Girls outperforming boys in high school, by Ashe Schow. If it was the other way around, it would be evidence of sexism and a national crisis, incessantly talked up by the media. It used to be the other way around, and feminists persuaded people to tilt the playing field towards girls because equality. Now…crickets.
Don’t expect to hear calls for helping boys perform better in school. Activists have focused so heavily on girls for years now that boys have gotten the message that they no longer matter. It’s what Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about in her book “The War Against Boys” nearly two decades ago.
Here’s a giveaway:
It is curious, however, as we look at the SAT data, that despite [girls] getting better grades and taking more difficult classes, boys still get better SAT scores in math than girls. In 2016, boys slightly outperformed girls on critical reading, with a mean score of 495. The mean score for girls was 493. On the math portion, the mean for boys was 524, compared to 494 for girls.
But on the writing portion, which has only been around since 2006, girls outperform boys, with a mean score of 487. The mean score for boys was 475.
The SAT tests are more like intelligence tests, not overtly based on knowledge gained. Marking writing is more subjective.
Most people aren’t aware that among whites the IQ of males is slightly higher than women. Males do better on logic and maths, women on language, so test makers ensure the sexes get the same average IQ score (100) by balancing the questions — specifically so 16-year-olds get the same score in both sexes. But female brains stop growing about then, while male brains tend to grow for a couple more years, so adult males have slightly higher IQs — though it is not that meaningful because it is merely an artifact of balancing the logic versus language questions.
More meaningful is that the IQ distribution in men has a larger standard deviation than in women: only 37% of humans with IQs over 120 (the bottom of managerial level) are female. So on the face of it the fact that girls are doing better in high school, dominating top rankings, points to sex bias in the school environment. Anyone with an jaundiced eye could hardly fail to notice it.
