One of the most evident gender gaps in the educational field is that there are boys and girls who drop out of school at the age of 16, and that there are more girls studying at universities, just as you suggest this analysis carried out in the British educational system. The gap, furthermore, has widened every year for a decade until 2018. And as we already saw, the treatment of girls is more condescending, which contributes to the gap.
As a result, children from disadvantaged backgrounds face even greater challenges, and White children from disadvantaged backgrounds have particularly difficult times.
Special treatment by gender
Studies in the United Kingdom and throughout the Western world have repeatedly shown that the education system harms children. Specifically, teachers they seem to have a bias when it comes to protecting girls from their failures but harming boys because of the same difficulties.
That is to say, in order to combat the educational bias that existed around women, the opposite bias is being fed.
This discrimination is also seen in the same behavior of children, since the studies that have analyzed this particularity suggest that teachers are also judging children's behavior with more severe standards than those of girls.
This other one study, for example, suggests that schools respond more harshly to children's transgressions and that difference also contributed to men not getting as far in their education… Even when girls and boys had the same behavioral problems, girls were more likely to finish high school and college.
This another study notes that naughty children were increasingly viewed negatively as rebellious and intrusive and were more easily labeled as the “class clown” by their teachers. The data also revealed that playful children were stigmatized by their teachers, and that this was communicated through verbal and non-verbal reprimands. And that the classmates assimilated this message. In contrast, girls' pranks were not a consideration in teacher or peer grades in any grade, nor did their classroom behaviors show significant variation.
another study suggests that, in all subjects, children are represented in grade distributions below what your test scores would predict.
A OECD report on gender in education, in more than 60 countries, also found that girls receive higher grades compared to boys of the same ability.
Educational gender gap
In 2015, returning to the United Kingdom, only 9% of male students progressed directly from the education system to university, a lower higher education participation rate than any other ethnicity/gender combination, and three times lower than the 28% national average.
The gap widened every year for a decade until 2018, when girls' lead narrowed slightly.
Looking beyond school to higher education, female students now outnumber men. In 2017, UK universities awarded places to 136,000 UK-domiciled female applicants and only 105,000 male applicants.
In short, talking about sexual brains, and any bias, It actually introduces us into an inextricable jungle, where one sex is biased for some reasons and the other for others.
The same thing happens if we analyze ethnicity, beauty, social class or any other parameter. Because, even if unconsciously, we are all crossed by racist, classist, sexist, tribalist biases... and it is inevitable, to a greater or lesser extent, as you can see in the following video:
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The news
Gender gap: only 9% of white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds reach university in the UK
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.