gender gap/ exam results

[rebelraising]

Every year, I get all confused about the gender gap in exam results. On the one hand, I want to be dismissive, because, despite the fact that girls do so much better, men still get paid more, and there does seem to be less attention paid to that. So, really, every time girls do better, whatever they're doing better at suddenly counts for nothing.

On the other hand, it's very bad that there is an education system that seems to systematically exclude boys from high achievement. Gender equality is gender equality.

Anyway, when they set up these scheme to "tackle boys' under-achievement", if they don't also set up schemes to "tackle" the fact that girls still get worse grades in maths and physics, we'll know exactly where the government is coming from.

Comments

the facts on maths

[lysora]

Ah, but see right now they don't care about what grades either gender gets in maths & physics because no one seems to be doing it at all. In last year's AS maths, just less than 1 in 3 students failed. That lead to 28% of the AS maths students dropping the subject and not taking it to A level. That in turn lead to the percentage of students applying to do maths at university to fall by 11%. This year, they realised their mistakes and made the papers somewhat more manageable -- only just more than 1 in 5 students failed AS maths this year, but it was still one of the highest failure rates across the subjects.

And the whole reason behind maths getting harder? University professors complaining that students are arriving without having basic skills. I hope they're happy with the result they got from 'toughening up' the curriculum.

So, yeah, the point was that the government isn't going to "tackle" the gender issue with regards to maths & physics. They've got other problems and unfortunately you can't really blame them for wanting to deal with this first.

Re: the facts on maths

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. Except that before they introduced new AS levels (and how annoyed am I that now nobody knows what my "old-style" AS levels are for?), girls still did worse in Maths and Physics, and there just wasn't the hand-wringing then, either.

But the general lack of people of either sex taking science is sad, and yes, you're totally right that it's probably the primary thing they need to deal with. (And my stepdaugter's off to study astrophysics at university in two weeks! Possibly the Scottish system has something to be said for it there...)