Hanna Rosin

Why do you think women are more successful at school than men?

This question is part of the readers guide for The End of Men. Please feel free to ad your answers, comments or more questions in the conversation below.

  • James

    I don’t know that they are. What are the facts and figures?

  • gordon61

    Sadly I think ‘girls’ are more successful at school than ‘boys’ because the education system, well at least in NZ, is more geared towards a girls style of learning than a boys.

  • Paul

    Adolescent boy’s and girl’s maturational development occurs at different rates, both physically and cognitively. Girls have nature’s advantage, perhaps they need the head start to keep the boys at bay later on. However, boys do cognitively catch up and at some point around 18, boy’s and girl’s development is about equal.

    • Summerwave

      There is a study out that found that grades earned in school may be predictably modeled based almost purely on the number of hours of video games children play per week. For students under 10 years of age, in particular, the extremely high levels of video gaming (almost overwhelmingly among male students) really cuts into their grades. After this age, female students start to develop a mild interest in video games, but for those 10 and under, it’s almost all boys. And this alone truly hurts them, academically.

  • DadofTween

    Why girls are more “successful” at school than boys can be summarized by saying that the education system has changed – and not for the better.

    Here are just a few reasons/observations:
    “Success in school ” has, over time, been redefined in ways that favor – i.e. rewards – girl’s ‘typical’ strengths.
    Since the 70s school funding decreases have encouraged men to migrate to more lucrative jobs (outside of teaching) which has, for a few generations, created a gap that has been increasingly filled by women entering the workforce.
    As a result, many of the values of “teaching/learning” have changed to focus largely on kids putting the *effort* and teachers *feeling* appreciated for theirs instead of doing what ever it takes to ensure children *learn* the material and skills.
    Furthermore, these mostly women school teachers have redefined what “education” means by emphasizing *social* values over academic skills.

    They have relaxed the disciplinary and academic expectations placed on kids and reward them for sitting still and being passively quiet (typically girl’s temperament) and punish kids who are loud and active (typically boy’s temperament)
    And worse: we have shifted our focus from results (learning the material/skills & passing the tests that demonstrate it) to effort and social (behaving *properly*, cooperating, playing well with others, etc…) and socially promote kids to the next level even when they do not have the necessary skills and/or knowledge..

    That’s just for starters.. There are so many other social and cultural reasons why girls are more “successful” at school than boys.

    I hope someone take a really good look and not just gloss over the big elephants in the many rooms we need to look at.

  • mrcead

    Learning is a relatively passive activity where the tools to practice are a book and a quiet space in which to read it. Who is more likely to sit down and read a book and learn from it? A testosterone charged boy who desperately wants to fit in socially and rebels against his parents’ wishes or a girl who is naturally passive, less likely to socialise and who listens to the advice of her parents?

    It’s the temperament. Women are taught from a young age not to buck the system and the system rewards compliance. Not difficult to sort out, just observe and school.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=510524039 Cynthia Rucker

    I teach high school in rural Ohio. Girls just want it more–all of it–the grades, the scholarships, the better paying jobs. They are more willing to put out the effort to do it. Boys USED to put out effort…20 years ago, when I started my career. Now, boys talk about marrying a woman with a good job–semi-jokingly.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Janos-Kocsis/100001335859700 Janos Kocsis

    they are not more “successful”, they have just more A notes…

  • A man

    I didn’t read the book but after reading a lot of articles and commentaries around the Internet about it I started to see many of the marital relationships around me very differently, this really clarified a lot of things to me, and I’m from countryside Brazil, this thing is happening even here.

    I think one of the issues why men aren’t capable of changing is the upbring. I’m a man, I have a sister and a brother, like many post-feminism families, mine raised the daughter with a very clear objective “you either study to be independent so you can choose the man you want or you’ll have to find a main to sustain you, and he probably won’t respect you, the more sucessful you are, the more you can choose a successful and respectful man”, this was very clear for my parents (both from families with lots of unhappy marriages for women), there was no other way for my sister, she HAD TO go against the fate of the typical housewife, while we, sons, weren’t in the fragile position, “you have to study so you can get a good job for whatever you want”, the concept is that men is in an advantaged position from the begining so he doesn’t have to worry about that, parents worry a lot more about the girl’s future and condition. It’s a double thinking (although this doesn’t explain the cases where married women start their career (or business) later and surpass their husbands, I know some cases).

    Another fact that I noticed during my college times (electric engineer here, we had only 3 women in our class, 2 were amongst the highest grades, the other was dumb as hell) is that the men who got girlfriends or married were more dedicated with the studies, internships, work, etc than those who didn’t. This was very clear by the end of the course, in the beginning all we cared about was getting good grades and good internship oppotunities because this is what people say is important during our college, in the end those who had girlfriends or were married already had more concrete plans for their careers and lives, they didn’t necessarily have better grades, but it was very clear that their professional future was brighter.

    Now I don’t know if this “girlfriend incentive” has to do with the upbring that I talked about above. There might be another thing playing here, which is “what’s the purpose of a heterosexual man after a certain age who can’t get a family to depend on him?” What is his incentive? A woman still can take care of herself, she also has a healthier social life, both with friends and family, it’s also easier for her to raise a family alone, resuming: she can still play most of the “cycle of life” alone. Being alone for a woman living in big cities today will make things harder but not take the purpose of her life, maybe that doesn’t happen with hetero man, in most mammal species the male has to convince the female that he’s worth something, if he can’t do that, that means he failed and now all he can do is to take care of himself waiting for death. Taking care of your body, drinking with buddies, having random sex with prostitutes and spending all of your money to show off isn’t going to incentivate you to work harder and harder, these things are all easy to achieve. We live in a society that values career building, your success in life depends on this discpline that must be present throughout life, maybe the upbring of many families today are preparing women better, or something worse, maybe technology, laws and urban economy made it so that women are concentrating and controling everything that would naturally give a purpose for men to be that disciplined, and there’s no return for that. So what’s left for men is to compete with dildos for women’s sex drive.