The

Economist

Gender and education

Nature plus nurture

Girls do better than boys in school and university. But both can still improve
sometimes for surprising reasons

Mar 7th 2015 |

From the print edition
STENDHAL once wrote that all geniuses who
were born women were lost to the public
good. At least in the rich world, that wasteful
truth has been triumphantly overcome. More
than half of new graduates in the OECD club
of mostly rich countries are now female. In
several the share is around 60%. Former
male redoubts such as medicine and law have
increasingly been captured by women. Indeed, elite American colleges are widely suspected
of admitting male applicants with lower grades, to even up the numbers. Yet despite this
monumental advance, prejudices continue to hamper girlsand boys, too. Happily,
neutralising them, at least within schools, should be much easier than reversing centuries of
patriarchy.
Educational results still seem to support the old idea that male and female intellectual
capabilities differ. An analysis by the OECD of PISA tests for 15-year-olds in 60-odd
countries turns up some eerily similar patterns. Girls trounce boys in literacy, but boys do
better in mathematics. Boys do less homework and are more likely to fail in all subjects. The
courses that both sexes choose at university mirror their earlier strengths at school. Women
dominate in education, health, arts and humanities; men lead in computing, engineering
and physics (see article).
All this might suggest that intellectual differences are hard-wired, with women abler and
more assiduous, but men better at the exact sciences. A closer look at the data reveals a new
version of Stendhals lament: that much ability, both male and female, is wasted because of
tenacious stereotypes.

One startling fact uncovered by the OECD number-crunchers is that, when teachers mark a
reading test without knowing who took it, the gender gap shrinks by a third. Most of the
worlds teachers are now women, who find it easier to spot ability when it appears in their
own likeness. They give better marks, perhaps unconsciously, to the punctual, orderly and
neat: fine qualities that society associates with girls, but which are not the same as reading
and understanding a text. Poor grades damage motivation and mean that pupils are put in
lower ability groups, so that biased assessments turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. Falling
behind in literacy, as boys disproportionately do, is particularly worrying, since reading is
needed to learn anything else. The solution is simple: whenever possible, school tests
should be made anonymous.

INTERACTIVE: The glass-ceiling index - the best and worse places in the world to be a
working woman
Sometimes it makes sense to go with the grain. Young boys are more likely to read when the
topic is zombies or superheroes; older ones prefer newspapers or comic books. So make
them all available. More often stereotypes get in the way: if girls believe they cannot do
sums and boys think that books are sissy, neither will do as well as they could. Pupils live
down to low expectations or pick up subtle cues about gender differences. In maths, for
instance, when female teenagers are asked how confident they feel about solving an abstract
equation, they rate their chances almost as highly as boys. But when the question involves
calculating a cars fuel efficiency, many balk.
Easy on the carburettors
The most encouraging finding is that gender gaps can be narrowed as attainment rises
across the board. Even more important than rooting out hidden bias is improving education
for all. Boys in countries with the best schools read better than girls elsewhere. In Shanghai
hardly any youngsters, of either sex, fail in everything, and girls are almost as good at maths
as their male classmatesand far ahead of boys elsewhere. Had there been a Mrs Stendhal,
she would have smiled.

From the print edition: Leaders