Attitudes to women in education

In the nineteenth century it was obvious that women were more stupid than men, some even put this down to small brains:

"But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men, a difference which we should not exaggerate but which is, nonetheless, real. We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority."

-Paul Broca

This was not just the view of Broca, a famous neuroscientist, but the widely accepted view.  Even as late as the nineteen fifties intelligence tests and achievement tests all suggested that women were somehow simply more stupid than men.

It is amazing how rapidly everything can change.  Simply by relaxing discipline in schools, having mixed schools and introducing course work into assessments it was possible to reverse the "obvious" natural superiority of the male of the species.  It is now "obvious" that girls are more intelligent than boys:

"While 72.3% of girls got A*-C grades, only 63.7% of boys did. The gap was even more noticeable for the top grades where 8.3% of girls gained A*s compared with 5.3% of boys." Guardian 2013.

Modern journalists and the woman in the street now portray women as cleverer than men.  The OECD has applied achievement tests across the world to assess gender differences:

The coverage of these results in the New York Times asked why girls were not trained (or boys held back)  so that there was also female superiority in science.  The true import of these tests is that there is a strong cultural factor in differences in achievement between males and females.  The differences depend upon how girls and boys are taught.

The history of male-female educational difference and the abundant evidence of cultural and environmental influences suggests that men and women have equal intelligence.  Women are not stupid and men are not stupid.  However, education systems can be stupid.

Where there are differences in educational attainment between boys and girls it is prima facie evidence that the education system is failing one sex or the other.
This is the case in the UK and in many Asian countries where extreme compliance is required from students.  Eastern Europe is an amusing case, years of socialism resulted in men taking advantage of being paid for doing nothing: the net result was that men go hunting and women run the civil service.

First published  25/6/14