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

[ChatterChattee]

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."

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

What a poorly worded question. Even splitting it into two questions e.g.

1. Statistically men and boys have an advantage in in the workplace over women and girls. True/ false

2. Statistically, men and boys have an advantage in education over women and girls. True/ false.

Results in equally poorly worded question, no account of age, social background or ethic background just to name a few variables. Ridiculous.

However, with the original question the answer is indeed false if you use Boolean algebra...as only one statement is true so it has to be false. (That is the extent of my knowledge as am earwigging conversations on A-level computer science.)

Still a lazy question.

Yes you’re all correct.
Girls/women achieve higher attainment by working twice as hard as the lazy boys/men. 🙄 (sarcasm)

And Asian people, like myself, achieve the higher attainment by being harder working than other races. 🙄 (sarcasm)

There is no such thing as systemic sexism or racism in the education system affecting the outcomes whatsoever. It’s a perfect meritocracy based on hard work. Ok. Got it. Leaving the thread now.

Do you think girls work harder at school because they're socialised to be people pleasers, where as the "boys will be boys" attitude is still very prevalent in society? Just thinking back to my school days.

You didn’t read the article. It included a study on how work tasks are assigned to Asians clearly based on racial stereotypes

I did read it. It didn't provide any evidence that this happens in education or the workplace. It only showed that in studies, where they made that happen, it had poor outcomes.

There is no such thing as systemic sexism or racism in the education system affecting the outcomes whatsoever. It’s a perfect meritocracy based on hard work. Ok. Got it. Leaving the thread now.

Leaving without justifying why you think “advantage” pertains only to academic performance and outcomes, rather than all the other aspects of education in which women are disadvantaged, and not addressing the disadvantage at Ph.D level either. You’ve focused on one area of “education” and neglected the rest.

Females are statistically more likely to be agreeable therefore conformist, which is an advantage at school.
Males are more likely to be risk takers and less conscientious, which is a disadvantage at school.

The differences are small but significant enough to create differing outcomes.

The view on here seems to be that the differences are entirely cultural and could be trained out if we provided the right environment.
Who knows?

What we do know is differences exist and they provide advantages and disadvantages in different ways in different contexts.

It was a stupid question.
The fact that girl's superior performance at exams is being put down to working harder is interesting. Girls are being told they aren't really intelligent or gifted but just slog away at it. Boys, however can fail exams because they're a gifted, unconventional, non confirming genius. Imagine if it was the other way round, if boys were passing the exams it would be put down to innate superiority.

One of the issue with the performance gap is language skills, boys who don't do sustained reading for pleasure often suffer but often reading is seen as a girly activity no real boy would do. This is a disadvantage created by an advantage, the male genius theory which gives middling boys a sense of superiority.

I remember the whole 11+ positive discrimination debacle- now that really was giving a structural advantage.

[quote PlanDeRaccordement]@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?[/quote]
I am saying that better teaching (or lack of) cannot account for boys not attaining at the same level as girls. Similarly, it cannot account for the differences in attainment for white/minority ethnic groups because attainment differs amongst us too. The white traveller communities' attainments also highlight this.

“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.”

The greater appetite for higher education among women is rational in financial terms because the financial returns from higher education have been larger for women than for men. But this gap is not due to female graduates earning more: in fact, they earn less on average. It is due to non- graduate women typically earning significantly less than non-graduate men.

Also:

Men still outperform women in some of the most prestigious areas – such as entry to the highest-tariff institutions, to Science and Engineering courses and to research degrees. Moreover, on some indicators, men have better employment outcomes. Six months after leaving higher education, women are more likely to be in work but men are more likely to be in professional occupations. Among those with jobs, men also earn higher incomes on average.

So a gender pay gap from the get go.

www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Boys-to-Men.pdf

Sounds like a really poorly worded question to me.

I agree that there probably are areas in education where girls have an advantage - especially in primary school, where the typical socialisation of girls encourages them to be good and quiet and sit still and act in a way that pleases teachers. Other areas, like having only terminal exams, might favour boys. So I don't think it's possible to say that there is a statistical advantage for either during education, because those things can't be as easily measured. Using exam performance as the proxy measure for advantage is problematic for many reasons, even if it is true that girls statistically perform better - that's still not what is being asked.

So it's a badly written question.

So many people who are involved in writing assessments and surveys don't seem to have had much training in writing good, unambiguous questions that measure what they are hoping to find out.

I am participating in a Covid survey from UCL, who you'd hope would train their researchers well. It's also poorly written. It's full of questions where you have to mark a sentence like "I become extremely upset when I think about past events" with a frequency of 'never, rarely, sometimes, often, usually'. I can tell from the other questions that they are looking not just for how often you become 'extremely' upset, but that they actually want you to rank the level of how upset you are, from 'mildly' to 'extremely'. But that's not what the question says. (Not the exact words/topic as the real questionnaire, but the style of question - a statement with an intensifier already in it, and then asking you to rank something based on levels of the intensifier).

There are whole fields of study on statistics and question writing, and it seems training courses and researchers don't actually look into it.

Where are we on the girls'-brains-maturing-earlier-and-having-more-neural-connections-than-boys research at the moment? I can never keep up. As soon as one study has declared there's no difference between boys' and girls' brains there seems to be another stating that girls have a neurological advantage during key educational years, after which boys catch up.

I don't really have a problem with the question, it seems tome like it's been worded to make the reader question their assumptions. The correct answer is false, that's how "and" questions work.

As for why some groups out-perform, bias can be a factor but I would say there is pretty ample reason in some cases to think it can be related to all kinds of other things, like cultural differences. Men out-earning in the workplace is largely down to reproductive role. And there is some real evidence that boys performing less at school may start in early years education where a poor start tends to follow students along through the years, and where young starting ages for school are a disadvantage to boys who are on average later to mature in that age group - though that's not the only factor by an means.

@Shedbuilder

Where are we on the girls'-brains-maturing-earlier-and-having-more-neural-connections-than-boys research at the moment? I can never keep up. As soon as one study has declared there's no difference between boys' and girls' brains there seems to be another stating that girls have a neurological advantage during key educational years, after which boys catch up.

I really don't think they have a clue as far as brain studies. Half the time they don't even know what they really mean or how much they can really see with the equipment we have.

From a behaviour POV though, or looking at things like reading readiness, I think it's pretty clear that boys have a different developmental trajectory.

I got a B in one my my favourite GCSE subjects because in the exam I had a killer headache and realised I was sitting in a pool of my own blood, flooding from a very bad period. If I was a boy there’s more chance I would have got my A. Still narks me decades later. Education is affected.

I spent years in clinical research. Some of the audits and questionnaires we got from professional organisations were so poorly written we wouldn't have got any meaningful data at all had we used them. We used have to spend a lot of time rewriting/redesigning data collection material before we could even start. I used to wonder what qualifications were needed to produce the material tbh. It happens everywhere.

Most non-white racial groups outperform white boys at school. By the logic of this training module, this must mean that non-white teenagers don't experience racism in school 🙄

When truth is that both sexes are equally lazy, or hard working.

[CITATION NEEDED]

This thread is evidence that people interpret "advantage" differently! So it was a crap question.

@TheWeeDonkey

Do you think girls work harder at school because they're socialised to be people pleasers, where as the "boys will be boys" attitude is still very prevalent in society? Just thinking back to my school days.

Yes, gender stereotypes. Much like the cultural stereotypes Plan is on about. Not sure they are 'advantages' though.

Not really. The pay gap is due to motherhood, not education.

And yet there's no disadvantageous pay gap between fathers and other men. On the contrary, fatherhood is an advantage on the workplace, fathers earn more than other men even if you take into account age seniority etc .
So fatherhood means you earn more but motherhood means you earn less. But there's no disadvantage...

"Have an advantage" is a stupid phrasing of that question.

Women and girls may outperform men and boys in education, but that doesn't routinely lead to them "getting ahead", or being "in a superior position" - they just have better exam results. So what is this "advantage" that they are supposed to have? Exam results do not automatically --> higher paid jobs, better positions - and women are generally disadvantaged in those areas.

So it's a bollocks question.

And I'm really horrified that an international law firm refuses to acknowledge the actual terminology and meaning of the Equality Act 2010 in favour of "what a bunch of other companies think it means".
If the law companies don't understand the law, what fucking hope is there for anyone else?!

As others have pointed out, exam results as a measure of success is a pretty narrow one. So lets consider a different area and think who has the 'advantage' in schools.

Not having to be subject to sexual harassment and otherwise being safe and having ones boundaries respected in the education setting. Who has the advantage here? Who is most likely to leave education with the advantage of not having been sexually assaulted or objectified and the negative impact that has on individuals through life?

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

Most non-white racial groups outperform white boys at school. By the logic of this training module, this must mean that non-white teenagers don't experience racism in school 🙄

I don't think that's really the implication - it's entirely possible to be advantaged one way, and disadvantaged another. Even as a result of the same fact or characteristic.

This is (yet another) area where intersectionalism tends to fail. It says someone can be advantaged due to one characteristic (sex, say) and disadvantaged due to another. But it can't seem to deal with the same characteristic having creating both situations.

@ScreamingBeans

Not really. The pay gap is due to motherhood, not education.

And yet there's no disadvantageous pay gap between fathers and other men. On the contrary, fatherhood is an advantage on the workplace, fathers earn more than other men even if you take into account age seniority etc .
So fatherhood means you earn more but motherhood means you earn less. But there's no disadvantage...

Why would you expect them to be the same though, when they are rooted in reproductive role? Which is different for men and women.

There is also the issue of predominantly female jobs being routinely paid less. See recent case of supermarkets where shop floor (mostly female) won their case in comparison with warehouse (mostly men). The issue is the same in child care, social care etc. It isn't just a matter of maternity but how work is valued for it's contribution to society and overall GDP. There is still a tendency to undervalue jobs which are associated with the 'domestic sphere.'