Why are girls more successful than boys in school?
It might exist, but I have yet to find a single group in which males outperformed females in school.
In my previous post I made the observation that girls graduated from high school within four years at a reliably higher rate than boys. I then made the claim that I believe this is due in large part to innate personality differences. The post was already quite long so I did not dive any further into this claim, however, I do think it’s something worth exploring. Below is the graphic that was included in the original post:
This is very broad data from 37 states. The entire article is here and is worth reading.
I took the five year average of 4 year graduation and dropout rates from the state of NY, based on NYSED, and graphed them (below). I’m sure there was a more mathematically sophisticated way of doing this, but I’m also confident that the story remains the same. When collecting the data, comparing like-demographics, there was never a single instance where male graduation rates were higher than female, or where male dropout rates were lower than females.
Boys always graduated at a lower rate and always dropped out at a higher rate:
I’ve been in education long enough to have been burned by disingenuous and/or incompetent people chirping away about “data.” Whenever anyone in this business begins an argument with “the data shows”, my default assumption is they’re full of it. That said, I swear on a stack of Shakespeare’s Tragedies that I am making a good-faith effort in presenting these numbers, and I’m going to make a good-faith attempt at positing a claim.
There is something about being a boy that puts a student at a disadvantage while playing the school game. I’m not going to weigh in (at least not here) on why, for example, black students tend to underperform other demographics in school, or why Asians tend to overperform in school, except to say that it is reasonable to suppose that culture is at play: either that the schools aren’t doing enough to accommodate members of particular underperforming cultures, or that there are aspects of different cultures that lend themselves to success or failure in school, or some other factor that is correlated with race, or maybe all of those things - however, what you can’t say is that there’s a unifying “male culture” and “female culture” that transcends not only black, white, and Asian, but also American Indian, Hispanic, multiracial, and all recent immigrants (from dozens of countries and cultures). If males from these various cultural and ethnic groups share something in common with each other that they don’t share with females of their own group, then it’s fair to assume that these attributes are innate to being male (and the same for female). Whether you are part of a high-performing demographic, or a low-performing demographic, you are at a greater disadvantage, on average, as a boy. What is it about males that puts them at a disadvantage while playing school?
In my previous post I suggested that average personality differences between sexes in the aspect of conscientiousness known as orderliness, and in trait agreeableness, was what went a long way to explain the gender difference in school success. I don’t think that answer is wrong, but I would like to adjust it slightly. I’ll explain:
Each of the five traits can be broken down to two “aspects” each. It is when comparing these aspects, more so than the traits themselves, that significant gender differences occur. The aspects are:
Industriousness (n/a)
Orderliness (f)
Politeness (f)
Compassion (f)
Withdrawal (f)
Volatility (f)
Intellect (m)
Openness (f)
Assertiveness (m)
Enthusiasm (f)
Each of these aspects trend, with varying degrees of significance, either male or female (noted as such), with the exception of “industriousness” (which, as I understand it, is very difficult to quantify in a lab). Also, while “intellect” trends male, IQ differences between genders are negligible, so this may more accurately be described as “perception of intellect” - or, it may be that males are more interested in abstract ideas than females, even if they don’t have any measurable difference in capacity. Also, keep in mind that each of these aspects have an inverse, so the fact that there are more “f” than “m” on the list above doesn’t mean anything. It’s semantics, e.g., being very low in orderliness also means you’re very high in disorderliness.
To be clear (and I apologize if this is obvious, but I feel it needs to be said), it’s not to say that every single male has a “masculine” personality, or vice versa. It is more like height, i.e., men are taller than women, and the very tallest people are all men, despite the fact that some women are taller than some men (the differences in personality are probably less pronounced than differences in height, but the idea is the same).
I am adjusting my position slightly from blaming two dimensions of personality (an aspect & a trait), specifically, and thinking of it more holistically. For example: if you were instructed as to the technical meanings of each of the aspects listed above (they are somewhat self-explanatory, but not entirely), and then you had someone’s personality described to you using similar language, you would be able to guess their sex with 85% accuracy, no matter what culture they came from. This suggests that average personality differences between sexes are real, quantifiable, and somewhat innate.
What does this mean, exactly? It could mean a couple of things. I’ve used the phrase “the school game”, because in a sense, that’s what it is. There are rules for getting to the finish line within four years, without dropping out, and as with any game, there are going to be winners and losers. As a hypothetical, let’s say that for 20% of students (10% girls, 10% boys), school does not serve them whatsoever. Who is going to be more likely to say screw it and walk out? Or just not do the homework? Or not feel emotionally distressed by a teacher threatening to fail them? A boy or a girl? It could be that a number of girls would also drop out, or not comply with their teachers’ instructions, but are too agreeable and too sensitive to negative emotions and actually give a rip whether or not their teachers are disappointed in them. It could be that the grades necessary for graduation aren’t valid measurements of actual academic accomplishment, or preparation for the workplace, or formation of good character, or anything else of value, at least for a certain group of students, and that the boys and girls of this group recognize it (even if they can’t articulate it), but it’s only the boys doing anything about it (e.g. dropping out, failing classes, etc.) I’m not saying that this is what’s happening, I’m just pointing it out as a possibility.
It could also be that school rewards “female” personality types, and that teachers self-select from the pool of personality who was rewarded, and some of those teachers eventually become administrators who reward the teachers for having those attributes, and what makes a person successful in school just becomes more and more deeply rooted in feminine dimensions of personality. I’ll give a few examples of what I mean:
1. I made this point previously, the subject itself is not the only thing that the student is being graded on, and it may not be the most important thing, in terms of earning credit. Who is going to do better in class? The person who is well organized, follows all of the school rules, loves teacher directions in class, and plays well with others, but is of less than average intelligence, or the student who is of above average intelligence, but who is disorganized, uninterested in the details of teacher instruction, couldn’t give a damn about the rules, and doesn’t get along with peers and adults? Which of those two people are more likely to be female, and more likely to be male? A total guess, but I’d say you have a 60% chance that the former is female, and a 60% chance that the latter is male. However, if you take the furthest extreme of each of those examples (the most compliant student you ever had vs. the most disruptive student you ever had), then the former is virtually always going to be female, and the latter is virtually always going to be male.
2. For all the talk of “creativity”, and that “students should take risks with their learning”, there is very little evidence of that actually happening. Males are more likely to be thrill-seekers and risk-takers. Teachers are rated on whether or not they’re doing their job based on a 39 page series of rubrics. Thinking “inside the box” has never been so literal. Teacher evaluation is a whole other topic, however, the general concept is that they need to give us teachers a grade. So they try to figure out what all good teachers do the same, construct some kind of bad-good-better-best continuum of practice for each of those items, and then type verbatim what we do in one or two classes and attempt to plop that transcript into the boxes. This is more or less what we wind up doing to students. Bold, assertive, creative risks by definition are not going to fit within the matrix of “what do all good students do that is the same?” - which is, essentially, an accurate description of a rubric.
3. If you work in a middle or high school, here is an experiment you might run. Walk into ten or twenty random classrooms and take pictures of any “good character” posters or artwork on the wall. Once you have 40 or 50 pictures, try to dump them into “buckets” based on the aspects of personality listed above. It won’t be perfect, but I bet you’re going to get a lot more posters that say “If you have a choice between being kind or being right, be kind” than you are “All cruelty springs from weakness.” I’m willing to bet that the messaging is going to be 80% or more “Be nice, do what you’re told, include everyone” etc.
There is nothing inherently right or wrong about any of these traits. We all are more inclined in one direction than another, there is a gender dimension to it, but we also can, given the right circumstance, act in a way to which we are not naturally predisposed. And we should, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven…a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” This is also the reason for biodiversity: different situations call for different actions. Multiple data points seem to strongly suggest that schools are not honoring masculine dimensions of personality, and that does a disservice to not only our boys, but to our entire society.