Females outperforming males at uni

[monkeytrousers]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8085011.stm

Agree with monkeytrousers' last post. I have expressed similar sentiments on MN before (that women and men are as equal as they ever will be, in the UK at least) and been shot down!

I think it's just the nature of our species to moan BA

I was thinking about this story the other day and getting intensely irritated - somehow it's only a story because it's this way round, as in shock horror - girls outperform boys!

I think the figures are fairly marginal aren't they - girls are doing slightly better than boys. Can you imagine that being a story if boys were doing slightly better than girls? It's a non-story isn't it?!?

agree with bramshott

and in my experience (as a university lecturer) one main reason for male undergraduates to underperform is not because they would need a different teaching/assessment style (60% of the mark is still exams in my dept), but because they overestimate their own abilities and consequently underestimate their need to put the work in

I also think that some posters on MN would rather moan about men, inequality etc than actually use their brain to work out how to negotiate a better deal for themselves in a society that does actually allow them to do so!

It's a positive spin on a story which highlights a worrying trend re: boys underachievement in education. Equality or the lack of it has very little to do with this trend IMO.

x posts cory

Is this overestimation a new trend then?

Interesting fact(from the BBC website):

'In the past, girls always needed a higher mark than boys in the 11+ to get into Grammar School.' - presumably in the name of equality.

Things may have been more equal sooner in the professional workplace if there had been less manipulation at this stage.

thedolly - that is indeed true. Back in those days, there were fewer grammar school places for girls. Presumably the people in power thought it didn't really matter if girls lost out, after all, they'd only be chained to the kitchen sink...

How about the idea of work creches - everywhere. Great ones. Ones where you can can get paged when your baby is hungry.

It's the whole idea of a work/life divide. Kids are the most valuable resoucse any society has - and that includes for people with no kids as we aree facing with the pensions crisis shows - it's about time they but them at the top of the pyramnd instead of at the bottom.

Work crèches are far from ideal IMO. I don't think babies should be subjected to their parents' daily commute to work if at all possible.

Hmm, yes - hadn't thought of the commute.

Just trying to think of a system that doesn't divide the home from work so much. I know a lot of you will groan now, cos I'm about to mention evolution (sorry) but for millions of years women did not rely on men for their subsitance - they worked and gathered together, with their kids, with a massive system of allo-mothers, everyone knew eachother and each trusted the other and worked as a team. The men basicallyt provided protection against other men.

It's only since the invention of agriculture that men have been able to concentrate the resources and so monopolise and contgrol the movement of women, thereby allowing them to monopolise them - and the men with the most resources monopolising more of them).

In some ways western society has dismantled this but has not thought about the 'child' problem.

Here in Paris quite a lot of women and men work very close to their home and children's school so that they can see their children at lunch time / pop back home or do child-related errands (doctors appointments, teacher meetings) during the working day. I do think that a lot of problems are mitigated (if not solved) when work/home/school are in close geographical proximity.

Thats really interesting, and obvious really isn't it?

Well of course it would be easier, but how many of us get that option!

I know, but is feminism demanding that option while it demands more women in high stress jobs with long hours - the ones men do traditionally?

I think that the British have a culture of a long commute (in order to have a house and garden, often enough) that means that they don't always look at the low-commute options. I agree that it isn't always easy or possible to live very close to work and school - but you can at least try juggling with your priorities.

I grew up in England with a father who did a long commute in the train to London every day; a mother who worked quite a way from home in another direction; and my sister and I were at one point in schools in different towns, a 30 minute bus journey from our home. In retrospect I think it was madness, and I would never organise that sort of lifestyle for my own family. I really like having the possibility of having lunch with my family during the working/school week if I so choose!

Been watching this thread develop for the last few days and I must admit when I saw the origial news story I did think the same as Bramshott - this would not be a story if it were boys outperforming.

Like cory I used to lecture and agree with what she said but my experience was mainly to graduate (MBA) students and in general I would say women were less confident than men in classroom discussion which is a staple of the MBA teaching routine. Women also tended to far underestimate their actual ability. I used to make considerable effort trying to encourage women to speak to me and the class about their experiences and opinions while equally I had to put a fair amount of effort in to get men to shut up. Men tended to be over confident in giving opinons and answers.

Often I found women preferred to come and talk to me after the class after thay had thought for a while about what they wanted to say. Some men did too but it was noticeable how many women preferred to do it rather than ask questions in class time.

My experience of marking both formal exam papers and also project work was that women and men faired equally well overall. I used to do specific statistical tests to make sure that both the mean and the standard deviation of my marking of men and women was not being unconciously biased by male and female styles. I did not find a systematic under or over perfomance by one sex over the other.

I think that the typical regime I had of 50% of the marks going to project work and 50% going to formal exams probably did even out the natural sex differences in performance in those two types of assessment.

It is possible that the shift to more project work at both AS level and undergraduate level has favoured women over men.

That said, employers do undervalue women and if women undervalue themselves (as I often found they did in lectures) the bias will be perpetuated and reinforced against women in the work place. It is bad for the economy and firms to see female talent going to waste.

My experience is that women are not intellectually less (or more) capable than men in the classroom setting but they do I think have different talents and ways of working that complement men's talents and offset some of the downsides of men's working modes such as over confidence.

For anyone that's interested this is a really good new book about this www.susanpinker.com/book.html