They seized the initiative at school, college and at work. Why is it easier for girls to get an education and how does this threaten their personal lives? Question for the experts.
Even 50 years ago, it was hard to imagine, but today, in almost all Western countries, girls study better than boys, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Officials who 40 years ago considered girls to be academically incapable are now desperately slipping Harry Potter books on boys in the hope that they will at least read it.
This situation is observed in all sectors of society, from private boarding schools with annual tuition fees of several tens of thousands of dollars to public schools for low-income families. “It’s all about their age, in the restructuring of the body, in hormones,” says the director of London’s Wellington College (training — 25 thousand pounds a year) Anthony Seldon.
“There is a collective belief that it’s not cool to work in the classroom, to show your mind,” adds Ivan Yip, director of the Bronx Leadership Academy for the poor (New York, USA).
Boys study less and read less
However, it is clear from the OECD report that the situation is not so dramatic. The advantage of girls does not appear everywhere: in mathematics, for example, fifteen-year-old boys overtake their peers — the gap corresponds to three additional months of education. In the sciences, both sexes are broadly equal, but in the literature, in all 64 countries tested, girls are ahead of boys by about a year of schooling.
Such test results are a direct consequence of the difference in male and female attitudes towards education. Pupils spend an average of five and a half hours a week on homework, students an hour less. Three-quarters of girls like to read; among boys, there are slightly more than half of them. The time spent reading is decreasing year by year for both sexes, but boys give up books more quickly.
It turns out that the average boy is a much worse student than the average girl. That’s what the statistics say, and that’s the general opinion. But there is no need to draw the wrong conclusions.
Instead of giving male students more attention in secondary school, encouraging their interest in learning, motivating them to study, combating the stereotype that “learning sucks”, many teachers, according to the OECD, behave differently. They tend to be skeptical of them and rate their work lower, destroying the last remnants of motivation.
Gender preponderance
It is the ability to read and understand what is read, which girls are much better at leaving high school, that turns out to be the key to further education, both in high school and at the university. Largely because of this, the ratio of applicants to universities has changed: in 1986, 54% of applicants were men, now the majority (56%) are women.
The same reading factor largely explains why boys, on average, study worse than girls and are more likely to drop out of higher education before finishing. This option was acceptable a century ago, when there were many well-paid male jobs in the labor market that did not require higher education, but those days are long gone, and now what to do with the growing number of undereducated young men?
The triumph of feminism?
There is a point of view according to which women have already surpassed men not only in education, but also in politics and in the social hierarchy. But the current situation, which pleases feminists now, may upset the female population in the future: if in the past women most often married men of their own or higher social circle, then after a while there will no longer be enough educated, well-to-do men for everyone.
Women continue to lag significantly behind men in two important ways: they earn on average 25% less than men, and their number among top managers does not exceed one third.
In the modern world, work after hours, availability by phone 24/7, willingness to quickly change jobs are especially valued — qualities that are traditionally more inherent in men. Whether this male bastion will survive or fall, like all the previous ones, one can only guess.