The Truth about Boys and Girls

The story gets even better when you look at the actual neuroscience supposedly backing up Brooks’s assertions, as Mark Liberman has done in two posts at Language Log: David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist and Are Men Emotional Children?. The gap between the actual research findings and the conclusions being drawn from them is wide enough to drive a whole pre-existing ideology through.

In my high school, girls probably outperformed boys on average. But it was pretty obvious that the reason was that the girls were much more willing to do what they were told to do, to be polite, not to question teachers, and to at least feign interest in even the most insultingly stupid instruction. Boys, for some stupid reason, at least had to pretend not to care about school in order not to risk their reputation amongst peers. But I doubt that there were any underlying differences in natural intelligence.

I’d be interested to hear, though, why the higher life expectancy of women is supposed to be an indication that women are, other things being equal, naturally more intelligent. The fact that women have a higher life expectancy doesn’t make them run faster, so why should it make them think better?

In the UK there has been a shift towards modes of assessment that favour the long-term organized over the person that shines in the 3-hour exam. I’d have come nowhere if I’d hað

nik — I don’t disagree with either of your points. But to 1) what Mead shows is that while there’s a gap in reading, there’s not much of a gap all-told, and if there is its not clear whether it favours boys or girls (because of indexing problems). And to 2), in that context, worrying about “boys versus girls” is a diversion. When the gap favoured boys a lot (and whites etc) insofar as we thought it was a result of what schools were doing we had as much reason to deal with it as there was a gap: but sure, if those efforts worked against black or hispanic achievement that counted against them. Of course, it didn’t, because half of all hispanics and blacks were girls (still are); whereas half of all boys are not hispanic or black.

gr – I didn’t say more intelligent, just superior, and I didn’t say it meant they were, just that the thought that they are doesn’t stretch the imagination.

What all the sceptics are pointing to, though, is something else that I’m bemused by about the new conservative social constructivist analysis — the assumption that schools are the only operative social institutions here. Couldn’t it be that boys are more vulnerable to family fracture, or more damaged (in their dispotion to take up education) by the new commercialism, or that our ideals of masculinity are badly attuned to male academic achievement in an environment in which girls get equal )or roughly equal) opportunities. Should schools have to compensate for that, if so? (I ask that as a real question, not a rhetorical one).

Anyway, it turns out that boys aren’t doing as badly as the new conservatives say. If I hear someone like Teirney saying that we should give boys a pass because they’re incapable of turning in homework, though, I’m never going to take them seriously as conservatives again.

My understanding has always been that boys have always dominated the extremes; boys tend to dominate top and bottom of the bell curve. What that means for the average, I don’t know-whether on average boys are smarter than girls or not.

If that is true, what would Harry say? Gender differences are ok, even though those gender differences suggest boys are the smartest -because those gender differences suggest that girls are smarter on average? Or gender difference is socially constructed, because it suggests that boys really do make up the elite (i.e. Larry Summers was right)-the only acceptable science is that which suggests girls are on average better than boys, and at the top just as good? The fact that this is even a reasonable question to ask-that Harry (and his reality -based community ilk) will decide to accept research or not based on whether they like the results-tells me all I need to know about Harry. David Brooks may very well be wrong on this, but at the very worst, he’s merely as wrong as a liberal.

It really reminds me of the OJ case; who does a liberal root for-the black guy, or the battered wife (ps. the black guy won-the battered wife was forgotten)? Who does a liberal root for? Science is acceptable because it suggests girls are on average smarter than boys, or science is suspect because it suggests at the top boys are smarter than girls? It appears we split the difference; science is right when it suggests girls are on average smarter than boys, but it is wrong if it suggests boys dominate the elite.

Try again, Harry.

Steve

As recently as the 1980s, males and females attended college in the U.S. in indentical numbers. Since then, the ratio has gone from 50-50 to close to 60-40. That is unacceptable (the raw numbers and, especially, the trend). Some of the changes that have been made since then were intentionally intended to make school more compatible with girls learning styles, for example:

– A de-emphasis on competition
– A de-emphasis on high-stakes tests (both in school and in university admissions).
– ‘Reading across the curriculum’ programs that introduce significant reading and writing elements to math instruction, for example.
– A steady diet of you-go-girl, ‘girls can do anything messages’–especially with respect to math and science (There are no programs that emphasize, for example, the fact that so many of the great writers in human history were male as a way of encouraging boys to enter humanities — or if there are, I’ve never heard of one). Some of this is in school, but much isn’t. The Onion (naturally) provided the perfect commentary:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38558

– The broad acceptability of expressing overt anti-male sentiments in ‘polite’ society (e.g. ‘testosterone poisoning’).

I don’t think any these, by itself, is the ‘smoking gun’–but the overall effort has been to focus on and encourage female achivement even if that meant neglecting or harming male achievement. And it seems to have had the intended effect.

I can understand the position that innate differences are easily swamped by other effects, but Brooks seems to be saying that innate differences translate into a disadvantage for boys where education treats genders equally. That’s doesn’t make any sense.

Elsewhere, Mark Liberman ignores the literature after 2002. There’s a review article at that contains a couple of useful references.

Wasn’t “Boys in Trouble” a Newsweek cover the other month. I never believe anything that is on the cover of Newsweek (or time). That is the main tool in my amature social scientist toolkit.

Having made my joke, I agree with Harry. If boys are actually “in trouble” it proves that we can significatly effect the outcomes of sub-groups in our society through very subtle social means. For example, the social pressure on girls to be girly. When this is removed or even reversed, viola! Girls rule! And if boys aren’t “in trouble” the fact that conservatives are all het up about them being “in trouble” shows how expediant and hypocritical conservatives are in their use of our children as political tools.

Either way, it’s pretty satisfying to have a couple of my most strongly held beliefs confirmed by hard evidence.

I remember all those articles about how women now make up significant majorities on corporate boards, in the US federal government, and in the faculty of all Ivy League universities.
…
Oh, wait, they don’t. Christina Hoff Summers has been pushing this line since at least 2000, which might suggest some sort of adjustment in the power distribution between men and women because the boys who have been terribly underserved are finally reaching the age where they’ll be denied the privileges they so obviously deserve. This suggests something about American education and society, but not that educators are failing boys.

“There is a bit of nonsense around about boys not liking books as much as girls, but I doubt that even now many boys are told when thinking about taking a demanding English class: “Oh no, you’re a boy and boys are no good at reading, you know, they can’t appreciate literature”, which is what my sister was told about maths when considering taking Maths A-level in the 1980’s…”

Might there not be pressures in this direction (i.e. telling boys that reading or educational achievement is not “cool” or something along those lines) from sources outside of school? You needn’t have a teacher tell you that you cannot, or should not, read and appreciate Shakespeare to come to that conclusion. Perhaps a good amount of boys don’t even think of considering taking a demanding English class because they see reading as a girl’s thing due to some extracurricula societal lesson that they have iternalized somehow. Anyway, the boys not liking books as much question seems to be an empirical one.

And forgot to say: the issue about changing the curriculum is a distraction.

The actual pattern observed by educational historians is that any subject identified as a “boys” subject is one in which boys do well. When girls start to enter in any numbers, boys start to leave. Subjects and topics shift constantly from being boy identified to girl identified. Just to give two examples, Literature and History used to be boys subjects: tough, manly, about universal values. Now they are girls subjects–although in history men still dominate at graduate level and in university posts. Medicine is currently shifting, 50% of entering students into medicine in he UK are now women. Expect medicine to turn into a “girly” subject some time soon.

The actual content of history and literature in schools hasn’t changed much. Teachers use books aimed at boys because girls don’t seem to care, and warfare takes up much of the history curriculum.

A significant factor has surely got to be that at least in the UK and US there is significant peer pressure among boys to not perform. There doesn’t seem to be a similar pressure among girls. So that could be one explanation for better performance by girls – that they actually do the work.

I would imagine another factor that likely has been exposed as performance levels between sexes evened out was that a significantly larger proportion of potentially intelligent boys spend their school years neglecting their studies to chase after the possibility of playing sports professionally (I can think of one very good example in my class at school, and a dozen or more within my year for whom academic performance was a distant secondary concern).

and that “whole language” reading instruction amounts to leaving children to figure out how to read on their own

ahhh phonics nuts, the Atkins Dieters of education. No it doesn’t. It is often worth remembering that “the whole language approach” can be replaced by “the Janet and John books” in most contexts without loss of accuracy.

“We know that when men and women receive roughly the same educational, health, and nutritional resources over the course of their lives, women outlive men by 3-4 years. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that when, as at last, boys and girls receive roughly equal educational resources during their childhoods, girls outperform boys by a similar percentage.”

I’d have to agree with gr that this is about as magnificent a non sequitur as they come.

“But there is no similar obvious pressure in the case of boys.”

It seems pretty obvious to me. Having good grades does not make you popular if you’re a boy, it makes you a nerd, a target for bullying, unless you can make up for it by also being athletic and nice-looking.

great post, harry. I love how you turned Brooks on his head.

I don’t see why this gap is terribly in need of explanation–there could be millions of reasons other than “natural superiority.” One possibility: women have only relatively recently had significant access to educational and career opportunities–this could easily translate into a higher general degree of motivation and enthusiasm for education and the perceived benefits it will bring. Boys, on the other hand, have absorbed, through their fathers, the realization that this is decidedly _not_ a truly meritocratic system and that hard work and good grades will not necessarily pay off for them any more than it did for their fathers. Girls do better because they were insolated from identifying with disallusioned fathers.

I obviously should have used a different multisyllable word, like Missolonghi or Semirechye or something, but the word I cited was the one whose mispronunciation proved most memorable.

My apologies to all — I was not aware that the odious Bartleby was in the house.

I believe the average brains of women and men are quite different, so I’d expect women and men to have different albeit overlapping cognitive/social/behavioral performance. I’d be surprised if it were otherwise, but I can believe the data’s not in to prove that however.

In terms of school performance I’d take a closer look at grades 5-7. Anyone who’s seen a 6th grade class knows boys and girls mature at different rates. I wonder if that’s when the performance gap really opens up.

In Canada, btw, I’ve been told (rumor, not verified) that about 3/4 of medical students are now female and that schools are struggling to provide any semblance of “gender balance”. Whether they should or not is another question …

I enjoyed this post so much on my RSS feed, I was sure Belle Waring had written it.

Can we at least agree that male and female brains, whatever their differences, are both delicious?

Peer pressure to not excel academically is not gender-specific. A girl who gets good grades and isn’t attractive or athletic is as much of a target (though the bullying won’t be as physical) as a boy.
While we’re throwing alternate hypotheses against the wall, how about this one: until recently, girls were at a huge disadvantage in terms of educational opportunity. They had to work harder than boys just to keep up – not because of any natural predilection or aptitude, but to overcome the societal obstacles – and while the obstacles have recently shrunk, the attitude hasn’t caught up; so girls work harder.

I mean, I keep getting the impression that the male mentality puts more emphasis on exploration, and the female mentality on instruction. Boys would rather go out and find out something new, and girls are more likely to sit and listen to what the teacher is saying.

And it’s only in the last twenty years or so that elementary and secondary schools in the US started using instruction rather than exploration as their primary method?

To the extent that the basis for all this is that fewer men are starting and completing college, it might be useful to keep in mind that both starting and completing college are largely voluntary activities. Lacking any evidence that this is a condition being forced on boys/young men, maybe the question is why they find it less necessary than women to get a collge degree. I can think of lots of non-biological reasons for that.

There ought to be a special hell for people who politicise educational methods.

It’s another front on the War on Science, really.

Phonics is the silliest, most overblown controversy of all, an ideological fossil like antifluoridation, and it was charmingly quaint to see it ressurected here.

Wow, I had no idea what kind of hornets’ nest I was stepping into. I’d actually assumed that “whole language” had long been widely discredited–at least as a primary method for teaching reading–and am frankly surprised to hear that it still has its defenders. (I don’t know anything about the question of whether it’s useful as a supplement to phonic approaches, but if there’s strong evidence to that effect, then I’m happy to hear it.)

As for “politicizing educational methods”, I’m with Diane Ravitch on that one–the divide is between those who view education as intellectual development, and those who view it primarily as character-building, self-invention, moral development, or something else entirely. This divide has crossed most partisan boundaries, at one time or another. (“Sesame Street”, for example, was a phonics-laden left-wing rebellion against the conservative Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood-style of “educational television”–essentially, values-laden babysitting for comfortable middle-class children–that dominated the airwaves at the time.)

In any event, perhaps someone here might be willing to take time out from launching into highly political attacks on us proponents of phonics and our supposed tendency to “politicise educational methods”, and address my original query, which I’ll helpfully recast in more methodologically neutral terms: has there been any investigation of whether the trend in the gap between boys and girls in reading scores in various populations correlates at all, in one direction or the other, with the trend in overall reading scores? If my guess is correct, and the lower the overall achievement, the bigger the gap, then I’ll surmise that (1) the gap is primarily a result of girls’ linguistic advantage over boys; and (2) it’s exacerbated by poor reading education, which tends to disadvantage the linguistically un-gifted (disproportionately boys) more than the linguistically gifted (disproportionately girls).

I might add that the analogous question could be asked about mathematics scores. My impression of the “truth about boys and girls” study, based on media accounts, is that it indicates that (1) progress in mathematics proficiency over the period studied has been poor, compared with, say, reading education; and (2) the gap favoring boys over girls in math has in fact widened slightly. The phrase, “you do the math”, comes to mind…

Of course, my understanding of the math data may be way off, as might my guess about the relationship between the reading gap and reading scores. And either way, the debate over the best way to teach reading (or math), though lots of fun, is obviously somewhat off-topic here.

Can I just add my agreement to #44. I was mercilessly bullied at school because a) I read by choice, rather than only what we had to b) I was smart and c) I was not good at athletics. And I am a girl.It was only once I starting learning music in highschool and got in with ‘the musicians’ that I was considered anything other than a social reject. And once I realised that was a possibility, I concentrated less on my studies, my behaviour in class was worse etc. etc. It is not just a male thing.

Well, my point is that whole-language teaching has been around since 1952 or before (I doubt that my rural Minnesota district was pioneering it), and has been under attack by conservatives ever since then, while the educational collapses people talk, if they took place at all, about took place during the 70s and 80s. The cause and effect relationship sounds hard to prove.

It’s always like that. If someone gets alarmed in 1970 by, lets say, rising crime rates and wires rising crime rates into his ideology, he’ll still be worrying about rising crime rates in 2006, regardless of whether rates are falling, rising, or stable.

It’s like the medieval Christians waiting for Prester John to come from the East and save them from the Saracens: at the end of a century they were still waiting for their 130-year-old savior.

Steve. Come on now, buddy. Did I say any of those things?

hey, can we not turn to the phonics debate? I should have squashed it in the first place. Its funny dan, but I read cian’s response to you as a kind of friendly amendement; there’s heavy politicisation on both sides of the phonics debates (if you’re in or near an ed school you can’t fail to be aware of that), which ought by rights to be a rather technical/empirical debate. I do not think there is the same level of polticisation of the debate in other countries, including other english-speaking countries (the more phonetic the language being taught, the less of an issue phonics/whole language is).
Bugger, I seem to be contributing to the hijacking of the thread. I’ll post on it again later.

The phonics argument has been driven by politicized pro-phonics people for 50 years or more. They were usually the same as the anti-fluoridation people — the phonics militants had a lot of agendas besides phonics.

If I’m not mistaken, by now most systems use mixed programs with some phonics — that’s what I would advocate, anyway. But Simon was using a change which occurred in the Fifties to explain problems that began in the Seventies or later.

I should say that I am not against teaching systematic, explicit phonics as part of a reading program (a reading program which also includes the features of a whole language approach). I am against the politicization of educational techniques by the uninformed. (I am moderately informed because I am in ed school and my wife works for a reading ciriculumm developer). If people really reasearched the history of begining reading instruction in this country they would see that for the most part it was a balance of whole word and phonics approaches, with a lunatic fringe on either side. They would also see that the socio-economic background of the student combined with the quality of the teacher and the amount of resources available to the student, have a much greater effect on the student’s outcome, than do the style of instruction.

I’ve seen the books, I have been given a demonstration of a lesson. One of my cohort is a teacher’s aid who does direct instruction in New Glarus, WI. The kids sit in small groups and the teacher reads a script. They go through various exercises, I believe it is always the same exercises for each word part, then they do some works sheets. It is all strictly phonics. There are no pictures or stories, no literature. Becasue they write the letters in special ways to signal certain sounds, it doesn’t even look like english. I believe it takes about 40 minutes a day. I can’t remember the exact time. You can read books outside of the instruction, but there is no literature in the instruction itself, as far as I can tell. Not in kindergarten or first grade.

I believe it was created to help children who were at risk (of not learning to read ebcasue of socio-economic factors) or who have shown some kind of deficit and need intervention. Now, there are plenty of places that use it on everyone.

I think the program I saw was by a company called Direct Instruction, but it is also a generic term for a teaching method that people apply to all kinds of subjects. Basically, the teacher has a script, works with small groups, the subject is broken down into very small pieces and students are instructed on these pieces until they “achieve mastery.” Then they move on to the next piece.

I’m sure you can find plenty of websites promoting direct instruction. As I said, it is popular, especially in the south, in rural districts and in poor urban settings. Conservatives like it becasue it authoritarian. It is completely teacher-controled. There is absolutly no room for the kids to make any discoveries on their own. Urban schools like it because it is authoritarian and becasue it DOES meet the needs of some poor kids without much exposure to literacy in their homes.

You can also find plenty of websites against it, I’m sure. I’m not against it as a remedial tool for some kids, but it is a ridiculous, boring, and unecessarily anal method for instruction most kids.

Dan: Harry in #57 interpreted my response correctly. I get irritated by debates which should be informed by the research, ignore it in favour of simplistic black and white arguments. Its not a question of phonics good/bad, whole-language good/bad. Rather there are techniques which are useful for some kids (at certain points of development), and not useful for other kids.

My other irritation is that these debates always ignore the most important question “what is this skill for?”. Because the success of different techniques also depends on what you want the outcome to be. If you’re focused on the basic skill (can this child read this text), then some techniques will appear more successful than if you’re focused on whether children read for fun, or with skill (do they understand this text, how much do they read?). And this tends to be true of most debates on education. If you haven’t made your goal explicit, how can you ask questions about technique in any meaningful fashion.

Conservatives like it becasue it authoritarian. It is completely teacher-controled.

No, conservatives like it because the evidence shows that techniques like this WORK for getting 5-year-olds to start being able to read. Why liberals don’t like teaching kids to read, I don’t know. The only thing that I can figure out is that too many adults have forgotten what it was like to be a child, and have been deluded into favoring their own preferences over actual results. I mean, read the quotations compiled here — most of which are self-evidently idiotic. No one would say that children are just going to learn swimming or driving on their own, without explicit and direct instruction in all of the basics of each activity.

Anybody can write that sort of response. CW, you have literally no idea what you’re talking about. There now, we’ve settled that.

Or have we? Perhaps you’d like to provide some links to actual studies/data showing the effectiveness of reading programs that decline to teach kids the two sounds that “th” can make, but lets them figure it out (if ever) on their own. I’m waiting . . . .

And it’s rich to be accused of ignorance by someone who can write something as silly as this:

Almost no program excluded phonics, they just taught phonics in a non-systematic and or non-explicit way.

Define “non-explicit” teaching. What does that even mean? And how well do kids learn something that is “non-explicitly” taught? Data please.

And reading is much much more than decoding (sounding out with phonics). PEople use all kinds of strategies to figure out what words are. Context, orthography, syntax, memory, other’s I can’t remember.

Reading is more than decoding, but the error of “whole language” ideologues is in supposing that you can ditch decoding altogether. Just as driving is more than learning what all the types of traffic signs mean, but that doesn’t mean that a kid is likely to become a good driver if you just throw him on the road and expect him to figure out from “context” the difference between a 4-way stop and a 2-way stop. (Again, what a mercy it is that whole language advocates haven’t managed to get their idiotic ideas adopted in any other area of instruction.)

“Context” — what a silly idea. Yes, advanced readers may be able to use the “context” to figure out an unfamiliar word. But beginning readers? Nonsense. What whole language advocates are suggesting — if you put it in concrete terms — is that kids who don’t know how to recognize the letter “A” or the sound that it makes, are magically able to read the word “apple” merely by seeing the context (as in a sentence, “Jack fell out of an apple tree.”). If that belief isn’t self-evidently stupid, I don’t know what is.

Do you have any education in this field? Have you read any reading textbooks? Have you spent time observing in kindergarten? Are you a teacher? Do you have a small child?

I think all you have is what you consider your common sense and the internet. You are just exactly the phenomena that I am so tired of. Someone who knows nothing about teaching reading who yet insists that a certain method is better because it’s the party line or because it resonates psychologically.

I will say it again. You don’t know what you are talking about. Take it for what it’s worth.

“What whole language advocates are suggesting—if you put it in concrete terms—is that kids who don’t know how to recognize the letter “A” or the sound that it makes, are magically able to read the word “apple” merely by seeing the context (as in a sentence, “Jack fell out of an apple tree.”)”

You’ve created a strawman version of whole language teaching (you’d have to search pretty hard to find someone who would advocate not teaching the sounds of the letters, or teaching kids some of the basic words. I’m sure they exist somewhere, but they’d be a tiny minority). I can see why CW finds you tiresome. And by the way, teaching kids to recognise the letter A would be a non-explicit and (typically) non-systematic form of phonics teaching. However it is not what is typically meant by teaching kids using ‘phonics’.

By the way, this sentence doesn’t even compute:

And by the way, teaching kids to recognise the letter A would be a non-explicit and (typically) non-systematic form of phonics teaching.

Non-explicit? How on earth do you feel that “non-explicit” is the appropriate term to describe someone who is teaching the letter “A”? What’s non-explicit about it? Does the teacher teach about the letter “A” while never explicitly mentioning the letter? That would be quite a feat. How does that happen?

This is why I don’t take whole language advocates seriously. They don’t seem to know the meaning of simple prefixes like “non.”