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

231–240 of 600 posts

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

#231

Post by thepete2 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #78

What's the metric? Average GPA? Average graduation rate? It seems so. It is well documented that men drop out at higher rates and are in general more prone to failing. Having a few extra "zeros" in the GPA rankings would skew the mean down for males. It's tempting to say that "Girls are better than boys in academic things", but if you look at the performance of a cohort of graduates, I'd expect you'd see we're all ab…

As always we don't measure what matters, but what is measurable. There are actually very good arguments against giving grades at all, but it's sadly way out of the mainstream ...

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

#233

Post by FactCore »

viach wrote: post #155

Isn't this considered incorrect nowadays - to publicly generalize a superiority of a group of humans with dimension by race or gender?

I find your sentiment interesting, but we can't ignore a fact in favor of not hurting people's feelings. Of course, more research is always being done, so I'm sure in a few years a new research paper will come out and we will hear a different facts about a certain gender's academic performance. Then next big paper comes out and the cycle repeats.

That's just my two cents anyways.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

mfenix wrote: post #141
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…

As the father of 6 years old twins (one boy, one girl) I agree with this 100%. My son needs more discipline than my daughter, he's more likely to get into trouble at school, he likes physical activities, etc. almost the opposite of his sister.

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by collias »

cperciva wrote: post #82
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.

There are couple more explanations which haven't been mentioned: 1. Time lag. Girls have only been exceeding boys' academic success for 20-30 years; in most fields the top tier of jobs is filled by people in their 50s and 60s, who were educated at a time when girls were underperforming academically. This hypothesis is supported by statistics showing that among childfree adults aged 20-39, women significantly out-earn…

Source for the stats in #1?

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

#236

Post by wing-_-nuts »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #29
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.

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…

>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.

Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?

You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?

I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.

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

#237

Post by jimbokun »

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…

> 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.

Why?

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

#238

Post by rajin444 »

dekhn wrote: post #194
visarga wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the free will of individuals factored in? I mean, if people in group A don't want to do job B, should we force them to reach parity? I think it's better to ensure equal opportunities and let people decide.

that is one of the reasons I said my approach was a good start. It's unclear, in a truly equal opportunity society, what the gender preference breakdowns for specific job roles would be. A simple first order approximation is "no preference".

I agree! I think trying to apply a high level value will result in more discrimination, however. i.e, if we see X group of society under/overrepresented by Y%, we do not have enough understanding to draw any meaningful conclusions from this. Large enough discrepancies should be investigated as possibly a canary for discrimination, but in some cases there may not be any (NFL lineman will likely always be men).

I think the correct answer is to evaluate people as individuals on their merits. However, this is expensive (in many ways) and still flawed. My view is that we are much close to coming up with a "fair interview" than we are with understanding the massive amounts of complexity explaining discrepancies in human populations.

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

#239

Post by mudita »

endisneigh wrote: post #143
aviraldg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

None of this explains why women are capable of following these rules and men are not. Are you saying men are biologically predisposed to not follow such simple rules?

It is pretty well established in psychology that women score higher in agreeableness (in the sense of the Big 5 trait). This difference is pretty small, the distributions overlap a lot, but I think, the fact, that women are more agreeable in general is pretty indisputable.

As far as I know, whether the difference has biological or cultural reasons is not equally well established. But it seems somewhat stable across cultures, which seems to me to suggest that it’s indeed biological, see e.g. Costa et al (2001), Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11825676_Gender_Dif...

“In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude, consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across cultures. Substantively, most of the gender differences we found can be grouped in four categories: Women tend to be higher in negative affect, submissiveness, and nurturance, and more concerned with feelings than with ideas.“

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

#240

Post by finder83 »

endisneigh wrote: post #143
aviraldg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

None of this explains why women are capable of following these rules and men are not. Are you saying men are biologically predisposed to not follow such simple rules?

When the rules are to "sit still" and "be quiet", yes, probably so. Boys are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate of 12.9% vs 5.6% for girls [1]. I've heard many counselors and psychologists (in my counseling program) suggest that many cases are misdiagnosed.

Sit in any classroom or ask any teacher who their problem children are, and they're almost always boys. They're louder, more violent, more likely to disobey, and have a harder time sitting still.

Are all boys a problem? No, of course not. I imagine a lot has to do with home balance, the involvement of two parents, etc. Are all girls good? No, of course not. But statistically there is a difference. This is true until they settle down in their mid to late twenties...just look at insurance rates.

Maybe it's not biological and is cultural, but it's true from a very young age through young adult that boys are less able to sit still, be quiet, and listen. And school is structured in a way that punishes those traits, and we as a culture medicate boys to make them calm down.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html

Post reply on HN