There was an interesting article in today's Globe and Mail by Carolyn Abraham. It highlights a new trend of boys all around the world lagging behind girls in "nearly every mearsure of scholastic achievement".
In a nutshell, the article looked at a number of different countries and dissected what percentage of their students that could be considered top performers were boys, and what percentage were girls. Here are some of the lop-sided statistics that prompted the article:
In science, boys lagged behind in Japan with 17.0% of their top performers being girls while only 13.1% were boys.
In reading, boys lagged behind in Canada (17.7% of our top performers were girls and only 11.3% were boys), Finland (23.7% girls and 9.6% boys), Turkey (2.9% of their top performers were girls and only 1.4% were boys), and Japan (10.7% girls and 8.1% boys).
In math, boys still have the lead in all countries featured in the article, but if you look at the annual university enrolment statisitics in Canada, in 1972 there were 193,002 women who enrolled and 279,751 men. Now, less than 40 years later, the climate has changed drastically. In 2008, there were 640,674 women who enrolled, which far exceeds the 471,408 men who enrolled. The number of women enrolled in university exceeded men for the first time in 1981, and since then the gap has only grown.
The article opens by stating that it was only 10 short years ago that stories about the disadvantages girls had in school due to gender biases against females were still prevalent in the press. Educational textbooks and publishers got there share of the heat when a number of studies criticized them for putting out to press books that contained sexist stereotypes which turned girls away from certain subjects, science in particlar. Since then, some of Canada's largest Canadian educational publishers began revising their textbooks to eliminate any biases that they themselves may have been contributing to. But as result, it seemed that whenever there was to be a picture of someone doing something well or right, it was a girl that was featured, and whenever you needed a picture of someone doing something wrong or negative, it was a picture of a boy.
Perhaps the pendulum had swung too far. In the media, boys have, in recent years, been branded as the underdogs. The article goes on to offer a plethora of data to support that claim, saying that boys earn lower grades overall in elementary schol, perform poorer in reading and writing, are more likely to be identified as having behavioural problems, are more likely to repeat a grade, more likely to drop out, and that 30% of them perform in the bottom quarter in standardized tests. Ouch!
So what is happening here?
The article shares a couple of perspectives on the issue. Some educational professionals think that boys have been forgotten, and all but forgotten, as all focus and effort went towards helping girls succeed with learning. On the other hand, others feel that the statistics are not all that worrisome. They argue that girls have always performed better than their boy-counterparts in earning better grades and that the changing marketplace (which puts so much emphasis on higher grades now more than ever), has made boys less competitive. Given that men still run an overwhelming number of the world's countries, and companies, and that women with the same level of education earn less than their male counterparts, some dismiss the notion that boys now need special measures to get ahead, or just keep up.
But to suggest that seems to open a can of worms. Some perceive the notion as one that undermines the achievements of females, and that it's politically correct to say there is no problem with boys and education.
The article continued with some of the social and and economical shifts that could result if the trend continues, such as woman being both child-bearers and primary bread-winners, and a lack of diversity in the workforce. Extreme perhaps, and dismissed by those who equate it to the fear that women would not get married anymore when they first started entering universities and the workforce.
It is an interesting question none-the-less, and one we won't know the answer to for another decade or more, and it's and issue that's got people talking.
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