Gender Differences in Gifted Achievement

Gender Differences in Gifted Achievement
In Britain and the USA

By Joan Freeman [Part 3/4 - see Part 1]

Reasons for the Increase in British Girls’ Achievement Level

Teachers and academics in Britain are struggling to understand exactly what lies behind the continuing increase in female high-level examination achievements, while at the same time to devise special programs for boys that will entice them back into learning.

To date, the most likely reasons seem to be the following: inspections, style of education and assessment, emotional changes and socio-economic influences.

Inspections

In Britain, there is not only formal commitment to gender equality of opportunities at all levels of education, but also statuary procedures designed to ensure that it happens. A highly trained force of national school inspectors checks for gender bias (among other things) in daily classroom teaching, such as making sure the waving hands of girls are responded to as frequently as those of the boys.

This directed effort appears to have been effective. Investigations by the government’s Equal Opportunities Commission considered that improved school inspection was to a large extent responsible for female examination superiority (Arnot, Gray & Rudduck, 1998).

Style of Education and Assessment

Female advancement first became noticeable in the late 1980s at the time when more coursework was introduced for credit as part of the nationwide examination for the General Certificate of School Education (GCSE), taken at about age 16. Such coursework is often composed of independent projects of the student’s own choice which take weeks of dedicated work to produce.

Of all students gaining A, B, or C grades on the GCSE, by 1993, girls were scoring higher in mathematics and all science subjects, and some education authorities reported a gap of five grades between males and females in all subject areas (Office for Standards in Education/Equal Opportunities Commission, 1996).

Possibly these results reflect deeper changes in the way different kinds of knowledge are currently valued in education. There has been a move away from teaching facts towards having pupils produce written portfolios, extended prose, and research projects.

This sort of learning requires high levels of sustained attentiveness both within and outside the classroom, at which girls are supposedly better, rather than the boy’s style of last minute revision. For example, gifted boys have been found willing to sacrifice deeper understanding for correct answers achieved quickly, according to research at London University (Boaler, William, & Brown, 2000).

This work has found that many girls, and some boys, are alienated by fast-paced and technique-orientated mathematical teaching, particularly the most gifted girls, who react less positively to pace, pressure and competitiveness, often wanting time to think and discuss their understanding. Consequently, gifted girls may have benefited from changes in teaching towards less didactic and more involving teaching styles.

The mandated literacy and numeracy hours (from age 5 to 14) may have further diminished gender stereotyping, particularly with the obligation of a “benchmark” of minimal standards which all normal children must reach. No longer can girls claim they are no good at math. In May 2001, the United States Congress debated whether to introduce a similar scheme in the USA for all sudents from third grade through to eighth grade (Sheffield, 2002).

Generally, women at the university level have been found to study for longer hours and show a higher “work ethic” than men, but men take greater risks, such as leaving preparation for examinations to last minute memorizing, but nonetheless expect to get better results (Mellanby, Martin, & O’Doherty, 2000).

These researchers conclude that men benefit from multiple-choice examinations (more common in the USA) and from their more confident style in written examinations which may be deemed worthier of a higher grade than the more tentative, balanced answers produced by many women (Stobart, Elwood & Quinlan, 1992).

But the traditional examination system is on its way out at British universities: there are fewer timed examinations which draw on high-risk last minute strategies and more emphasis on the continuous accumulation of credit from projects and written work.

Emotional Changes

Research on the academic performance of high-achieving students over their school careers by Power, Whitty, Edwards, and Wigfall (1998) found boys somewhat resistant to study. As one boy put it, “You were supposed to make it look easy and never get caught working.”

Almost all the students interviewed said that boys could do as well as girls if they worked as hard. But it was difficult for the boys because their peer group roles obliged them to be rebellious, and they believed other boys might laugh at them if they behaved like “teacher’s pets”, which is thought to be unmanly.

Sadly, many boys in British schools are now saying that they are less intelligent than the girls.

Surveys have shown that British girls are becoming more confident in their own abilities and that their construction of femininity is no longer at odds with educational achievement (Arnot, Gray, & Rudduck, 1998).

In America, though, gifted girls have been found to be more depressed than gifted boys, often underestimating their abilities because of conflicts between success and “femininity” (Luthar, Zigler, & Goldstein, 1992).

High-achieving girls in Britain are feeling some strain because of their successes. As Lucey and Walkerdine (1996) found, girls’ teenage career planning can be a cause of stress which also delays rather than resolves potential conflict between family and work.

Their study found low SES girls were more likely to aim higher than their mother’s traditional, “feminine” occupations, and that these ambitions brought with them some mother-daughter relationship problems, such as the anger bright girls felt towards their mothers for having accepted relatively lowly occupations.

Socio-economic Influences

Although gender is one of the key factors affecting educational performance, it always functions in relation to other social variables such as social class, ethnic origin, and local context (Arnot, Gray, & Rudduck, 1998; Plummer, 2000).

Domestic work is still likely to constrain working-class girls’ academic achievement (Adkins & Leonard, 1996); the girls most able to make non-traditional choices had the double advantages of the best material provision and the best qualifications.

On the whole, it is middle-class girls who are becoming so successful. For both boys and girls, when one looks more carefully at the examination results, it is the lower SES girls who are still not doing quite as well as their male counterparts. This is true in the USA too.

There have also been overriding social changes in Britain. Traditional routes into work have collapsed, and about 70% of new jobs in the 21st century are expected to be in areas traditionally dominated by women (Office for National Statistics, 2000).

While many boys retain the old-fashioned notions of the male-headed family with mothers at home caring for the children, girls’ attitudes have changed: they are less attracted by a man as a meal-ticket and more attracted to having a career of their own.

Girls no longer suffer from the belief that brains aren't sexy, while too many boys still appear stuck in a “macho” peer culture. Possibly in an effort to reaffirm their masculine identity in the face of academic failure and poor job prospects, boys play at being “cool guys”, taking pride at courting trouble and challenging authority.

This means that it isn't “cool” to do well at school, and rough behaviour such as getting drunk and being generally anti-social, which meets with the approval of their male peers, is growing (Adkins & Leonard, 1996).

Higher Education

In 1999/2000 the British student body in post grade-school education was approximately 54% female, compared with 51% in 1995/6, with women less likely to drop out than men (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2001). But at the university level, gender stereotyping in subject choice is still significant.

For example, more men study computer science, the physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and technlology, and more women studying creative art and design, education, and the biological sciences.

Men are also more likely to aim for a higher degree beyond a bachelors degree. In the UK, this can be through a dissertation alone or through a combination of teaching, examination and a shorter dissertation.

Twice as many women as men choose to take a teaching qualification. There has been a huge change in medicine and law—fields, which were until very recently dominated in numbers by men, but are now well over 50% women.

It remains to be seen whether in time this will be reflected in senior positions in those professions, which are currently filled by only a small minority of women. Similarly in 1970, women made up only 13% of medical students and 8% of practising physicians in the USA, but by 1999, those figures had risen to 50 % and 22 % respectively (Dworkin, 2001).

These changes may have far-reaching consequences, such as style of practice and increasing flexibility of working hours.

The Workplace

In spite of British girls’ excellent school and university results, it is men, not women who still hold most of the high status, high power, high reward jobs in Britain, as elsewhere. Men generally outperform women in their later careers. The glass ceiling (that invisible barrier to advancement described by Morrison, White & Van Velso, 1992) remains in place, although there has been some improvement towards equality.

Most pertinently for intellectually gifted British women, some of the worst places for equality in employment are the universities (Equal Opportunities Commission, 2001). In 2000, women lecturers were paid on average about $12,000 less than men doing the same job in the same field; 84% of universities have no equal opportunity plan, and two thirds do not monitor appointments or promotion by gender or race.

Women in all forms of post grade school education, who make up 51% of staff, are also on average much less well paid than men, not least because only 25% of senior staff are women. The slow increase in women full university professors has raised the proportion to almost 7%.

Outside the universities, discrimination is also prevalent, with an average gap of 18% between male and female earnings. The UK remains at the bottom of the European Union’s equal pay league table, although there is progress, particularly among women entrepreneurs, and a government review of corporate discrimination is now under way.

Women working in grade-school education also earn less than men, being seriously underrepresented in senior positions (Equal Opportunities Commission, 2001).

In all the Local Education Authorities of England and Wales, only 12.6% of Chief Education Officers are women, and this low proportion is general throughout all the policy-making bodies (Office for National Statistics, 2000).

In high schools, 54% of classroom teachers are women, though only 26.85% make it to become a principal. In elementary schools, though men make up only 11.7% of classroom teachers, 42.7% of the principals are men. Schools also rely on an army of casual and part-time workers, such as classroom assistants and school meal supervisors, most of whom are women, and such work is low paying.

Yet even in the toughest businesses it is possible to right such imbalance. In 1991, the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche found that their high turnover of women was caused by unpromising career options due to the male-dominated culture (McCracken, 2000).

Among other actions, the company held mandatory two-day workshops for its 5000 US managers. The gender gap in turnover has now nearly vanished, and this move is associated with the company’s fast growth.

[Part 3/4] Continued in Part 4

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