Meet the Other Phone. Protection built in.

Meet the Other Phone.
Protection built in.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

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

137 replies

ChatterChattee · 03/06/2021 09:01

Question: Statistically, men have an advantage over women in education and the workplace.

I chose 'True.'

Apparently, I was wrong. The correct answer is:

'False: Men are paid more than women in the workplace. However, girls and women now outperform men at school and university."

Angry

There are soooo many things wrong with that statement! Conflating 'an advantage,' 'being paid,' and 'outperforming,' for one thing.

OP posts:
WarOnWomen · 03/06/2021 10:08

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

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:08

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.

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:10

@WarOnWomen

Oh and Asian girls do statistically the best at exams so not just a case of simple race bias.
? Sure it is. You can have positive racism as well as negative. We Asians are racially stereotyped as very smart and studious.
NotBadConsidering · 03/06/2021 10:10

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

slug · 03/06/2021 10:11

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"

Tibtom · 03/06/2021 10:15

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.

DelBocaVista · 03/06/2021 10:17

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.

DelBocaVista · 03/06/2021 10:21

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.

WarOnWomen · 03/06/2021 10:24

? 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

WarOnWomen · 03/06/2021 10:27

Visual representation.

Just completing some Equality Act 'training' and apparently I got this question wrong...
Just completing some Equality Act 'training' and apparently I got this question wrong...
Shedbuilder · 03/06/2021 10:28

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.

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:30

@slug

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"

Yes. According to U.K. HEPI

“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/

SpamIAm · 03/06/2021 10:33

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

But that doesn't work because it's not true. Pupils from an Asian background perform the best and white working class boys perform the worst. So, if anything, that just supports the point that advantage doesn't equal better performance.

SunnydaleClassProtector99 · 03/06/2021 10:33

Firstly, there are many studies that prove boys are favoured in mixed sex education settings, so girls aren't taught better.
Secondly, schools analyse data carefully when allocating provision. It's looked at on an individual, school wide and nation wide level. So no girls don't get more 1:1, but they might be allocated 1:1 if a particular cohort shows girls are falling behind.
I deliver 1:1 as well as group intervention. It's very rare for girls to be as non compliant as boys, where I might get a chair thrown at me because they don't want to do catch up maths.

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:34

@WarOnWomen
Your point? I agree/know Asians have higher attainment levels, but I am saying that it is because we have advantage of positive racism. Have you never hear of positive racism before?

Why do you think we do better? Do you think we are naturally...what? Harder working? More intelligent?

VanGoghsDog · 03/06/2021 10:35

How does this positive racism towards Asian people manifest in an education and work environment?

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:36

Lol. Love how all “Asians” are lumped together but when it comes to how white people perform, it’s sliced down to the subgroup of “working class white boys” why not compare “Asians” to rich white girls?

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:39

@VanGoghsDog

How does this positive racism towards Asian people manifest in an education and work environment?
We are racially stereotyped as clever and studious...especially good at maths and sciences.

Here is an article on the harm of this stereotype and how it operates.

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201302/the-pain-positive-stereotypes

TheWeeDonkey · 03/06/2021 10:41

I just find it a really badly worded question. Advantage, performance and measuring success on pay are different things to me, but then I tend to overthink things like this.

For me personally I know a lot of people who have been very successful without what we would conventionally see as 'advantage'. Conversely I know a lot of people who've had advantage over others who have been less successful given the measure used on this question and answer.

MsFogi · 03/06/2021 10:43

I am lost - what "advantage" do girls have in education over boys? Statistically they may do better at school than boys (ie come out with higher marks/more exams) but is that due to an inbuilt advantage in the system or is it for another reason (eg they work harder)? As far as I can see, girls in a mixed sex school have to put up with lots of badly behaved boys (in my dds' case they had to sit next to naughty boys in junior school because they were well-behaved so that was helpful!), they often have to put up with hearing rubbish about girls not being good at maths/sciences (or unconscious bias around this), in secondary school they have to put up with all sorts of sexism from fellow pupils, in some cases they spend ages doing make up/on beauty regimes (time that could be spent working) etc etc.
I am genuinely interested on where an education system (which I assume was set up by men for boys) is institutionally biased in favour of girls.

VanGoghsDog · 03/06/2021 10:45

@PlanDeRaccordement

Yes, I'm aware that stereotypes are bad.

None of that answers the question I asked.

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:46

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

Not true. From 18-39, the gender pay gap is less than 1%, which is statistically insignificant. That fraction 1% is due fewer women having children young. It is only after age 40, when vast majority mothers return to the workforce that the pay gap appears at a high 11.2%

PlanDeRaccordement · 03/06/2021 10:48

[quote VanGoghsDog]@PlanDeRaccordement

Yes, I'm aware that stereotypes are bad.

None of that answers the question I asked.[/quote]
You didn’t read the article. It included a study on how work tasks are assigned to Asians clearly based on racial stereotypes

thepuredrop · 03/06/2021 10:49

Not sure why the differences are positioned as being more intelligent/hard-working vs being less intelligent/lazy, given this is FWR, socialisation of children will encourage behaviours which will be advantageous in certain areas but not others.

MalagaNights · 03/06/2021 10:50

Girls have an advantage because they work harder.
Asian students have advantage because they work harder.

The interesting question is why. Why do girls and Asian children work harder than say white boys?
There will be many cultural reasons which place one group in a position to maximise educational opportunity whilst other groups don't make choices to invest in education, which is of course a disadvantage.

Yes men on average get paid more which is an advantage. The question again is why. Which will have multifaceted biological and cultural reasons one factor of which may be discrimination.

The logical flip flopping between unequal outcomes are/ aren't a problem of unfairness and women are disadvantaged both when their outcomes are higher and lower then mens is incredible to watch here.

Swipe left for the next trending thread