Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 600 posts

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#131

Post by aviraldg »

endisneigh wrote: post #101
throwaway53086 wrote: post #31

Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better. Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females t…

I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women compared to men? Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

The rules and grading are different.

In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.)

At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#132

Post by ameister14 »

endisneigh wrote: post #101
throwaway53086 wrote: post #31

Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better. Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females t…

I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women compared to men? Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

>Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

That might be true if you ignored development, but we're talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the same as a 23 year old man.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#133

Post by 1_player »

endisneigh wrote: post #101
throwaway53086 wrote: post #31

Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better. Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females t…

I've seen this take a few times and I don't really buy it. How exactly is school setup in a way that's more suitable for women compared to men? Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.

Perhaps, presuming OP's assumption that women have an easier time to follow the rules and there are more women in education than men is correct, that school has a lot of rules and not enough freedom.

I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school was a really strict place compared to real life and work. There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher had intended you to.

As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#134

Post by esja »

dekhn wrote: post #118
rajin444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know 50% is the correct amount of women at all levels?

I didn't mean to imply that at all, although it does seem like the first reasonable target: all job categories, except for ones that require people to be a specific gender for some reason, should have participation roughly proportional to the proportion of that gender (or other attribute) in society. I'm not certain that's the right goal, but what I said above was working a model where 50% women participation seemed…

Would you consider kindergarten teaching to require a specific gender? Or carpentry? If not, please explain how you are going to persuade a huge number of women who wanted to be kindergarten teachers to instead become carpenters, while also persuading an equal number of men to do the reverse. That is what your target requires (across many occupations). It will never happen.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#135

Post by AnimalMuppet »

firefoxd wrote: post #37

This is anecdotal but I'm sure many people are seen this increasingly. In the past 10 years on the job, I'm seeing more guys make jokes about how stupid they are. Every time they make a single mistake they say "oh my God, if my head wasn't attached to my shoulders..." Then it becomes a competition of who has done the dumbest thing. I know it's just being playful, but you rarely see the opposite. Turn the tables, I wa…

I wonder...

After doing something stupid at work, I once said, out loud, "AnimalMuppet, if brains were leather, you couldn't saddle a flea." And 30 seconds later I was over it and back to work. I didn't say that because I think I'm stupid. No, I was able to say it because I'm sure that I'm smart. The security of being sure made me able to say that.

I wonder if the females don't feel secure enough to say such things, or if they're just wired differently. (So that saying derogatory things about themselves, which they don't actually believe, is an alien concept. It sounds rather weird when I put it that way...)

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#136

Post by novok »

Kluny wrote: post #66
spaniard89277 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues. There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it. Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviou…

> Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it. Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.

When your "customers" or "boss" are people you love vs. a boss or corporation that is more prone to be an asshole than not, and the work of having kids has genetically encoded feel good chemicals while many find work a pure slog, it's not surprising if given the choice people would chose to be mothers vs. workers for a while.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#137

Post by visarga »

itronitron wrote: post #51
endisneigh wrote: post #2

How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent then you’d think. I suppose all three could be true.

Performing well academically usually means that the student is good at at completing assignments in a way that aligns with the teachers grading rubric. I think boys have a certain contempt for that for a variety of reasons (at least mine do) so they focus their attention on how to work around the system, which probably yields an advantage later in the workplace.

Like when you solve the arithmetic problem with algebra and the teacher says it's wrong because you didn't use the official method?

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#138

Post by odiroot »

throwaway53086 wrote: post #31

Anyone with young boys and girls will notice that girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions. A lot of doing well in school is about following rules and instructions, and it seems pretty natural that girls will do better. Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females t…

> Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women.

That was definitely the case for me until university.

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#139

Post by dijit »

endisneigh wrote: post #2

How is it possible that girls perform better academically (in 2015) yet are under represented in the top tier of jobs? Either women have no interest in money, academic skills have no bearing in getting high paying jobs, or discrimination is more prevalent then you’d think. I suppose all three could be true.

Men are over represented at the top _and_ at the bottom.

So the average may be higher for girls, but that’s across all girls.

This is what the bell curves are and a result of men’s being very wide and girls’ being very narrow.

This is known as the variability hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis?wprov=s...

Re: Girls perform better academically in almost all countries (2015)

#140

Post by Pet_Ant »

swebs wrote: post #114
Kluny wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it. Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.

Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do, even if they have no financial incentive. Most people don't like having to go to the office 8 hours a day, and very few probably would if money wasn't in the equation.

> Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do,

I don't know that is true of most men. Have children? Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men wanting to have more children is inversely proportional to the amount of work the mother expects them to contribute.

Post reply on HN