots with power functions - talk about creativity and problem solving!

Yes that's exactly to my point. Boys can and do do this stuff and enjoy it. We're just all very keen to say that girls do craft and reading and boys do sport and maths.

"You can't buy craft kits for boys" - the first craft kits available were aimed at boys...airfix, meccano etc.

I believe the problem has been the shifts in educational thinking which is imposed on schools/teachers.

For example, it is widely believed that boys prefer kinaesthetic learning but this research suggests otherwise and from experience I can relate to all the responses from the students within the study and I have changed my lesson planning with this study in mind (especially my option groups which at the moment are very boy heavy).

I haven't been observed yet with these groups - but that is a different thread entirely! but I have noticed immediately a change in the attitude to learning from the boys when they have less time to take a break (less kinaesthetic learning)

I don't believe one can say that because men are dominating the workforce and higher salaries now this will be true forever.

Of course the (mainly) white men in power and high salaries now were the fruit of an education received 20-30-40 years ago and things have changed radically now.

I work for a large corporate and we see many more women but also many more ethnic minorities especially young Indian men climbing the career ladder very quicly and successfully. Interestingly a lot of these men actually value education very highly and having been involved in interviews with a number of them over the last few years, I have noticed they do tend to take more notice of academic qualifications in candidates. But this is anectodal anyway.

I don't believe for a minute that boys brought up with no sense of discipline, concentration and low academic achievement will be in those seats in 30 years time. Let's not fool ourselves that if our boys will leave school with rubbish GCSEs and A-levels they will land a job easily or any job that will lead to high rewards - it's not going to happen.

good points, margoandjerry, not least the one about timing

when dd was 11 she had reached puberty, she was physically a woman, she was clearly thinking more and more like an adult in terms of planning ahead, thinking about the outcomes she wanted, admiring women who had reached the kind of future she might like and finding out how they got there

ds at 11 is still very much a little boy, no physical changes have happened and his role models are still a child's role models iyswim: famous footballers, rappers, just one step away from Superman really; they don't involve any element of "I can realistically plan to be like this person"

I expect in a few years he will have caught up; I know my brother did. In fact, he caught up a little too much and went from a sweet giggly little thing to a totally serious driven person in the space of a few years; wouldn't mind if ds stopped halfway tbh

'Kirsty Bloody Alsopp '

I think that's her full name . Sounds like just the sort of moronic rubbish she would come out with . 'I think they like the numbers' - what a load of rubbish!

The stats are used very misleadingly. Some boys underachieve, some don't. Some girls achieve highly, some don't. Generally, girls only significantly outperform boys in literacy, and always have. The 'gaps' in achievement in maths and science are barely enough to be considered noteworthy.

This has been so since records began. There are quotes from the 1800s stating that boys were just deeper thinkers or were less show-offy than girls, which, reading between the lines meant that the girls were apparently performing better. Learning styles have varied wildly across that time, and yet it remains fairly static.

There are much, much bigger gaps when results are considered in terms of race or socioeconomic background and yet it is gender which we pay attention to. There are also bugger variations within gender groups than between them.

Also, access has ha a lot to do with it. For example, for years Physics was considered a male subject and very few females took it. However, those females that did achieved highly. However, it is only now that there are lots of girls taking the subject that people have started bleating about boys underachievement in that area.

What exactly are 'male' learning styles? There is no evidence to suggest that boys perform better in certain types of assessments or with certain approaches to teaching. And what if using these so-called boy-friendly approaches disadvantages the girls? Is that acceptable? Similarly, why do we not take up those things which have shown to improve girls learning? For example, studies have shown that where single-sex classes were introduced into schools to try and address boys underachievement, it had no impact on the boys achievement, but the girls actually improved, yet none of these schools kept these approaches up.

I believe, like several others have said, a lot of it comes down to expectation. A girl takes charge and tries to organise everyone else, she is bossy and this is discouraged. A boy does it and he is a natural leader and encouraged. Girls are definitely encouraged to do activities in their early years which set them in better stead for schooling (craft, reading, beads etc) than boys, who are expected to be running about and being boisterous.

The shools where the gap is the smallest are the ones who treat achievement as an individual issue, not working on gender stereotypes and trying to enable every child to achieve their full potential, regardless of their gender.

The issue about why women aren't progressing as well as men in the workplace despite outperforming them academically is still because of childcare. When they have children that's where there's a discrepancy and by the time they have finished their families the men have overtaken them.

I think a lot of it is about expectations as folk have already said. I've got a very boyish boy, at the rough and tumble end of the character spectrum. He hates sitting still and listening and doing as he's told, but is under no illusion that we tolerate it! Least he'd better not be... We expect him to behave politely and sit and listen when it's appropriate and crack down on privileges when he doesn't, like if we catch him throwing lego, it gets jailed overnight. It will be interesting how he turns out (he's only 4!)

Edustudent I agree with several things you say. We forget that statistically, you have a distribution of ability. Also what we expect children to learn varies wildly. When I was at my first senior school in the 80s (mixed comp) everyone did tech drawing, woodwork, metalwork, art, needlework and cookery. When I went to my next one at 13 (girl's comp) there was no woodwork, metalwork and tech drawing. I complained and was told young ladies don't do that sort of thing. I ended up getting a couple of physics degrees so your comments about physics made me . HOWEVER, at the mixed school, I was not positively encouraged to do maths and science even though I was patently good at them. I had less aggro at the girls' school. We were taught that nothing was impossible for us, even though the basic curriculum had already written off several subjects. Go figure.

I read something the other day about 11+ quotas back in the 50s. More girls were passing it even then and so quotas were brought in to positively discriminate in favour of the boys. I would dearly love to know the current demographics for 11+ areas... but I am not in the least surprised that girls do better at GCSE. Maturity is key, once you remove all differences in opportunity.

And there is a topic for another day...

Like others have said, it really doesn't matter because when it comes to it, men outperform women as soon as they hit the workplace.

I have no idea about biology, but I attended a teaching seminar where we learnt that the part of the brain responsible for memory develops faster in girls, so they are better at school at a younger age.

Moonbells There's a lot of interesting research around subject choice and careers advice, especially comparing single sex/co-ed.

And you're right about the 11+. Many girls didn't get grammar school places when boys who scored lower did, as there were more places for boys and so they didn't need to achieve such a high score to get in. Like you say, it would be interesting to see how that works now, particularly in areas with co-educational grammar schools, presuming they don't select according to gender as well as academic achievement, i.e. holding 50% of places for girls and 50% for boys. Might try and find out actually not that I have a dissertation I should be writing

As a man I would suggest that much of the problem lies with expectations and aspirations ( maybe one follows the other?)

As a child I was taught to be polite, well behaved and to speak only when spoken to and not to run around - especially not to run around like a tearaway. Running around was for outside playing football or cricket or bike races or other games. I was expected to sit and learn from an early age because I had to do well at school. My future depended on it. I would have to work one day and support a family.

My dad worked. His presence was defined by his absence at work. I had to be like dad ( not like my teachers and they were not my role models).

Now, when I recenly mentioned here that I had taught my DS to sit down and at a table and I had taught him how to read and write, I got a lot of stick from teachers who told me I should not do that because he was too young.

I say rubbish. Its schools - the curriculum, the expectations they have of boys, the way we teach and examine in education these days and mostly because boys do not see themsleves as having any kind of responsibility in an economic future and so they become irrisponsible, immature bum wrigglers.