Gender Differences in Gifted Achievement In Britain and the USA

By Joan Freeman

School of Lifelong Learning and Education, Middlesex University, London, UK

Ref: Freeman, J. (2003), ‘Gender differences in gifted achievement in Britain and the U.S.’, Gifted Child Quarterly, 47, 202-211.

Abstract

In Britain, the academic achievements of gifted girls in grade school are surpassing those of gifted boys in almost all areas of study and at all ages, whereas this does not appear to be the case in the USA.

The evidence suggests two major reasons for this difference. Emotionally, British girls are now showing greater confidence in their abilities.

Educationally, changes in the style and content of British curriculum and assessment may favor female study patterns, along with a national system of inspection which checks for equal gender opportunities in the classroom.

Although this managed change in gender equality of opportunity in schools is seen to be highly effective, female school advantage has yet to make a significant difference in the workplace.

Putting the Research to Use

The relatively lower achievement of American gifted girls in the sciences and mathematics compared with American gifted boys is not a universal characteristic, as international comparisons have shown, and so cannot be due to the innate abilities of either sex.

In Britain, and reflected in other countries, the continually rising superiority of gifted girls in every school subject area is associated with socio-emotional and educational changes.

Although the situation is complex, the essential steps that appear to have been effective in altering the British gender achievement balance include changes in the following educational procedures.

• Administrative planning: An explicit school policy and whole school support are most effective with some form of continuous monitoring.

• Teaching practice: Changes include, for example, teaching sciences in single sex groups, making the curriculum content more real-life based, and the encouragement of learning which is more thoughtful than memory based.

• Assessment: Moving way from the dominance of multiple-choice responses towards greater inclusion of more deeply considered essays and student projects helps rights gender balance.

• Counselling-type teaching: Promoting girls’ understanding of their fear of “male” subjects as difficult, encouraging coping strategies and general assertiveness is helpful.

However, school achievement is not life achievement and there is still an international need to broaden gifted girls’ selection of study areas, which affects their career prospects, as well as improving equal opportunities for gifted women in the workplace.

In Britain, throughout their school lives, girls’ results are now surpassing those of boys, not only in the “soft” subjects such as English, art and history, but also in the “hard” sciences, such as physics, chemistry and mathematics (Department for Education and Skills, 2000; Equal Opportunities Commision, 2001).

This includes the curriculum-based Standard Attainment Tests (of general school progress), which all children take at the ages of 7, 11 and 14, and almost all the nation-wide public examinations taken at 16, 17 and 18.

A consistently higher proportion of girls than boys score in the top three grades (receive an A, B, or C), and girls have a lower rate of failure (9%, compared with 11.9% for boys).

According to a British overview of research in gender achievement, this trend “emerged at the end of the 1980s; within four years the position had changed from one of rough equality between the sexes to clear disparity” (Arnot, Gray, & Rudduck, 1998, p. 11). However, boys are still better at physical education.

At the university level, more women are gaining relatively more top grade (summa cum laude) degrees than men. This has trebled in just ten years, with women now taking the lead in 12 of the 17 university fields reported by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (2001), including medicine, law and business.

The British educational system is triangular, in the sense that the bases are wide and thorough, but become sharply subject focussed in the teen years. From age 5 to 14 years, every child follows the National Curriculum, with the exception of physical education, where girls have fewer team games and boys have less gymnastics and dance.

Every child until the age of 10 has two mandated daily study hours, one on literacy and one on numeracy, cutting across any nascent gender bias in these basics. Students who achieve well at 16 and want to continue their education can study for Advanced level (A-level) examinations from a choice of 76 independent subject areas.

Without passes in at least two examinations there is no possibility of university entrance; and as there are more applicants than places, A-level results are extremely important. In 2001, of all the 17 and 18 year-olds in the country, 33.7% passed two or more A-levels and 18.5% of these passed three. (Department for Education and Skills, 2002).

There are no private universities in the UK (Oxford and Cambridge included), and the drop-out rate is very low.

Although the standard of learning in the areas so intensely studied from 16 to 18 years of age is extremely high, those teenage decisions about what to study certainly restrict choice at university (Colley, Comber, & Hargreaves, 1994).

The major division in subject area choice between males and females is still usually between the sciences and the arts (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2001). Women are more likely to choose English, biology and French, and less likely to choose economics, physics, computer studies, technology or business studies, which usually lead to better-paid and higher-status careers.

Government research has found that a preponderance of one gender entering a subject does not inevitably result in a gender gap—with respect to achievement—in favour of that sex. Males, for example, may achieve higher grades in French at A-level and females in physics (Department for Education and Skills, 2000).

However, in spite of overall superior results in all national examinations, of those girls who do choose the “hard” sciences, more boys still specialize in them and more girls are still overrepresented in the traditional female subjects.

In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2001) provides the only national picture of school achievement by subject and populations of students, including trends.

It shows, for example, that in July 2001 the percentage of male and female fourth-graders performing at or above proficient in math had more than doubled since 1990: The percentage of males increased from 13 to 28%, while the percentage of females increased from 12 to only 24%, still 4% lower than that of males.

High level examination success in the USA shows a very different pattern with regard to gender and subject choice. In Chicago, Hedges & Nowell (1995) analysed mental test scores from six meta-analyses over 35 years using national probability samples. When they examined students whose mental test scores were among the top 5%, they found that on mathematics, science, and vocational (male type) aptitude scales “talented” 17-year-old males outnumbered females substantially.

Males scored 8-10 times more frequently within the top 10%, and for several tests no female managed to score at all in the top 3%. Hedges and Nowell wrote: “there are only one half to one seventh as many women as men who excel in the relevant abilities” (p. 45).

However, they found the talented males to be at a profound disadvantage in literacy skills, which trailed that of their female counterparts by as much as a year and a half. The overall conclusion was that the differences in innate abilities between male and females across the arts-science divide are large and deep, which is why, according to Hedges and Nowell, men achieve at a higher rate than women in the sciences.

Findings from more than 20 years research in the USA by Benbow & Lubinski (1993) are in accord. Above-level testing (designed for older children) of well over one million 12 and 13 year-olds in the top 3% in intellectual ability on the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), found that males scored higher on mathematical reasoning ability than females, as well as spatial-mechanical reasoning and some lifestyle and vocational preferences.

Though the girls scored significantly higher in mental arithmetic and computation, they were much less successful with higher-level problem solving and much less likely to have studied mathematics at a higher level. The researchers suggest that “sex differences in science achievement should be especially pronounced at the exceptional levels” (p. 55), and conclude “mathematical talent seems to have biological co-variates, with the patterns of brain activation and inhibition underlying precocity and its expression differing between at least a subset of males and females” (p.57).

Benbow and Lubinski’s conclusion is underlined in an overview of gender effects in engineering and the physical sciences (Lubinski, Benbow and Morelock, 2000), where although recognizing the effects of cultural influences, the researchers write, “We conclude, that because of sex differences in the configuration of specific abilities, the satisfactoriness for engineering and physical science is less frequently met by gifted females compared to gifted males” (p.641).

There appears to be a major difference between American and British gender achievements. Whereas in America, boys’ overall mathematics scores tend to be superior to those of their female counterparts, in Britain the mathematics scores of girls tend to be superior.

Again, although proportionately fewer girls in Britain choose to specialise in physics and engineering, their achievements in those subjects are at least as good as those of boys. It could be expected that boys and girls in the two countries have identical genetic make-up, implying that different cultural influences have produced these contradictory outcomes.

One can think of the concerted British move to equality of opportunity as a grand experiment on a population of about 60 million people, using other countries for comparison.

Apart from tests set by teachers in school, public examinations are national; and although there are some differences for Scotland and between the five regional examining boards, there is sufficient similarity for the whole school population to function as a statistically analyzable unit in terms of examination grades.

Specific concerns and trends, such as gender achievement, can be identified. The experiment began in the mid 70s with the broadening out of attitudes with respect to education. It is an experiment that is still in progress and while debate continues on how to interpret the results, much can already be said about the results with respect to examination scores.

[Part 1 of 4] Continued in Part 2

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