NY Times: "At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust"

[DRab]

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As for the social sciences/humanities vs. math/science issue, while the students in the former are more likely to be female, those who do the grading–at least in the universities with which I am familiar–are still more likely to be male. Whose gender is the important one?

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<p>The important one? I don’t think either is that important, really. But lets look at the situation. Let’s forget about gender and sex for the moment. In academia, social science and humanities courses tend to give out significantly higher grades to undergraduate students than the sciences and technical disciplines. If we accept that (which is a well-documented phenomenon), if we take into account sex of students in the disciplines, we see that far more women occupy those that have higher average grades given, and far more men occupy the disciplines that have much lower average grades given, so I would understand at least in part why women have much higher average grades than men. I don’t think my claims are provocative or difficult to accept when looking at the state of things. </p>

<p>I find it absurd when people or organizations claim things about grades and gpa and ignore this. I have a pamphlet from Berkeley sposored by the Cal Greeks. “Sororiety girls have higher average GPAs than the campus average.” “Fraternity boys have higher average GPAs than the campus average.” Great- what with 1 total sororiety girl being in the college of engineering this past year, and very few being in the sciences, with most being in the humanities. And the same is very true of fraternity boys, although somewhat more of them are in engineering/technical and science fields. When you ignore this, and when people produce reports showing that the SAT is underpredictive of female performance and overpredictive of male performance and don’t even consider grading discrepencies could possibly explain some of the situation, it’s absurd and misleading or those and ignorant.</p>

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She was just arguing, tongue-in-cheek, that there was a good reason for men not to be so concerned about academic success because that’s not what society rewards.

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<p>I think it depends. Law school admissions very much reward academic success if you define that as “high GPA.” The same is very true of med school admissions. Being able to do well what it takes to get good grades has many benefits, as does getting good grades, and is often rewarded. But as she and the informed know, society only really rewards members with a certain type of anatomical feature (and punishes others with a different type). That’s what society(aka the patriarchy) cares about, right?</p>