Achievement gender gap

Last year, the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C. published a report: Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls? The answer to that question is simple – yes.

Of course, it didn’t take a stuffy statistical analysis of longitudinally collected data to tell you that. A recent editorial in The New York Times urged parents to address this epidemic of inequality. You know boys are better at math and science than girls, and girls are better at reading and writing than boys; and if we just fixed our education system we could even things out, right?

Probably not. But that doesn’t mean schools are failing.

In fact, the gender achievement gap is much smaller than the media has led us to believe. Yes, boys score higher on math and science tests at all age levels. However, the achievement gap in math has remained at a miniscule 2-3 points since 1986.

Further strengthening the fear that girls were being shut out of math and science was the fact few females went on to become engineers. This is true. However, a closer look at the data reveals a much more nuanced scenario. Though girls only earned 21 percent of the master’s degrees conferred at American universities in the field of engineering in 2004, they earned 58 percent of the master’s degrees in biological sciences and an astonishing 78 percent of all psychology master’s.

In a 2005 study of American high schools, the US Department of Education found that 18.5 percent of female seniors completed advanced placement biology and 30 percent of female seniors completed advanced pre-calculus. Compare this to only 14 percent and 25 percent of graduating male students respectively. Although both men and women are entering four-year universities in record numbers, women are doing so at a much higher rate. This is not a case of men falling behind. More men are going to college than ever before, it’s just easier for them to find a date now.

I don’t see an epidemic. I don’t even see a sickness. Psychologists, pundits, education specialists and journalists have tried to “solve the problem,” when a closer look shows there isn’t a problem at all. Looking at 30 years of testing data shows that, in spite of all the massive changes in our approach to education, the achievement differential of men and women on standardized tests has remained basically the same. The fact that women scored 14 points better than men on the most recent American national reading test for 17-year-olds is somewhat alarming; that is until you look at the data from 1975, a year in which women were 12 points better.

Men aren’t getting worse at reading, and women have never really been that much worse at science and math. The data simply illustrate the differences between the two sexes, differences that are innate, as evidenced by a 2008 Northwestern University study that found “language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls,” and that “girls show significantly greater activation in language areas of the brain than boys.”

As long as teachers and parents aren’t pushing girls away from fields such as engineering, I see no problem. Homogeneity is not the key to life. All are not made equal. Some men will become teachers and some women will become engineers. Women are taking the same courses as men in high school and scoring just as well on exams. They are entering university at record levels, outpacing their male contemporaries.

Our schools aren’t failing our daughters because more women aren’t engineers. Our schools need to continue to reform, not for the sake of increasing the number of female computer scientists or male social workers, but for the sake of making instruction better for all students. The real achievement gap is not between men and women, but between poor students and affluent ones.

Too often the media grabs data and inaccurately paints a picture that’s black and white. Doing so only distracts from the real issues. Without a doubt, men and women are more similar than we are different, but as neuroscience and psychology advances, we are getting a better understanding of where we differ and why. Emerging studies are illustrating the fact that men are neurologically predisposed to spatial learning, while women have an advantage in the realm of language acquisition and utilization.

Naturally, educators should exploit this knowledge in order to help male and female students learn more effectively, a goal that should be evaluated not in relative terms, male versus female, but against whether or not females and males are increasing their overall achievements in various disciplines over time.