Another possibility that springs to mind is that men are more likely to join the military right out of high school, then use the assistance from that to go to school after they get discharged.  I know this was a popular strategy in the late 90’s when I was in college.  Maybe less so now.

I wonder if the chosen field of study matters?  For example, my husband works at an engineering school and it’s very common for the engineering students (overwhelmingly male) to take 5 or 6 years to graduate.

I know this is a dumb way to look at it, but looking at the young hetero couples I see around my college town… almost without exception, the girls are thinner than their boyfriends. It just feeds into a narrative in my mind where college guys are sleeping in and college girls are hitting the gym.

There are a lot of possible reasons for these graduation rates, but thinking back on college (just a few years ago), the girls pushed harder. I think Amanda’s pressure hypothesis rings true.

Like all things of this nature, the answer is most likely a combination of things.  Men (to the extent that an 18 year old is a man) are more likely to join the military, they are more likely to screw off, they are more likely to binge drink, and they have the luxury of lower expectations at that age (boys will be boys!).

Off topic:  Can I just say that the casting of Emma Watson as Hermione was one of the best bits of casting in the history of cinema?  Not only did she look exactly as I imagined Hermione at the age of 11, but she matured exactly the way I imagined the character matured.  The casting of all three main characters was great, but they got especially lucky with Emma Watson.

When I was in school, I noticed this gender divide.  Most of the people I knew who changed majors, took only 9 hours a semester, filled their schedules with blow-off classes that didn’t go towards their degree—-and thus took 5 or 6 years to graduate—-were male.  And most of the people I knew who worked their asses off because their financial support would be yanked if they didn’t were female.  The in-between people, who worked their asses off though they probably didn’t have to, were mixed.

It’s also a question of having pre-college organisational skills and academic self-discipline, both of which are not formally emphasised in most public secondary schools. Combine that with a willful, Freakonomics blindness to the fact that boys are cut a lot more breaks than girls are in high school on behavioural/discipline issues, and you can see why there’s a perception that a woman has to work a lot harder to approach some sort of career and economic parity with men (recent stats also indicate that women make up a larger and larger portion of the American undergrad population with every year).

It’s not just a matter of self-perception or media images, either.  Women with college degrees make less than men with equivalent education in equivalent fields.

Not only that, if they graduate earlier than the typical male, they end up entering the labour market one or two years earlier. In the early stage of a career, that makes an enormous difference. See, Freakonomics guys, you can have a discussion about economics and sexism all at the same time!

This whole post reminds me of the film An Education, which I watched earlier this week (the story on which it’s based is summarised in this long article). The memoirist describes her relationship at age 16 with a charming and seemingly solid older man, but what’s interesting is how easily her parents jettisoned their insistence of her attending college when presented with the alternative of a “good provider” spouse:

Of course Oxford, and time, would have stolen me away eventually, but Simon made it happen almost overnight. Until our “engagement”, I’d thought my parents were ignorant about many things (fashion, for instance, and existentialism, and why Jane Austen was better than Georgette Heyer) but I accepted their moral authority unquestioningly. So when they casually dropped the educational evangelism they’d sold me for 18 years and told me I should skip Oxford to marry Simon, I thought, “I’m never going to take your advice about anything ever again.”

Granted, this was 1961, but I’m sure that there are many parents who’d still choose the hubby over college for their little girl. And a lot of women whose faith in otherwise loving, protecting parents was destroyed by the assumption that a husband = life-long security.

This is actually in my bailiwick.  I think there are a lot of explanations and I’m surprised that Freakonomics didn’t cite relevant research (published in journals no less) to explain the gap between men and women:

a) men account for many many more of the engineering and STEM degrees than women and many such degrees take much longer to complete than 4 years.

b) popular writers and publications only started caring about this statistic when White men started going to college in much lower numbers than women; this stat had been consistent for African American men (and Latino men) for YEARS; I think there is something to be said for the income parity between women with a 4 year degree and men who are hs graduates.

c) disproportionately, the major sports in Division 1-3 schools are male and have athletes with lower academic credentials than women (so it isn’t surprising to me that men might have lower 4-year completion rates when taking a and c into account)

excellent post! I felt like you were telling me my life here. The explanation is so obvious and common sensical, it is just so frustrating that it is overlooked, even after all these years of “consciousness raising” - those Freakonoics people truly live in a soulless vacuum.

I’m surprised that Freakonomics didn’t cite relevant research (published in journals no less)

You shouldn’t be.  They’re writing to make money, now.

#3 - I know many many women who had to do this too. I think, if anything, familial responsibility falls more heavily on women.

I think there is one other possible explanation: women come to college better prepared for the workload, possibly due to the way school is taught, possibly due to earlier maturation, possibly due to the fewer mulligans given to women. 

Women may come better trained in the “outside of school” stuff - in other words, they may have been better taught how to organize their own lives and their homework and actually know how to do things like laundry and such.  Perhaps the “baby the boys” mentality backfires once people actually have to get their own shit together, who knows?

Our son’s birthday was one days before the cut off for his grade.  So he would have been the very youngest in his class.  And our assumption was always, especially because he was a boy, that we’d hold him back and have him start kindergarden a year late, which we did.  But he’d still be on track to be 22 when he graduates, because his 22nd birthday wouldn’t come until the summer after he graduates.

But I’d still expect the first answer to be that it’s because more boys get held back at or repeat kindergarden.  My second guess would be that more men than women come back to school after doing time in the military.  That guys are afforded more luxury to be flaky through their late teens and early 20’s, and to grow up later, would be third on my list. 

I wonder, if for people for whom academics don’t come easily, if guys have an easier time sticking with it than women.  Guys can keep plugging away on a 7 or 8 year track with less risk of being de-railed by pregnancy, or the expectations of a relationship, or whatever.

Side note: In LDS/Mormon culture, guys take two years off for missions at age 19, whereas girls are only allowed to go on 1.5 year missions AND have to wait til they are 21 AND are encouraged not to go at all to up their chances of getting married. (That’s not going to skew stats majorly across the board, unless the samples came from heavily Mormon western states like Utah, Idaho, or Arizona, but it is something to consider. I don’t know about other religions and service requirements.)

Just as anecdata: it took me six years to graduate because a) I was a lousy student and b) I changed majors 3 times.  Mostly a.

How about: guys are just freekin’ lazy because their privileged status gives them more of a cushion/buffer?

I think this can be tied into: why do American men dress like fucking children and/or idiots?  I’m lookin’ at you, Seattle, but it’s a nation-wide plague.

That’s what I’m saying. What Eric_RoM said.

The Google didn’t help me find statistics, but this isn’t just a question of women beating men to a bachelor’s by 22. High school and college graduations are both starting to tilt in women’s favor. (Limiting access to contraception might be a good way to reverse the trend. Hmm…)

Condoned and indulged laziness.  Think about photos and commentary on male unemployment worldwide: guys sitting around listless.  We hear a lot about men without jobs doing nothing, amusing themselves, or having their propensity for blowing themselves up explained.  Nowhere in the world do you find doing nothing as a way of life for large cohorts of women, whether they’re called “unemployed” or not. 

And about the United States, here’s a snippet from a story Newsweek ran last year:

Let’s start with the myth of the new diaper daddies. The American Time Use Survey shows that in fact laid-off men tend to do less—not more—housework, eating up their extra hours snacking, sleeping and channel surfing (which might be why the Cartoon Network, whose audience has grown by 10 percent during the downturn, is now running more ads for refrigerator repair school). Unemployed women, in contrast, spend twice as much time taking care of children and doing chores. Nor do former working stiffs necessarily reconnect with their families: following alcoholics and drug addicts, they’re the most likely demographic to beat their female partners.

So yeah, young women figure out how little slack they’ll be cut, and get to work as a matter of survival.

One other factor: guys mature nearly two years later physically and socially. Yes, there are sexist assumptions that let them continue to slack off, but the reduced expectations start in the primary grades and middle school when this difference has very real impact.

I wonder, if for people for whom academics don’t come easily, if guys have an easier time sticking with it than women.  Guys can keep plugging away on a 7 or 8 year track with less risk of being de-railed by pregnancy, or the expectations of a relationship, or whatever.

It’s possible, but I would blame lowered expectations and more self-indulgence and entitlement as the source of their complacency more than the fact that they can’t get pregnant.

I wonder if the chosen field of study matters?  For example, my husband works at an engineering school and it’s very common for the engineering students (overwhelmingly male) to take 5 or 6 years to graduate.

A factor in the 5-6 year graduation rate, especially for STEM majors is the fact most US high school graduates enter college with extremely poor mathematical preparation, especially those hoping to pursue engineering or STEM fields despite scoring high on the SAT math section and being straight-A math & science students in high school.  Nearly every engineering/STEM major I knew who took 5+ years to graduate did so because they had to spend an extra year taking remedial courses such as trigonometry or pre-calculus or their high school calculus and science foundation courses were so watered down that they had to repeat/take remedial courses just to get up to where students with good preparation were when they graduated high school.  This was never an issue with the high school classmates I knew who were engineering majors in college.  Heck….some of them even managed to graduate with a BSE and an MSE in 4 years from schools like MIT…

Another factor, especially in large universities is students having to spend an extra semester or a few because the few specific required major/distribution requirement courses they need to complete for their BS/BSE were not available during the semesters they needed them to complete the degree in 4 years.  This was especially an issue at the large state universities….including the famous UC campuses.  This problem, however, is also an issue with all other majors, especially the most popular ones on campus.

I just realized that was unclear, but I’m thinking a woman would be more likely to decide she’s not good enough for college and drop out rather than allow herself to slouch along on student loans and/or her parents’ money.

Guys get more for less work. Even though girls do better in school, boys are far liklier to be labeled “gifted”, for instance.

I suspect a combination of factors.
Parents are more likely to delay a boy’s kindergarten entry. Boys are more likely to be held back a grade. (When I was in school, it seemed only boys were held back. Girls tended to skip a grade)

These factors result in a 19 year old graduating HS.  These are not students likely to complete an undergrad degree in 3 years.

Also, figure in the perpetual scholar. The one who changes majors every three semesters so he can keep the financial aid flowing and not have to get a job. Every campus has one (or more).

Of course privilege figures in.

Then again. I took 5 1/2 years to get an English degree because I spent 3 years trying to master calculus for an engineering degree.

Another factor, especially in large universities is students having to spend an extra semester or a few because the few specific required major/distribution requirement courses they need to complete for their BS/BSE were not available during the semesters they needed them to complete the degree in 4 years.  This was especially an issue at the large state universities….including the famous UC campuses.  This problem, however, is also an issue with all other majors, especially the most popular ones on campus.

In my experience, this was the primary reason why most of my peers, STEM or liberal arts, were on the 5- or 6-year plan instead of the traditional 4.

The situation again goes to preparation. Getting the proper mix of breadth requirements in a timely fashion, especially at a large public campus, requires serious advance planning and negotiation skills starting in freshman year if one wants to graduate in 4 years. It’s a classic case of having to manage a large project involving limited time, limited resources, and necessary contingencies.

Public high schools don’t even begin to teach the skills needed to handle that situation, and do the boys a further disservice by giving them more breaks than the girls when a student fails to clear even the low bar of high school time-management expectations.

As to why boys get more mulligans (as Ms Kate nicely puts it), there seems to be a well-meaning but sexist assumption at work that “girls should know better,” so if they screw up it’s their own damned fault (and if they do better than average, it’s nothing special—they’re girls, after all).

It’s also a question of having pre-college organisational skills and academic self-discipline, both of which are not formally emphasised in most public secondary schools.

Though they are helpful in succeeding in college, I’ve known plenty of college classmates…including myself who lacked one or both of the above in high school and yet, excelled academically in college and beyond.  In contrast, some college classmates/acquaintances on other campuses who were highly organized and academically disciplined in high school ended up crashing and burning once they arrived in college…..largely because they were unable to cope with the much more unstructured college course schedules, reading/assignment due dates, and syllabi where the student had to self-manage how to spend his/her time without the constant minding/reminders from parents and high school teachers.

Interestingly, some of the most disorganized procrastinators I’ve known happen to be highly successful university/college professors, attorneys, artists/musicians, and engineers/computer scientists….

This is only tangentially related, but as the parent of a young child and a teacher of young children, I’m continually shocked by how different people’s expectations often are for boys and girls, from the very youngest ages.  Among my colleagues and fellow parents it is so common for the same behavior to be treated radically differently based on a child’s sex.  If a girl is rowdy and loud, or disruptive, correction is QUICK to follow and will be repeated until she falls in line.  If a boy is rowdy and loud, it must reach a truly dangerous level before most teachers/parents say anything.

At a birthday party this weekend, a little boy came up and roughly pushed my daughter down (out of the blue) - a 4 or 5-year-old, old enough to know better.  I said something about it to a nearby parent and she said “well, he’s a boy.  They do that.”  with a snide look at me as if I were clueless - don’t I know that my daughter just has to put up with being pushed down by boys?  THEY CAN’T HELP IT, duh.  Can you imagine a parent just standing idly by while a little *girl* pushes another kid down?  No, I can’t either.

What floors me is that the grownups enabling this double standard are often educated, fairly thoughtful people themselves, but they seem blind on the gender issue.  Less important but also annoying is the ubiquitous tendency of many educators and parents to make reference to “boy colors” and “girl colors” and other things of this nature.  My daughter stopped liking blue after a teacher made her take a pink bookmark as a prize, instead of the blue one - “no, that one is a boy color.”  My friend’s daughter’s preschool teacher has filled her classroom with Disney princess stuff and her reasoning is that “girls just like princesses, it’s in their DNA, you can’t stop it.”  Adults set up environments where kids are basically forced to adhere to strict gender norms and then they throw up their hands and say “it’s just nature, what can we do?!?!”  SO IRRITATING and SO NOT BENIGN.

Obviously these kinds of attitudes lead to what we see in society - different expectations for men and women, and a lot of excusing men for bad behavior.  Amanda’s hypothesis about later college graduation for men makes sense as viewed in this context, although I think that other factors such as greater enrollment in STEM majors and time spent in the military before schooling, etc., also contribute.

Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet but males are more likely to enlist in the military and then enroll in college later under the GI bill.  Not sure how much of a statistical impact this has but we are talking about a large group of young people. 

And yeah, the expectations on girls and young women are way higher.  I see it all around me.  Parents seem to be much more tolerant of their adult sons lolling around the house than daughters and this even extends to helping out around the house.  Boys are incapable of housework, dontchaknow.

Never mind, the military thing has been mentioned several times already.  I don’t suppose that angle had ever occurred to the Freakanomics dudes.  Guess no one in their social circles chose that route.

Interestingly, some of the most disorganized procrastinators I’ve known happen to be highly successful university/college professors, attorneys, artists/musicians, and engineers/computer scientists….

Oooh, I hope to fall into that category someday!  I’m not successful yet, but I am a disorganized procrastinator.  *fingers crossed*

Though they are helpful in succeeding in college, I’ve known plenty of college classmates…including myself who lacked one or both of the above in high school and yet, excelled academically in college and beyond.

There are natually self-directed students who can adapt to what you correctly describe as the less structured nature of the college degree requirements. There are others who learn time-management skills from parents (often a privilege issue). But secondary schools that expect their graduates to go on to college have a responsibility to give all of them at least minimal preparation in that kind of self-discipline absent authority figures.

My private high school, in many respects a ultra-liberal “do as thou wilt” environment, required that students select a major (with required classes and a major project) and follow through on it. In junior year I even had my major “discontinued” and had to scramble to complete a new one, but better I learned that lesson in high school than in college.

Interestingly, some of the most disorganized procrastinators I’ve known happen to be highly successful university/college professors, attorneys, artists/musicians, and engineers/computer scientists….

Same here, but I’d argue that they achieved their success despite their disorganisation and procrastination. Talent and creativity can make up for traits that are generally considered barriers to success, and can sometimes transform them into strengths.

#26 - when you say boys are more likely to be held back a grade, that’s a euphemism for flunking the grade, correct? I have a nephew who is very likely to have to repeat his sophmore year, if not more, and it’s not because he’s developmentally behind, and people are protecting him or anything.

It’s that he does NOT do his work, and is failing, has authority problems, etc.

But boys like this probably don’t go to college, so are they who we’re even talking about?

that might have sounded harsh - let me say I don’t blame my nephew, he has a terrible home life. But the fact is, he is failing, whereas his sister is not, though she’s not a good student either. But this is OT, since we’re discussing graduating college, and as I said, these people tend not to go.

I think Amanda explained things pretty well, pretty much says it all, I think.

I’m not successful yet, but I am a disorganized procrastinator.  *fingers crossed*

Just remember, you’re not a procrastinator, you’re someone who tries to achieve optimal work-life balance (“I just believe in stopping to smell the roses”). And you’re not disorganised, but rather your organisational skills are highly unorthodox and there’s a method to your madness (“those only look like random piles of paper”).

That creativity stuff works even on a superficial level.

I’m back in college at the ripe old age of 47 and have observed that the male traditional students seem to take their classes far less seriously than the female trad students.  The front row of my classes are always filled with women and the high test scores consistently go to women.  The males seem to have more discipline problems, too.  If an instructor has to interrupt a class to chastise a student for disruptive behavior, sleeping, talking on the cell phone or texting, it’s always a male student. 

As for why this happens, I’m guessing male privilege plays a role - they have expectations that the world will revolve around them and struggle once they hit college and it doesn’t happen.  It may also be due to a lack of maturity.  Whether that is due to biological or cultural factors, I haven’t a clue.

as far as the military, do we know if the statistics have already adjusted for that factor? It may be a moot point….

Anecdata:  I’m a woman and I graduated high school at 17, graduated from college in three years, and got two masters degrees in about 2.5 years - which has culminated in me finding my first professional job (in academia) by 23.  I have always been a hugely stressed overachiever, and throughout my education for every 5 girls like me there was maybe 1 guy.  My husband, for example, is almost a year older than I and still doesn’t have a college degree - but I am glad to have someone in my life who isn’t exactly like me, as that would be incredibly stressful. 

However, I should also point out that for every 5 girls like me, there were 95 girls who didn’t really care and enjoyed having a good time.  Overachievers are overachievers - I think girls are more likely to gravitate toward academic success because it’s very rewarding for quiet, thoughtful people, and girls are socialized to behave that way.  I’ve been very well socialized to respect authority - so while a lot of smart, thoughtful guys I knew were getting really involved in radical activism and refusing to submit to academic authority, I was politely following all of the rules and planning out my future very carefully.  I enjoy working hard and being passive, and I think that kind of behavior is not seen as necessary or positive for masculine performance. YMMV.

The Hermione character, like many, is a somewhat sexist, negative stereotype of female scholars as overachievers that irritate everyone else with their eagerness to succeed.

The archetype/stereotype is not expressly female.  Hermione is the know-it-all sidekick, boy or girl, always the smartest person in the room whom people resent because they are so effortlessly competent- and who doesn’t hesitate to let you know it, either.  She’s the “greatest witch of her generation,” remember.  She’s supposed to be the best.  She’s the LeBron James (or the Allen Iverson) of the Potterverse.  While that does bring with it the pressure of high expectations, it also means that she has at least a reasonable capacity for being able to pull it off.  So, given that Hermione has all this pressure to be Supergirl, does that mean that Harry doesn’t also have pressures?  After all, Voldemort isn’t trying to kill Hermione as far as I know (I’m not an expert on the Potterverse).

To get off the Harry Potter/sports metaphors, yes it is clearly the case that women face higher expectations than men, and that that’s unfair.  But that should not be used to argue that women should be given permission to slack off like men do, which I think you’re in danger of doing.  Instead it’s an indictment of society allowing men to get away with slacking off.  I just don’t know how you get from here to there, or what such a society would look like.  There were several comments on that Supergirl Syndrome post about how women should take a day or two off, essentially go on strike and just not do all the work that men were foisting off on them.  That’s an interesting idea, but I think it’d take more than a day or two to get the point across.  Guys are used to living like slobs and not having responsibilities.  How do you change that?

Guys get more for less work. Even though girls do better in school, boys are far liklier to be labeled “gifted”, for instance.

I got hung with that “gifted” tag and felt like an absolute dumbass when I struggled in college after coasting through grade school.  It’s not such a great thing to be pegged with.  I would wonder if the “gifted” designation has more to do with how people perform on standardized IQ tests, and whether the bias is in the tests.

Badkitty - I teach at a college with a lot of re-entry students, and this semester I am shocked, shocked!!! at how many behavior problems I am having to deal with, all males, all late 20’s or even older.

I feel like I’m teaching jr high.

PS, yes, I think it’s pretty clear it’s entitlement. At least in these doodz’ cases. I do have a soldier, and he’s a dream, a real sweetheart. I had a young veteran last semester who had attendance issues, but he was at least nice and respectful.

But these problem guys this semester - I get no respect, no respect at all, I tell ya! I’m so sick of this crap. I expect adults to act like adults so we can get on with studying the material.

as far as clever guys being anti-authority - frankly, and speaking as a teacher, if you can’t get your ego in check long enough to sit in class and respect that someone might know something you don’t, well then why the hell are you there, if you don’t want to learn? Do us all a favor and leave.

entitlement!!

My personal theory is that academics and doing well in school, and to some extent, perfectionism generally, has become feminized and boys don’t want to care too much about grades because it’s “girly.”  The type A control freak woman who needs a man to teach her how to chill out has become a huge stereotype.  Add that to the “boys will be boys” excuse for irresponsible behavior and well…you have a situation where boys are less likely to go to college and less likely to graduate sooner.

Reentry students always work harder and get more out of it. Part of it is that they are there because they want to be, not because their parents are pushing them. But I think maturity is a big factor, too (which also reflects on women as better students).

If I had unlimited power to do social engineering, I’d put kids in the service sector for 10 years as a prerequisite to going to college. Low-skill jobs for those years when they don’t care about developing skills, and then actually teach them stuff.

#48. hmmm, sexism might make sense for this - “submitting” long enough to listen in class, being considered “girly”? Maybe this is one of the main problems!!! Especially if the teacher, as I am, is a woman?

Is listening to a woman emasculating these days? sigh. my job is difficult enough.

But Hermione isn’t effortlessly competent.

I wouldn’t say that.  The audience has to see her effort to get to know her, but the entire thing where she had the time travel device seemed to me to be an apt metaphor for how many young women feel they have to cram it all in without looking like that’s what they’re doing.

I’ve also had a lot of problems with re-entry students who felt they already knew everything, and didn’t want to listen to someone younger than them. (I’m in my late 30’s, but look a bit younger, maybe)

Authority/ego problems don’t go away with age, I’m finding.

I had one problem student who explained his bad behavior as: because he was in his 40’s, he felt he should be able to do what he wants.

Um…no.

I prefer female authority figures, because it is less threatening. With male bosses, doctors, etc, I get like an oppositional-defiant disorder thing. I know, very evolved of me…

I think it is less emasculating than that boys live up to the “boys will be boys” expectation.

But Hermione isn’t effortlessly competent.

Like a swan - looks stately and graceful gliding on the surface, because there’s a hell of a lot of work being done under the water…

@52
which actually included sexually harassing me, the teacher. good times

But Hermione isn’t effortlessly competent.

Yes she is.  Come on, it’s about perception; to everyone else, it seems effortless.  And yeah, she does a lot of studying, but it’s not onerous work to her.  She likes knowing everything and digging around in dusty libraries, and what’s more, she’s able to synthesize what she learns into useful knowledge.  LeBron James isn’t “effortlessly” hyper-competent either, in the sense that he doesn’t have to work at it; we know he works hard.  But he also has talent that other people don’t have, just as Hermione does, that let them both excel far above what the average person would achieve with the same level of effort.  That’s what the stereotype “know-it-all friend” is about, that and the way they relate to other people who don’t have the same capabilities.

Liviaclaudia—you’re actually not the first youngish-looking female teacher to tell me that. You’re focusing a bit more on the behavior, and I was thinking more of the quality of education…

My experience has been as a fellow student, and they were reliably on the ball and good study partners. But I take your point—and defer, you’ve got more expertise than I do to say if a student is getting something out of a class.

It’s that he does NOT do his work, and is failing, has authority problems, etc.

But boys like this probably don’t go to college, so are they who we’re even talking about?

Actually, quite a few boys and girls who fit two or more of the above do go off to college.  Many will start their first year taking remedial courses covering K-12 material…..including remedial math courses teaching how to multiply/divide fractions and courses teaching basic sentence and paragraph structure. 

Others who go off to college will have no issues jumping into the standard first-year curriculum and find the less structured college academic requirements along with the lack of overbearing teacher/parental minders to be so liberating as to actually thrive in college….such as yours truly. 

Disclosure: I failed many courses in high school, graduated with a C average, and had serious authority problems with a few teachers to the point the high school dean ended up knowing me quite well by the end of my first semester in high school.  That dean and many of my high school teachers are still in disbelief that I managed to enter a college…much less graduate with honors-level grades from a well-reputed private liberal arts college. 

My private high school, in many respects a ultra-liberal “do as thou wilt” environment, required that students select a major (with required classes and a major project) and follow through on it. In junior year I even had my major “discontinued” and had to scramble to complete a new one, but better I learned that lesson in high school than in college.

There are many crappy private K-12 schools as well so this isn’t a public/private issue.  I’m still shocked that there are many expensive and respected private boarding schools whose academic requirements would be considered a complete joke by those at my urban public high school…such as requiring only 2 years of science courses without lab, 3 years of English, 3 years of social studies/history without econ, or allowing people to graduate without completing trigonometry.

humanadverb - well, I flatter myself that my students are getting a lot out of my classes regardless of their individual personality disorders! But the behavior stuff that I feel like I shouldn’t have to deal with at this level makes my job a lot lot harder, and more stressful. It’s a shame that adults are no longer adults or something….I dunno

It’s amazing how you can be so completely scientific without citing any, like, facts.

exholt - that’s awesome - gives one hope.

p.s. - I took 6 years to graduate because I had a full time job all through college and also worked full time on my band.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

“The plural of anecdote is not data.”

Which I have aptly cited my anecdote to prove! Take that, Marcotte.

I’d like to point out the Percy Weasley was as much of an overachiever as Hermione, and even before he went to work and had obvious differences of opinion from his family, his mom was the only one who loved him for his efforts. His younger brothers all ragged on him.

Girls face more approval than disapproval when they work hard. Boys get beat up by their peers.

Sorry to have offended you, John, but that some men undoubtably work hard in no way, shape, or form means that the pressures described here aren’t real.  Women do have to work twice as hard to get half as far, still, and that will, across the board—-though individual mileage will vary—-create situations where women do things like graduate younger.  They have fewer choices, and are reacting accordingly.

Also, we do have facts.  Women graduate a full three years earlier than men.  That’s not nothing, and speaks volumes about different social pressures, ones that are due to sexism.  Unless, John, you’d like to offer evidence that most women are born with trust funds that mean they don’t have to work through school.

In the normal classes I teach, at a second-tier research university, the subject matter is elective and well-known to be very difficult. The male-female divide is about 50/50 and they’re about equally likely to do well. But in the big core class I teach once a year, while there are still about as many boys as women,* the gender divide with respect to talent and effort is large and obvious. Case in point: a simple assignment—turn in an annotated bibliography for 8% of your total course grade—26 out of 30 women turned it in on time and complete, but only 8 out of 32 boys. Class attendance has a similar breakdown, even though it says, in boldface, on the syllabus that I read out loud on the first day of class, each day missed beyond the first takes 1% off your final grade. Pretty much all the women show up every day, but only 2/3 to 3/4 of the boys. And the boys who miss class will always bug me at the next class because they want notes.

Also, we have a 17-month-old daughter who is a big, boisterous kid who we don’t dress in cute little princess crap: the rule for our extended families is if you can’t imagine a boy wearing it, don’t buy it for our daughter. We expect crap from them—they’re almost all Republicans—but what constantly amazes us is the grief we get from friends and acquaintances. These are almost to a person liberal intown late-30s hipsters, but they dress their little boys in awful little sports jerseys and the little girls in princess crap, and everything they do to their kids is gendered. They always tell me “well, little boys really are more aggressive and physical: you’ll see if you guys have one.” I tell them this is total bullshit and they’re seeing the behavior their expectations have trained them to see, but nobody listens.

*—And yes, it’s “boys” and “women”. The difference in dress, behavior and maturity is manifest.

felagund - that’s my experience as well - the male students are the ones who expect dispensations and favors, and often try not to take “no” as an answer. Some even try to be what I think they consider “charming”, as if that will work on me because I’m a woman. I have a behavioral problem/flirt right now that I"m really starting to hate.

A few girls might ask for a favor, but when they hear “no” they back right the hell off.

from my perspective, it feels like these particular guys don’t take the class, or me, seriously. Like they can make their own rules, so it doesn’t really matter - the class should revolve around them, and if it doesn’t then it can sod off. So again, this goes back to what Amanda is saying about entitlement and internalized expectations.

As a student entering college, I soon realized it was ridiculous that I was just going to a university as a sort of high school plus: I was there because it was expected, not because I had any particular goals.  So I was not only a lazy student who was just there for learning and not grades or a degree, but I was aimless in life.  I dropped out.

Then a couple of years later I went back because I had gotten married (to someone I met in a class I had earlier took on a whim) and really needed extra income.  Student loans paid my rent, since I had a crappy (though not impossible to live on) job and a wife to support (and we adopted a child, which was a huge money pit of an experience—I’m not supposed to say that, but the affirmations I received from strangers didn’t exactly balance the checkbook.)  Student loans were a great source of income with a back-end problem I couldn’t afford to worry about.  And to maximize their usefulness, I milked the time it took to get an undergraduate degree.

Then, after graduating, I was so sick of school that I rushed through a graduate program.  Didn’t need to (since it took years to find a professional job in my chosen field,) but at that point I was a serious student with a goal, a purpose, and the maturity to get my work done.  I still wasn’t a good student, nor was I doing anything more than the assignments, but I was pursuing a degree.

My story certainly started out as an immature dolt who didn’t have a deadline and acted accordingly, but it morphed into someone being a responsible adult making difficult choices and working at a goal.  I imagine the details aren’t always there, but I also imagine that many of us who take nine (calendar, not scholastic) years to get an undergraduate degree learn many things responsible students who take four years never can.  I’m not going to advocate for my path, nor am I, but I will say that it’s not as unusual or as bad as some would like to suggest.  Life is a journey and not a scheduled event.  At least that’s how I prefer to think of those wasted years.

Is it a coincidence that so much tasty entertainment is available for men’s consumption and guys seem distracted in school? Movies, porn, video games are mostly designed for guys. So many conversations I overhear among engineering students involve video games. It’s like this generation’s Vietnam. They were there TOGETHER. Not doing their homework or studying or paying attention in class.

as far as clever guys being anti-authority - frankly, and speaking as a teacher, if you can’t get your ego in check long enough to sit in class and respect that someone might know something you don’t, well then why the hell are you there, if you don’t want to learn? Do us all a favor and leave.

entitlement!!

liviaclaudia,

You would have hated teaching at my urban public magnet high school where one favorite student past-time is to wait for a teacher, especially those teaching math/science to make a mistake or otherwise screw up…..and then viciously pounce and belittle them endlessly for it.  What’s worse is the fact that all of the students who do this would be considered academic overachievers with the grades, academic awards, and other indicators to prove it.  Consequently, they couldn’t be easily punished for it and they had dismissive attitudes towards teachers they considered “less intelligent” than themselves, yet they had to humor/deal until they graduate and head off to college…preferably an Ivy/Ivy-level one. 

As for myself, I tend to react very badly to petty authoritarian assholes and had a need to do whatever was necessary to piss them off/drive them into retirement….a factor in my failing many high school courses. 

Incidentally, all my issues were with male teachers whereas I got along or at least felt I got a fair deal from my female teachers….including an extremely strict US government/history teacher who didn’t hesitate to punish me when necessary and whose lowered voice still causes the hairs on my back to stand on end at this very moment. 

Funniest part was that I was actually just as argumentative and willing to push my instructors’ buttons in college…..except that instead of being punished for it, I ended up getting praised and rewarded for adding to the class discussions….especially where the campus culture was such that most class discussions tended to resemble vicious verbal slugfests to first-time visitors.  Many of the instructors with whom I was most argumentative and willing to push buttons were more than happy to offer to write academic and professional references when needed after graduation. 

I’ve been very well socialized to respect authority - so while a lot of smart, thoughtful guys I knew were getting really involved in radical activism and refusing to submit to academic authority, I was politely following all of the rules and planning out my future very carefully.

Interestingly enough, the most active radical campus activists on campus who fit the above description are more likely to be female.  Then again, students who tend to be passive and respect authority tend to be a poor fit for my undergrad….

Amanda, I do not dispute that women graduate younger. I do dispute that it’s because all guys play video games, go on drinking benders, and are really really lazy.

I agree with everything you say about women having to work twice as hard to get half as far. However, I think you let some prejudice seep into your discussion.

liberalrob, but Hermione does all that studying because deep down she’s convinced she’s not good enough.

I think that’s somewhat aside from the point Amanda was making.  Did she work so hard because she bought into the premise that she had to work twice as hard to get half as far, the “supergirl syndrome,” or did she feel a kind of impostor syndrome and didn’t feel worthy of being a part of the elite?  The two syndromes are different, aren’t they?

Hermione says multiple times that she started working so hard because she felt like otherwise she’d fail out of this environment not her own.

I guess the difference is that Hermione actually is Supergirl, to follow the metaphor, where most women aren’t and can’t be.  It’s easier to succeed when you actually are the thing you’re trying to be.

If Hermione’s only distinguishing characteristic was that she worked harder than anyone else, it would be an apt metaphor.  But I think she also must have had exceptional talent to begin with.  I’ve only seen the movies, and not all of those, so there may be more in the books; but that’s my impression.  There were other girls at Hogwarts, but Hermione rose above them all; and I find it hard to believe that it was only because she out-worked them.

I didn’t see Hermione as a “negative stereotype” at all.  I also didn’t see her as “somewhat sexist,” although as a man who tends to put all women on pedestals I guess I’m not qualified to judge.

You would have hated teaching at my urban public magnet high school where one favorite student past-time is to wait for a teacher, especially those teaching math/science to make a mistake or otherwise screw up…..and then viciously pounce and belittle them endlessly for it.

The kid who had to interrupt the calculus teacher in the middle of class to “correct” him by pointing out that the teacher neglected to add “dx” to the end of the integral he wrote on the blackboard is not being a challenging overachiever—he is being a petty annoyance distracting everyone else’s ability to learn from the lecture in an effort to bring attention onto himself.

exholt - oh yes, I know only too well that I would hate teaching at ANY high school - that is why I teach college! Where the students are technically adults, though sadly they often don’t know it themselves.

That’s why that comment was: leave if you don’t want to learn. In a college setting, I can expect that. In high school, not so much. I’d never say that of a high school student, but then, in high school, there is a disciplinary structure specifically set up for that.

I’m an academic, not a social worker.

Don’t underestimate the STEM factor. I crunched some numbers just for kicks, and here’s what I found:
According to the article, the ratio of women to men with college degrees at age 22 is 1.85, and at age 25 is 1.41 (which is roughly consistent with their enrollment ratios). In CS (and probably a couple other engineering fields, I know less about them), the ratio of women to men enrolled is about .17.

Now, lets make the following assumption: all non-STEM grads finish their degree by 22 regardless of gender, and all STEM grads finish between 23 and 25 (regardless of gender) - this is 5-7 years for their degree. Big assumption, but bear with me. If this is true, and 27% of guys enrolled in college are in STEM fields, that will explain the *entire* disparity in graduation rates. Now, I doubt either of those assumptions is true, but it does suggest that the gender disparity of STEM fields are perhaps a majority of the cause of not finishing in 4 years.

Now, the reason behind said gender disparity in those fields is probably deeply rooted in sexism, but of a slightly different sort (gendere norms rather than gendered performance expectations).

exholt, I should say too that in discussions, I love a good challenging debate - that’s fine, that’s when I want the students to go off, though I don’t know what you mean by “button pushing” - if it’s personal, rather than relevant to the subject under discussion, then it is inappropriate. Basically I expect students to be “professional” during discussion - I have a student who likes to use casual profanity in discussion, and now I have to worry about putting a stop to that - I don’t mind personally, but not in class. And I do take questions/comments in lecture, but I do not appreciate lecture derailers - of which I have several this semester.

@Liviaclaudia, I’m talking about kids held back at the kindergarten or first grade level, often for reading difficulties. I’m not talking about the ones who just don’t do their work and turn in tests with nothing but their names on it. Sometimes the problems are organic (my youngest was schizophrenic and legally blind and kept her mouth shut because her sister was so much sicker), sometimes kids just aren’t ready to read at 5-7 years old.

Someone like your nephew is making the choice to fail. Someone like my youngest, or a couple of the boys my age who graduated a year behind me, just needed a little extra time and help. They often do go to college.

I do think class enters into this.  There are likely a lot more working class women go to college because they can and because they don’t realistically have the trades to turn to as an option like men do.  This means the men that do go to college are likely more privileged.  I would love to see if there is any data to bear this out - I would be that the reason there are fewer men in college than women and that men take longer has to do with what options are available to working class women.

The university where I earned my PhD is known as a working-class stairstep to the middle class.  I rarely had issues with undergraduates who slack, because they simply can’t cut it and aren’t encouraged by their peers to fail. This goes for the boys as well as the girls. Most UML students are working - sometimes full time - and pulling full course loads to boot and don’t suffer lazy fools gladly.  Most graduate in 4 or 5 years because they have to.  Compare with other campuses like Zoo Mass Amherst, and Lowell is where you put your nose to the grindstone or you don’t play.

though I don’t know what you mean by “button pushing” - if it’s personal, rather than relevant to the subject under discussion,

Depends whether you consider pushing an instructor’s buttons because of their personal politics is personal and not when it can be related to the topic under discussion.  Did this mostly in history/poli-sci courses….though I also did this to some extent in courses as disparate as English lit and philosophy.

OOps….meant to say “and when it can be related to the topic under discussion.

“But Hermione isn’t effortlessly competent”

she is a wizard
I know, I know, sourcerers apprentice, great power = great responsibility and all that

but isnt the basic appeal of stories involving magic the wish fulfillment of just being ablt to say “hocus-pocus” and your problems are solved?

Impostor syndrome and Supergirl syndrome often go together. You feel like an impostor when you believe that: i) You’re not worthy, ii) You’ve fooled everyone into believing that you are. One reason to strive for perfection in everything, as opposed to excellence in the things you actually care about, is because you feel insecure. Society gives women a lot of good reasons to feel insecure (like discrimination) as well as plenty of bad reasons (like unrealistic expectations, misogyny). If you’re working your ass off to seem effortlessly perfect and you’re insecure, it’s a short leap to wondering whether you got where you are because of the facade, rather than because of objective merit. Thus the vicious impostor/supergirl cycle perpetuates itself.

I do dispute that it’s because all guys play video games, go on drinking benders, and are really really lazy.

Strawman. I never, ever said that.  On the contrary!  I said that the people who were self-motivated hard workers seemed evenly divided when I was in school.

“More likely to be” doesn’t mean “all people”.  If you disbelieve me, let me put it this way:

“Men are more likely to be sports fans than women.”

Now, did I say all men are sports fans?  Did I suggest no women are?  No.

Please lay off the strawman arguments.

liberalrob, but Hermione does all that studying because deep down she’s convinced she’s not good enough. Harry’s a Hero with a Troubled Past and Ron was born into a wizarding family. Hermione says multiple times that she started working so hard because she felt like otherwise she’d fail out of this environment not her own. It’s a very apt metaphor, I think.</blockquote>

Yeah, let’s not forget that, in addition to being a girl, Hermione’s parents are <i>both Muggles - unlike Harry, who has two parents who went to Hogwarts, even if one of them came from a Muggle family as well.

Hermione is the know-it-all sidekick, boy or girl, always the smartest person in the room whom people resent because they are so effortlessly competent- and who doesn’t hesitate to let you know it, either.

See, no.  Everyone resents Hermione because she smashes the curve and she’s a stick in the mud who always has her nose in a book and is reminding her friends to study - NOT because she does all this effortlessly.  She also doesn’t usually rub it in the way you seem to be suggesting she does.  When she does rub it in, it’s very much along the lines of “well if *you* had paid attention to the teacher/spent your weekend studying you would know how to the spell too!”  It’s very much NOT “Dude! you suck! I rule!”

I mean, Ron especially tries to resent her success, but then she always reminds him of how hard she actually works and offers to spend the evening tutoring him.  At which point he realizes how much work she is actually suggesting and consequently decides he has better things to do.

Which, yeah, seems *really* apt considering the statistics being discussed.

If anyone could be said to have achieved success effortlessly, it’s Harry.  Certainly it’s been at great cost, but what the hell did he ever do to become “The Boy That Lived?”  (And it’s interesting to me that just as Hermione seems to settle into a more social and admired role at Hogwarts, there is increased resentment at the perception of special treatment given to Harry.)

Also, it’s “the greatest witch of her age” not necessarily “the greatest witch of her generation.”  The implication is that she is the best in her class and she has a hell of a lot of potential, not that she will ever match the likes of Dumbledore or that she won’t have to work to get there if she does.  It’s also not something that is very openly acknowledged, especially at first.  It’s usually said to her in private and, in at least one case, as a way to mock her during a tragic battle.

But that should not be used to argue that women should be given permission to slack off like men do, which I think you’re in danger of doing.

Also, I very much disagree with this.  Weren’t we just talking about women not feeling justified on spending creative time on themselves?  How many women would rate “work[ing] full time on my band” up with “ha[ving] a full time job” the way JohnGor0 has?  And is the answer to this imbalance necessarily (only) men spending less time on their bands?  Because I rather think it should also include more time for women to rock out.

Now, I doubt either of those assumptions is true, but it does suggest that the gender disparity of STEM fields are perhaps a majority of the cause of not finishing in 4 years.

Or, the gender disparity of STEM fields could suggest that the reason why STEM graduates take longer to finish is because they are overwhelmingly male.

*says the physics major who graduated in four years*

That’s a very good point, jennygadget. Maybe fewer women do STEM because of the longer study period.

Certainly, a lot of women are discouraged from going into sciences because they’re afraid of failure—not because they’re less capable than their male peers, but because they view anything less than an A as a horrible catastrophe. IME, most successful science majors accept that they (and science majors in general) are going to have a slightly lower GPA, on average, than liberal arts students. Society gives guys more permission to be successful without being perfect.

Or, the gender disparity of STEM fields could suggest that the reason why STEM graduates take longer to finish is because they are overwhelmingly male.
*says the physics major who graduated in four years*

I think the root cause is probably more traceable to the difficulty of actually taking all the required high-level courses in 8 semesters—STEM programs tend to be smaller, and especially in marginal fields (such as physics) *required* classes are sometimes only offered every other year. Of course, a lot of the time there’s not enough required classes for you to take to maintain full-time status, so you have to go off and do something else at the same time…then take about 4 difficult classes simultaneously…okay, that’s enough whining from me! The point is, if you don’t have all your ducks lined up right to begin with, you can easily end up taking 9 or 10 semesters to get a degree, simply because you have to fritter away a semester waiting for some courses to be offered.

/physics-math major on-track to graduate in 4 years.

There are many crappy private K-12 schools as well so this isn’t a public/private issue.

Very true—there are public feeder schools in upscale suburbs (Scarsdale High in NY is the one I know) and magnet/speciality schools (like Stuy High or Bronx Science) that teach the organisational and time-management skills I mention, too. But they’re the exception to the rule.

Again, any school that takes pride in not only sending its students on to college but ensuring they succeed make some effort to see that the students are prepared for an academic experience where teachers, administrators and parents are not riding herd. And, magnets and feeders aside, most public secondary schools as an institutional mission are not focused on fostering independent thought or even self-reliance (most private ones, too, but they have to put in an effort to justify their pricey “college prep” status by teaching some independent learning skills).

The quality of actual academic curricula can vary, as you note—there are some truly awful private schools and some truly excellent public ones. For example, there are private schools upstate that are basically jock factories, and “prep” their students to thrive not in college in general but in a college athletic programme where mulligans continue to be accepted.

I’m still shocked that there are many expensive and respected private boarding schools whose academic requirements would be considered a complete joke by those at my urban public high school…such as requiring only 2 years of science courses without lab, 3 years of English, 3 years of social studies/history without econ, or allowing people to graduate without completing trigonometry.

Mine was like that to an extent: senior year you focused on completing your major requirements and project, taking AP and college level courses you could handle, and finishing off any remaining “breadth” courses. I don’t think I took a HS math class after grade 10 (I hit the wall with trig/precalc), and I’m sure others did the same with other subjects. It worked because of the nature of the student body (most public schools don’t have the luxury of selectivity), an accelerated curriculum that depending on subject was generally a year ahead of a typical school’s for a given grade/age, and the expectation that the students would implement those personal organisation and time-management skills. But it was an unusual school filled with geeky and obsessive over-achieves, as I suspect was your magnet school.

Anyhow, this is a big de-rail, so I’ll leave it there.

@88: high-five! (math major who possibly could’ve graduated in three years but wanted to take more electives)

IME, most successful science majors accept that they (and science majors in general) are going to have a slightly lower GPA, on average, than liberal arts students. Society gives guys more permission to be successful without being perfect.

QFT. I did have some female classmates who were specifically paranoid about their grades and do purposely avoided majors they perceived as more difficult and thus harmful to their GPAs. At the same time, I saw men biting off more than they could chew, messing up their semesters in the process.

A lot of the STEM classmates I went to school with, especially in engineering, were at peace with the idea that they weren’t geniuses and willing to accept that they weren’t going to get all A’s but confident they would still get decent jobs or get into good graduate programs after finishing. And for the most part, they did.

One should also note that JphnGor0 complains that he is being unfairly stereotyped as having videogamed his way through 6 years of college and then fesses up to playing in a band full time while he was a student. You don’t see a lot of nursing students trying to juggle finishing their degrees while trying to handle booking gigs and hoping to get signed to a record label.

*says the physics major who graduated in four years*

Hey, me too.  And my school had a very small physics department where most of the upper level classes were only offered every other year.  So yeah, if you didn’t take a class when it was available, you were stuck for at least 3 more semesters before it was offered again.

And I teach intro physics at a decent sized state U.  We have our own building in physics here (where I went to school, the physics department had one corner of a floor in the science building).  I have similar issues with many of my students that liviaclaudia above describes, especially from engineering students, who skew overwhelmingly male.  Those boys absolutely do not seem to feel like I have anything valuable to teach them and I’m sure a big part of it is that I’m a woman and present as *very* feminine and so I can’t possibly be a good physics prof.

And I teach intro physics at a decent sized state U.  We have our own building in physics here (where I went to school, the physics department had one corner of a floor in the science building).  I have similar issues with many of my students that liviaclaudia above describes, especially from engineering students, who skew overwhelmingly male.  Those boys absolutely do not seem to feel like I have anything valuable to teach them and I’m sure a big part of it is that I’m a woman and present as *very* feminine and so I can’t possibly be a good physics prof.

I have observed something like that as well. Last semester, I was taking my Intermediate Mechanics course with a black, female professor. She was pretty much universally disliked by everyone else, though I couldn’t see why. I didn’t see anything particularly bad about her or her style of teaching. No unfairness or anything…though I do have quite a high tolerance for those sorts of things overall. Interestingly, in her other hat (advisor to the SPS) she seems much more liked. The very same people have no real problem with her there. I wonder how students in her intro level physics course like her this semester, compared with the other professors.

Also interestingly, the other female professor who’s taught a course I’ve taken was generally liked by the students. Perhaps this is because it was:
a. An advanced lab class, so relatively hands-off
b. She had the perception of being the “softy” compared to the other professor (an Irishman). Much more likely to help you and such. It wasn’t actually true, but that’s how it felt. Maybe a bit of the “Mom complex” coming in.

Of course, that’s two thirds of all the female professors in the physics department here…

when you say boys are more likely to be held back a grade, that’s a euphemism for flunking the grade, correct?

Not necessarily. In Texas, it is not uncommon to keep boys from starting school for a year so they won’t be the youngest and/or smallest kid in class. Even worse, I’ve seen parents have elementary schools “flunk” their boys so they have an advantage playing football. Seriously.

Of course, that’s mostly a side effect of how much our culture values sports over academics and how that particular aspect of sexism harms boys.

I have observed something like that as well. Last semester, I was taking my Intermediate Mechanics course with a black, female professor. She was pretty much universally disliked by everyone else, though I couldn’t see why. I didn’t see anything particularly bad about her or her style of teaching. No unfairness or anything…though I do have quite a high tolerance for those sorts of things overall. Interestingly, in her other hat (advisor to the SPS) she seems much more liked. The very same people have no real problem with her there. I wonder how students in her intro level physics course like her this semester, compared with the other professors.

I actually tend to have really good evals at the end of the semesters, from the engineering students and the pre-med/pharmacy students in the other course I teach (and they are about 50/50 male to female in that one), but as far as actual in class behavior goes, the engineering guys are awful.  Really just awful.

OK, I haven’t read all the posts, but two things jump out - the first is that these are two separate questions - age at graduation and how long to degree from start to finish.  The first may have red-shirting as a reason - boys are many x more likely to be red shirted.  ANd the sports thing - many student athletes on scholarship are told to take fewer classes so they can focus on sports - if they get drafted, great, they finish the degree after sport career if needed.  If not, they do the extra year then.  And even with Title (#?) aren’t there still more male athletes than female?  Playing sports that one can actually have a $ career in?

Well I graduated in 4 years.

See, I remember my social security number b/c the numbers are a series of important years/dates.  One set is the year I was supposed to/did graduate from college.

Had I flaked out, my SSN would have mocked me FOREVER.

My husband, not having such a fortuitous SSN, decided that taking a quarter off was a great idea.

Anecdata, I know, but there it is!  The Social Security Administration is behind it all!

I think a lot of it goes back to the fact that women are expected to be the caretakers in the family.  We don’t just do a lot of physical work, we’re expected to do a lot of emotional work too.  When my little sister was born, I had to help change the diapers, care for her when she was sick and babysit, while my slightly younger brother (we were both teens at this point), never did a thing.  Not because he was lazy, but no one ever asked him to, so I think it never occurred to him. 

When my mother hurt herself and needed to go to the emergency room, my brother called me to come over and take her there.  He was still living at home and was right there with my Mom, I had already moved out, but he told me later he was terrified and didn’t know how to handle the situation.  Well, I was scared too, but I had spent so much time caring for people when they were hurt or sick that I just dealt with it. 

But when you’re told from a young age that you have to help, that you can’t get scared, you can’t get tired, that you have to take control of the situation, that creates one heck of a work ethic.  I remember one semester in college, I had so much work to do, on top of a couple of part-time jobs and helping my family, but I never thought, “I can’t do this,” because I was never allowed to say “I can’t do this.”  So I sucked it up and only slept every second day to manage to juggle everything.  I was a walking zombie by the end of the semester, but I got straight A’s!

That’s a very good point, jennygadget. Maybe fewer women do STEM because of the longer study period.

Hmmm..that’s not actually what I was trying to suggest, but I do think that’s an even better point.  And, hey! it’s related!

I was more trying to say that maybe the reason STEM degrees take longer is because most people doing them are men.  As in, the discussion so far surrounding STEM degrees seemed to be suggesting that the cause and effect goes like this: STEM degrees take longer, women don’t want longer degrees, therefore few women have STEM degrees.  Who says it’s not: men are ok with longer degrees, most STEM graduates are male, therefore many STEM graduates take longer to get their degrees.

As far as what is cause and what is effect, I think part of why this happens would be what I just said, plus (and this is also in response to truth is life) the fact that, because it is less abnormal for men to graduate with more than 8 semesters, the overwhelmingly male student population of those fields are more likely to put up with the kinds of major requirements/lack of options that force them to stay for longer than four years.

My school?  Totally not at all like that.  My school was also an expensive all-womens’ college.  If the STEM departments we had* didn’t make it very possible to graduate in four years, they would pretty much have no students.**

Which, yeah, I think brings it back to what you were more saying Lindsay, that a lot of women look at the realities of it all and question how practical a STEM degree would really be for them - when one factors in the time constraints.  Because one of the other complaints I’ve heard from women trying to go to school for things like video game design is that the schools are all built around the idea that you either have no job or a very flexible job, it doesn’t matter how long you take to get your degree, you don’t need class schedules that are even moderately flexible, and your social circle is all centered around the school so it’s almost expected that you will hang out working on homework 24/7.***

It should also be noted that while STEM degrees take more time, STEM careers are less forgiving of things like time off to have kids.  So not only are you probabaly going to be not as far along in your career when you have the kid, chances are your future employers are going to be even more skeptical of your abilities than the norm.

That’s less likely to work for women, and women will have a harder time justifying it to themselves and others.  Men are still expected to have careers so - hey! at least he’s going to school!  But women are still expected to focus on other obligations - even though it’s gotten to the point where it’s norm for us to work too - so you’d better have a good reason if you are shirking those other obligations.

*while, like most small liberal arts schools, we didn’t have the TEM parts so much, it should be noted that a good third of our student body was S.  And that I knew of at least a handful of S majors that went on to get various joint S/TEM bachelors/masters degrees in 5 to 6 years.

**In practical terms, what this means is that when my extremely tiny physics department was faced with me entering my senior year short on certain topics to due to studying abroad the year before and the classes not quite lining up they made sure those topics were covered in the senior level classes that year.  And that wasn’t really as crazy as it sounds, there were pretty much always one or two 300 level classes that were sort of “whatever this years graduating class wants to study” so it wasn’t difficult for the professors, who all knew me very well, to make sure those topics were included.

**Which, ok, actually describes my school really well - except that we do a reasonable job of providing the fin aid to back up the “minimal job” part and have a longstanding and successful program for non-traditional students that need more flexibility.  Together this means you get to choose flexibility OR four years - rather than get neither.

Even though girls do better in school, boys are far liklier to be labeled “gifted”, for instance.
Comment #24: Amanda Marcotte on 02/25 at 05:32 PM

Uhm, Amanda, gifted isn’t something you can earn through effort,  and “labeling” technically involves some pretty specific testing, in which one is far likelier to get a false negative than a false positive.  If you mean “bright” or above average in intelligence but inside the one standard deviation area, OK.

Those boys absolutely do not seem to feel like I have anything valuable to teach them and I’m sure a big part of it is that I’m a woman and present as *very* feminine and so I can’t possibly be a good physics prof.

heh.

One summer during college I worked with…er, more like for…my dad (physics and astronomy professor) and this group that he was a part of that did trainings for K-12 teachers on how to teach science.  Mostly, I was just a gopher.  But part of why he wanted *me* was because he knew that it meant they’d have an extra knowledgable person during labs and such.  (Note: I also worked in the college computer lab during the school year, at that included conducting trainings for other students.)

Most of the teachers were really super nice.  But the one guy…dear lord ....he pretty much refused to have anything to do with me.  And I’m talking really simple computer stuff here, too.

I got hung with that “gifted” tag and felt like an absolute dumbass when I struggled in college after coasting through grade school.  It’s not such a great thing to be pegged with.  I would wonder if the “gifted” designation has more to do with how people perform on standardized IQ tests, and whether the bias is in the tests.
Comment #41: liberalrob on 02/25 at 06:19 PM

Refraining fron an Urrrrrgh, here.  Gifted refers to intelligence or intellectual ability.  The test is not biased, it’s purpose is to gauge intellectual ability, not organizational or interpersonal skills.  Both can of those can be learned.  IQ cannot - it it a heritable trait, which can be somewhat affected by nurture or lack thereof.

But these problem guys this semester - I get no respect, no respect at all, I tell ya! I’m so sick of this crap. I expect adults to act like adults so we can get on with studying the material.
Comment #44: liviaclaudia on 02/25 at 06:24 PM

Yes.  They thought they’d have that manufacturing job, that union (trades) job, that construction job, just like daddy.  Then the bubble bus t, and these guys who saw h s as a prison to be escaped find their sentence extended.  It’s the paradox of high enrollment keeping academics employed, but on the other hand, degrading the degree and academia to more compulsory education.  Set clear boundaries, and don’t be afraid to use your institutions disciplinary code and Deans - that’s why they’re paid the big bucks.

@88 @92 I’m another female stem major without any problems finishing in 4 years (actually 3.5).  If there were more women in stem, four year grad rates would probably be a lot higher.

@jennygadget: That sounds really interesting and I wish my school was like that. However, being a major public research university, I suppose they probably don’t have as much flexibility as your school did in their classes. Plus, it was made pretty clear to us last semester that the undergraduate enrollment was simply too small to offer the classes needed more often—IIRC, we had something like 100 people, total, enrolled as physics majors. I think that’s something like 2-3 people per professor!

It should also be noted that while STEM degrees take more time, STEM careers are less forgiving of things like time off to have kids.  So not only are you probabaly going to be not as far along in your career when you have the kid, chances are your future employers are going to be even more skeptical of your abilities than the norm.

Yes, this is true and quite sad. Happily, there are pockets of determined feminist STEM people working to overcome this, and I think some fields are relatively close. IIRC, biology is closest while the “mathy” fields (math and physics) are rather farther away. Part of the reason for the former may be that health fields generally require a biology or chemistry degree to enter, while the latter have historically been serious bastions of male privilege, despite certain brilliant female members (eg., Emmy Noether).

IQ as a theoretical concept is supposed to be innate, unlearnable, and unvariable—but IQ tests measure something that varies a lot, seems to be affected by one’s cultural background, and can be improved with study in particular areas, to a certain extent.

Still, though, at least the gifted programs I was aware of were based on measured IQ—not “physical rambunctiousness” (what?).

@107: For someone who pretty clearly thinks he’s smart, you don’t seem to be very good at thinking things through (or at grammar! is your spacebar broken?). We are already talking about gender disparities in things like physics, and talking about all the societal conditioning type reasons that those disparities develop (frex, the way girls are practically taught to be anxious about math from elementary school on. Which would be rather before the 6-8th grade you’re talking about, of course…). And you have the gall to come in and blithely state that because a given gender breakdown exists, it’s because of innate differences?

Also, extra asshole points for demanding people’s academic credentials on a blog comment thread.

Uhm, Amanda, gifted isn’t something you can earn through effort

Oh, that’s such bullshit.

When I was a kid, “gifted” was based on your IOWA basic skills test scores.  My 60th something percentile in math the first year I took the test was nothing to brag about in terms of being “gifted.”  But because I had teachers and parents who believed in me and payed attention to me enough to know this made no sense they sat me down to figure out what the fuck was oging on.

They discovered that, like oh so many girls, I had needed to make sure every answer was exactly right before I moved on.  Which resulted in every question that I answered being answered correctly, but lots of unanswered questions.  A little bit of coaching and viola! 90th something percentile in math from then on.  (partly) Through effort, I became “gifted.”

When it comes to math and science, more boys than girls get this kind of attention.  More boys than girls feel that adults have high expectations for them.  Many adults actually do have higher expectations for boys than for girls.  Still.

“the ratio of women to men enrolled is about .17.”

OK, I’m not the math genius, but isn’t a ratio written as “#:#?”

To truth is life @ #90.  This idea of waiting for a course to be offered is foreign - I mean, in history/English/phil/poli sci liberal arts, one simply does an independent study/directed reading because the university can’t delay your graduation.  I take it this is not the case in the sciences.  Very interesting.

Hey Corwin, as a gt individual who has spent most of a lifetime thinking I was “bad at math” talented at all else, it has been a revelation, as I think back, and am now teaching my own children math and enjoying the hell out of it, that my math education basically ended at elementary math.  My pre-algrebra course was a sop to the private school gt contingent - we were thrown into a “seminar” room, and a pre-algebra text was thrown in after, and the door shut for most of the year.  Then, luck of the draw put me with an alcoholic ex-principal who had been stuffed into last period algebra because the paperwork to fire his tenured ass was too onerous for the big city district.  My geometry class I LOVED.  In undergrad, I took the conceptual physics/science/math courses for LAS majors I could because I was convinced I was “bad in math.”

I’m now (a liberal arts teaching academic) considering going back for math degree because I like it so much and seem to be pretty good at it.  Frickin’ messed up K-12 system….

“the ratio of women to men enrolled is about .17.”

OK, I’m not the math genius, but isn’t a ratio written as “#:#?”

Yes, but you can also write x:y as x/y, and x divided by y gives you a decimal. If there are 6 men for every 1 woman in a class, you’d say that the ratio of women to men is 1:6. That can also be written as 1/6, which is .1666667 or approximately .17.

They discovered that, like oh so many girls, I had needed to make sure every answer was exactly right before I moved on.  Which resulted in every question that I answered being answered correctly, but lots of unanswered questions.  A little bit of coaching and viola! 90th something percentile in math from then on.  (partly) Through effort, I became “gifted.”

When it comes to math and science, more boys than girls get this kind of attention.  More boys than girls feel that adults have high expectations for them.  Many adults actually do have higher expectations for boys than for girls.  Still.
Comment #111: jennygadget on 02/25 at 11:29 PM

Let me elaborate.  If you had the ability (innate) to do the work and your perfectionism got in the way, then showing you that perfect didn’t count, (or neatness, or putting little hearts over the “i”‘s) that was teaching or clarifying or assistance with a learning disability,  not effort.  Effort would be if they took the perfectionism into account and gave you a higher grade for it.  Or if you studeid extra hard and did ten more problems than required on your homework, and they counted that towards your grade, but, as you know, IQ tests DON"t work that way.

Thanks, Tyro, I didn’t know that. Curious at what level is it expressed that way?

To truth is life @ #90.  This idea of waiting for a course to be offered is foreign - I mean, in history/English/phil/poli sci liberal arts, one simply does an independent study/directed reading because the university can’t delay your graduation.  I take it this is not the case in the sciences.  Very interesting.

Well, as I mentioned there are a lot fewer physics majors than liberal arts majors—but there are unpopular liberal arts programs, too! I suppose the issue (in physics at least) is that there’s quite a high ladder of knowledge you have to climb before you can start doing “real” work. A physics major HAS to take an intermediate mechanics course, a modern physics course (which usually means relativity and some quantum physics), a real quantum physics course, a thermal physics course, an intermediate electromagnetism course, plus the PDE, ODE, calculus, linear algebra, etc. classes required simply to do those in the first place. Plus, unless he or she simply wants to go on with a bachelors (which usually severely limits your prospects), you have to aim for graduate school, which means the prospective physicist will probably want to take some elective courses on various somewhat more advanced topics such as biophysics or astrophysics, as well as try to sign up to do research in someone’s lab.

That’s quite a lot of absolutely necessary classes! And all of them build on what you’ve already done—it’s impossible, or nearly so, to do well in (say) the intermediate electromagnetism class without already having taken vector calculus and PDEs. Compared to liberal arts majors, it’s extremely structured. To compare physics majors and history majors at my school, while physics majors have to take 71 hours specifically, 6 of those being self-chosen electives, history majors have to complete 36 hours specifically, 24 of those being self-chosen electives. In liberal arts, too, it is possible to do well in upper-level liberal arts classes without necessarily have taken a lot of them already—I, for example, did quite well in a junior/graduate-level Medieval Philosophy course I took, despite not having formally taken any philosophy courses previously.

The classes are (I understand) much more similar to what people (or at least professors) “really” do, so taking an independent study-type course is a reasonable substitute for an actual class. In contrast, lab work is not really all that similar to the classes, particularly as the classes at an undergraduate level are usually considerably behind “the real world”. Most physics classes cover topics developed in the 16-1800s, up to the early 20th century. Some are more recent, but those are usually high-level electives which are not as much of a problem.

So you see there are classes you simply can’t take substitutes for—there’s no way to get around taking quantum physics, for example—yet there are usually very few people to take them. So, they offer them often, but not over often. The worst are the electives, simply because so few people take them—last semester, for example, I took Astrophysics because I wouldn’t have been able to take it again until after I graduated! More common is simply offering them only one semester a year. That affects me since I have to take E&M;1 and quantum mechanics this fall—-or delay my graduation an entire semester! And those are two very tough classes (in fact, I already delayed taking quantum mechanics a year because I was taking too many hard courses at the same time—I simply couldn’t keep up with all of it)

Note that this does *not* affect all STEM majors. More popular fields should have an easier time of it (biology or chemistry for example). Our math department (which I am also working with) is also much easier on things, and much much more similar to the history department in that they allow students mostly to choose their own classes.

Or if you studeid extra hard and did ten more problems than required on your homework, and they counted that towards your grade, but, as you know, IQ tests DON"t work that way.

But what you can do with IQ tests (or Iowa tests or California achievement tests) is practice the sorts of problems you will be presented with, do them over and over again, and then when the test comes around, feel more natural and be able to finish the problems faster and more accurately.

Thanks, Tyro, I didn’t know that. Curious at what level is it expressed that way?

Hm. I’d say algebra. When you express a ratio as a decimal, then to you can use that decimal to solve for an unknown. Take the male/female example. If there are 100 men in the class, and the ratio of women to men is approximately .17, then there are about 17 women in the class out of a total of 117.

But a ratio is different than a percentage. In a class of 100 people, if 10% of the class is women (10 women, 90 men), then the ratio of women to men is 1:9.

Best to stay at least a few steps ahead of your kids if you want to keep helping them with their homework.

My IQ (as tested) went up 30 points over the course of my childhood.  While that is rare, this idea of IQ as a static indicator is flawed (look up the Flynn Effect).

Best to stay at least a few steps ahead of your kids if you want to keep helping them with their homework. smile
Comment #121: Tyro on 02/26 at 12:14 AM

Yeah, we’re at the tutor point or the parent back in math classes point.  But since I’ve seen ratios in the text, but never expressed as a decimal, I was checking to make sure nothing was missed.

Females tend to major in the less intellectually challenging fields.

And what, pray tell, would those fields be, eh Corwin?

When I was teaching Constitution courses for non-history majors I found it amusing how students in “hard” sciences—you know, the challenging fields—struggled to master material in which they were required to analyze the meaning/importance of historical events and fit them into a broader picture rather than simply regurgitate some useless data points like who did x on y date.  Even worse when they were confronted with the notion that there can be multiple “right” answers for interpreting historical evidence and very clearly wrong answers (“But if there isn’t one right answer then mine is as good as any other”). 

Uniformly, the students who complained loudest and boasted of their intellectual gifts in STEM fields were men. The girls came to me during office hours (often dragging a male friend along who was too stubborn to admit HE needed the help) and sought extra help to understand the material, asking me to read first drafts of their essays, etc.  Actually, across the board my best students and the bulk of A and B students were female and they worked hard for it.  Most of my F students were male and it was because they literally gave up on the course.  IME young men do not want to be perceived as putting much effort into a course and if they are struggling will sabotage themselves by adamantly refusing to try because then they “control” the outcome.  Older men who returned to school often had moved past this particular masculine requirement to appear effortlessly intelligent and would come to me for additional help when needed.

You see, Corwin, being smart in a STEM field does not mean one can easily master the humanities any more than being smart in the humanities necessarily means one can master STEM fields.  Different people have different aptitudes and they are all challenging.  I’ve always been equally adept in math/sciences and humanities but am drawn to the humanities.  This notion of STEM fields being so much harder than the humanities is part of why so many people have a piss poor understanding of culture or history.

IME, most successful science majors accept that they (and science majors in general) are going to have a slightly lower GPA, on average, than liberal arts students. Society gives guys more permission to be successful without being perfect.

What is your definition of “slightly lower”?

At my undergrad in the mid-90’s I recalled that the overall GPA of all graduating humanities and social science majors to be around a 3.0/4.0 range whereas the average for graduating science majors hovered around a 2.4/4.0.  I don’t know about you, but most people I know would not consider that a “slight” difference.  Granted, a large part of that was due to one of more of the following factors: lack of adequate academic preparation before college, taking far too many credits/semester, getting far too overextended from getting involved with campus/political activism…a common issue at my school, being far more willing to experiment outside of one’s academic comfort zone without regard to one’s grades than most US undergrads at mainstream colleges(i.e. an English lit major taking an intermediate course in neuroscience or a Chemistry major taking an advanced seminar on Marxist theory without taking the prereqs as a challenge), overextended artistic/music commitments like forming/joining rock bands…another biggie considering the artsy/musical inclinations of the student body,  etc. 

There’s also the reality-based perception that they will have to work much harder just to tread water with a mediocre or crappy GPA (2.0-2.8/4.0) as STEM majors….sometimes to the point they will literally have no time for a life outside of the lab/schoolwork.  It is a similar dynamic as to why so many people I knew dreaded going to certain “hard grading colleges” such as UChicago or MIT where grading tended to be harsh almost across the board as opposed to easier grading institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, or Georgetown, especially in non-STEM fields.

It should also be noted that while STEM degrees take more time, STEM careers are less forgiving of things like time off to have kids.

This along with the fact the perception STEM fields tend to attract socially awkward/anti-social “Nerds” who don’t know how to “play hard” is a big turn off to many women or many people in general….especially if they are confined with working with them for 8+ hours each day for 5+ days/week.  A perception which has some truth behind it from my experience. 

Though I have little problem spending hours or sometimes even days discussing the finer points of microprocessor, operating system, or air foil designs with a hardcore engineering/CS graduate, most people IME tend to get extremely frustrated at the seeming neverending extreme hyperfocus on the minutiae of science and technology.  Even I have a need to discuss non-technical topics of personal interest such as East Asian geopolitics, current events, or music…...topics which IME most causes most engineering/CS grads to freeze up, attempt to switch conversation back onto science & tech minutiae, or a few to actually ask why I wanted to waste time talking about “fluffy subjects”...

To contribute some more anecdata to this thread, I’m a current (male) physics major at a very large research university. Our department isn’t massive (we’re not the engineering dept), but we have a couple hundred undergrads, which is apparently enough to offer every class every semester, which is nice. In fact, I didn’t even know until reading this thread that at other places, people have to wait that long for required courses! Anyway, my classes are no more than 20% women, probably less than that. Most of them are actually part of the cadre I study with (which, mirroring someone’s observations that I can’t find right now upthread, is split about 50-50, genderwise), so I know more or less how they’re doing. Most, if not all, of them are in the top 50% of the class. All the slacker-type people in my classes are guys.

I have to say, though, that the gender imbalance in my major is often frustrating. My girlfriend, who is a fellow physics major and a semester ahead of me, had a female professor for her waves class a couple of semesters ago. The professor, in addition to being one of the more brilliant people in the department, was a good teacher. But for the whole semester, she had to deal with being disrespected/harassed? by one or two guys in the class who pretty obviously disliked her for being an attractive female physics professor. I honestly think that said heckling negatively affected my girlfriend that semester, even though she wasn’t the target.

I honestly don’t know how I can effectively fight it. I know both normal, nonsexist guys and assholish/socially maladjusted misogynistic guys (some of them are assholes, some of them seem to be misogynistic because they haven’t interacted with girls enough. That type seems reachable, though there is an overlap) in my major. More normal guys than jerks, but the contingent of, well, Corwin-like people is higher than it should be. Interestingly, though, the jerks seem to be concentrated towards the lower end of the achievement scale. I guess male privilege is all they’ve got…

But that should not be used to argue that women should be given permission to slack off like men do, which I think you’re in danger of doing.

Also, I very much disagree with this.  Weren’t we just talking about women not feeling justified on spending creative time on themselves?  How many women would rate “work[ing] full time on my band” up with “ha[ving] a full time job” the way JohnGor0 has?  And is the answer to this imbalance necessarily (only) men spending less time on their bands?  Because I rather think it should also include more time for women to rock out.

Spending more time on creative pursuits is not the problem.  The issue was men being given a pass on sitting on their asses not doing anything productive while women have to get on with all the other work and responsibilities of life, and that being unfair- which is true.  The danger I mean is being seen as asserting women’s right to sit on their asses and get drunk/shoot pool all day instead of working too, which while possibly feminist is not exactly what I think we should be pushing society towards.  Instead we should come up with some way of steering men into being helpful and productive too; and simply asserting “they should become feminist” doesn’t sound like much of a plan, if that’s the prescription.  (Though in the end that may be all there is.)  I recognize and agree that there’s a problem, but I don’t have a good answer either.

To contribute some more anecdata to this thread, I’m a current (male) physics major at a very large research university. Our department isn’t massive (we’re not the engineering dept), but we have a couple hundred undergrads, which is apparently enough to offer every class every semester, which is nice. In fact, I didn’t even know until reading this thread that at other places, people have to wait that long for required courses! Anyway, my classes are no more than 20% women, probably less than that. Most of them are actually part of the cadre I study with (which, mirroring someone’s observations that I can’t find right now upthread, is split about 50-50, genderwise), so I know more or less how they’re doing. Most, if not all, of them are in the top 50% of the class. All the slacker-type people in my classes are guys.

The thing is, we ARE quite a large research university—over 30,000 undergraduates! And I know we’ve done at least one or two things you’d have heard of. But there’s so few physics majors, we could probably fit all of them comfortably in one of the decent-size (not even one of the big) lecture halls. Even for colloquia, one of the medium-sized lecture halls is enough to fit most of the faculty and graduate students. It’s ludicrous how small our physics department is compared to almost all the others.

This means there are really, really few women in the department. In fact, I only know of 3 female physics majors (and one presumably physics minor—I know she’s getting a math major)! And only one of those is actually in my classes, and I’ve never really talked to her. So I have no idea how well they’re doing. I assumed (of the two who have actually been in my classes) that they were doing poorly since they never seemed to show up to class, but who knows?

I didn’t say it was static over generations, which is what the Flynn effect addresses, but rather for the individual.  And as far as the Flynn effect, I’d give a lot of props to nutrition, lead regulation, etc. as the effects are mostly low end floor. 

In your case, what I would wonder is physical impairments such as vision being corrected, nutritional deficiencies, treatment for illness, relief of stress (divorce remedying homelife factors)  because generally, the variability is like 5-10 points; add any one of the above - even mild, and you’ve got the balance.

The minimum required number of credit hours for a BS in CS at my liberal arts college was about 140.  Easily doable in 4 years with some 18 hour semesters or summer school, but also not unreasonable to take a little bit longer to finish.

@88 @92 I’m another female stem major without any problems finishing in 4 years (actually 3.5).  If there were more women in stem, four year grad rates would probably be a lot higher.

Word to this. I went to a women’s college and *everyone* finished in 4 years (minus about 3 people) regardless of major. Male STEM majors need to cry moar. >:D

If anyone could be said to have achieved success effortlessly, it’s Harry.

Absolutely true.  He’s Luke Skywalker.

We just perceive Hermione’s story differently.  And since you’re clearly more familiar with all the details than I am, I’ll concede.  I was just trying to defend against what I saw as a mischaracterization of her as being a negative stereotype.

If anyone could be said to have achieved success effortlessly, it’s Harry.

Fuck Harry! Out of the three of them he was absolutely the entitled male snot of the bunch (at least, after the first few books.) Hermione worked her ass off and took a fair amount of crap for it, and she pretty much carried Harry for half their adventures (until he got off his ass long enough, in the last chapter of each book, to pull a Deus Ex Machina out of it. :p)

So I gotta agree with liberalrob on this count, Hermione was the “stereotypical” overachieving female but she was also an accurate and fairly sympathetic portrayal of a lot of hard-working women, too.

@ 132: PS. one of those people who took an extra year was dealing with some serious mental health issues the entire time, and managed to finish everything except hir senior thesis in 4 years anyways, and the other person finished her anthropology major in 2.5 years, got bored, minored in some other stuff, and then stuck around to do an entire CS major in her senior and 5th year. :D So yeah.

I find it interesting that liberal arts = feminine, “hard” sciences = male, and then we talk about how much more important the hard sciences are than the liberal arts.  I see the value in both of them, and to be perfectly honest, hard sciences always seemed easier to me.  It was memorization.  You don’t have to analyze that a fluid in motion has a lower pressure (though you may have to test it), it just is.  Whereas if you’re looking at, say, why some countries take to democracy and others don’t, you have to absorb a fantastic amount of information just to start describing it.

What I see it is, is that liberal arts have lower barrier to entry, so to speak. Anyone can pick up books and start reading about the history of different countries (and indeed, I have a second life as a history nerd in addition to my physics/math thing). It’s not inconceivable that an undergraduate will have a novel and interesting idea from that. It is much more time-consuming to learn the math needed to do the fluid dynamics problem, and even a high-level undergraduate will rarely have a tremendous new idea.

People then conflate “low barrier to entry” and “easy”. Easy (sorry) mistake, but not at all true. Think of games—“easy to learn, impossible to master”. So, since STEM has a higher barrier to entry, it must be harder, right? Of course, there’s also the fact that a lot of people do have “fun” with math, which is generally pretty vital.

Also, high-level math/physics courses, at least, are much less about memorization. There are many, many, many “show…” or “prove…” problems where you have to reason out how to use what you know to get there from here. It’s a lot less about plug numbers into a formula. And then (if you are in physics) there are the fun lab classes where you write more than you did in any of your college-level humanities classes. The professors there are not going to stand for you simply regurgitating numbers at them—they want you to figure out why things are going on! Of course, “real” physics—as opposed to undergraduate physics, which as I said before is pretty old stuff—requires quite a lot of thought and work.

Gah on the math thing. Corwin - at 7 years old, I took the same math aptitude tests that had been administered to my 16-year-old brother (almost by accident, they were trying to keep me occupied while my parents talked to his Precocious Youth adviser) - I outscored him by a substantial margin. Mind you, he was actively recruited, sent to college early, and is still being followed as part of some longitudinal studies on major math talents.

Yet somehow, in my middle school years I lost interest in math as a field. By high school, while still an outstanding math student, I was no longer blowing the roof off of the curves. Did all my aptitude magically vanish, or is it just possible that while my brother was given plaudits, encouraged to play around and have fun with math, and otherwise just be comfortable with it, math was my grim duty, something I was made fun of for doing (what the hell was the fifth grade girl doing in the algebra class, anyway, huh?) and rapidly became associated with all the things I most hated about school.

These days, nobody follows me as a major math talent, nor do I appear in any of the studies that include my brother as part of the study group. So pardon me for taking the “inherent math skills” just -so stories with a giant grain of salt.

#136 - humanities includes languages and Classics. Learn Greek and Latin, then come back and talk to me about “low barrier to entry”. What bullshit.

by the way, why the hell has this turned into a pissing contest between humanities and sciences? That’s pretty telling, if anything!

ridiculous

@ liviaclaudia #138: Humanities has a “low barrier to entry” because, if you’re tall, with a bit of a run-up you can easily leap over the massive pile of books and papers you have to read every day. :D

right, do “hard science” grad students need to pass language exams in Greek, Latin, French and German, like I did? Oh yes, the humanities are so easy! *snort*

exholt, re. our exchange above, if you were deliberately meaning to “push the buttons” of the teacher’s *personal* beliefs, even if slightly related to discussion, then, yes, that’s inappropriate. It’s about keeping personal crap out of it. Getting away with it doesn’t mean it was ok. It does sound like you have personal issues with teachers, which you should attempt to keep out of the classroom, and let your teachers do their jobs.

@141 Whereas try as you might, you just can’t jump over that chalkboard.

#136 - humanities includes languages and Classics. Learn Greek and Latin, then come back and talk to me about “low barrier to entry”. What bullshit.

Jesus, I’ve been being polite! To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about languages—my mind was on the “regular” subjects—history, English, political science, and so on. Anyone can indeed start reading about those. I’m not claiming that they’ll have any tremendous impact without a lot of study, but it’s at least possible—I’ve listened to a history professor talking about how undergraduate researchers working for him became world experts in various areas. And I suspect most people would talk about history, English, political science, and so on if they were asked to talk about the humanities—remember, I’m describing, NOT defending, the problem that people think humanities are “easy” and STEM is “hard”.

Like I said, I also read a lot of history and participate in regular discussions about the thing on another forum. It pretty quickly gets obvious that the humanities are damn complicated. I also took (a) high-level philosophy class, like I said—it required a lot of thought on my part, and quite a bit of effort.

by the way, why the hell has this turned into a pissing contest between humanities and sciences? That’s pretty telling, if anything!

Well, if it helps, I’ve been thinking of this as a conversation between two camps that rarely talk for whatever reason. There has never been any intention on my part to belittle the humanities, and I am sorry that I seem to have come across that way. I like both areas quite a bit, and think both have important things to contribute to humanity. The humanities are different from the sciences, but then biology is different from physics—each has methods that are appropriate to their own field and scale.

and I’m speaking as an unprivileged American that grew up with only English, and didn’t get a second language (Spanish) until 9th grade.

@ liviaclaudia #138: Humanities has a “low barrier to entry” because, if you’re tall, with a bit of a run-up you can easily leap over the massive pile of books and papers you have to read every day. :D

Well, if you’re like me and really, really love reading…

Actually, I have seriously considered changing my major to a humanities field several times, and not just because I’ve always had better grades in there than in my science/math classes, but because I really, really love reading—often, the professors have just told me to go out and read something I wanted to read in the first place!

I always thought the difference was that young women had their shit together while guys were goofy.

But when I was in undergrad, engineering students had to take the equivalent of an extra semester’s worth of credits to graduate, compared to the BA types. So, taking classes at the same rate as the humanities’ students would put the engineering student a semester behind.

Lab work is a big time sink, too, especially in those classes where your grade depends on performing the experiment perfectly.

Another issue in engineering is that classes build on each other a lot more. A couple of times I did find I had to take the prerequisite afterwards, because of poor scheduling of the class I wanted to take. But I was the engineering stud—lesser types would have had to wait a year.

But I agree that guys have a multitude of distractions that they readily seize on. While girls are trained to get their work done first, and then relax.

well, anyway, this isn’t about majors, or what’s “harder” or who’s “smarter” it’s about male students not finishing as timely as female students, which is culturally interesting.

@136: I also see I used a “you” in that last paragraph which (inappropriately) gave the appearance that the humanities people were writing less than me. Uh, no. I meant, that I am writing more for my lab class than I did in any of the liberal arts classes I took, even the ones that were all about the writing. That “you” really meant “me and other STEM majors”.

@148: Agreed. Given the usual notions of male privilege, you’d expect that men would graduate earlier, but instead the opposite is the case, for the exact reason that male privilege allows them (us) to get away with bumming our lazy asses off (ironically, one way I, in particular, do this is by coming here and posting about male privilege. Oh the humanity), while women are expected to work their asses off and be perfect in every way.

@147: Oddly, the HRM (hotel & restaurant management) majors here have it the worst. They have to have some crazy number of credits to graduate. Them and the architecture people, but that’s more expected.

“gifted refers to intelligence or intellectual ability.”

Phylosopher, what the word means is understood.  How accurate is the testing and how fairly the testing policy is applied at any given school is debatable.

I was identified in the sixth grade as gifted.  Maybe I was.  Maybe I still am, though I kind of doubt it.  But I know as surely as I know anything that not everyone in the program at my Southern, suburban middle school was in any way more intelligent or intellectually able than anyone else not in the program.  It seems odd to me that, in a school where about half of the student body was nonwhite, all three grades of gifted students (7th-9th at my school) were almost entirely white with exactly one latina.  Hundreds of black kids, many of them highly accomplished A students, and not one of them was gifted?

Also, of all the gifted students, you could count on one hand those whose parents were, like mine, working class.  Virtually all of the gifted students were the children of professionals, some very well connected, the kind of folks who donate to school board elections or could credibly threaten an administrator’s job if their precious tyke wasn’t tested and retested.

Granted, this was 30 years ago.  Maybe it’s changed since, but my experience with gifted education turned me off of the whole concept.

Also, dittoing Antigone, Ive gone from a 149 IQ as a child to 128 IQ 15 years ago, the last time I took a test.  Apparently I got significantly less intelligent between ages 11 and 28.  At this rate, I’ll probably be at 100 IQ when I’m 50 and a Libertarian when I retire. 

Maybe the testing isn’t actually effective at measuring inherent intelligence, or maybe it was all the marijuana.

You meant, “writing less than I,” right?  :p

I’m finding it a bit discrediting towards the sexes to simply assume men are slacking off and women are simply better study buddies.  To assume the polar opposites about the sexes is what is driving them apart is to ignore the converging issues.  Course this is coming from a male who graduated HS at 16, went to college and changed majors once to graduate undergrad in just under 6 1/2 years then 3 years in grad school.  Changing majors can set you back a great deal depending on how you load your schedule and frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if a large portion of the males find themselves failing at the sciences and transferring to a liberal art degree. 

The greater factor in the higher college entrance rate by women is also factoring in as men are starting to search for labor positions more than attempting to push themselves seeing as they have better chances at a labor job or simply don’t care to strive.  From an early age girls are taught the exact opposite, to succeed they must go to college and get out quickly or else they’ll have no excuse.  I’m essentially agreeing with what most of the commentators have said and the writer, but I try not to take such a harsh tone because not every white male going to college is John Boehner’s son.  Some come from highly liberal backgrounds, support equal rights wholly and still struggle.  Just slathering them with the “fuck them, the lazy bastards” brush doesn’t really bring anything new to the table and generally blames them on a personal level that really can’t be leveled without serious psychological studies.  This is a societal issue that goes deeper than sexes, race, and class. 

What I am more likely to agree with is that males are coming in less prepared due to the fact they tend to play sports & have outside activities they take time away from studying more so than females do.  This combined with a certain amount of “boyish charm” slack they’re cut for misbehavior probably feeds most of it.  Still as I teach classes at the University I see mainly a 50/50 split and the sexes don’t seem to factor in the quality of papers I read unless they play a sport, in which case they’re routinely lower.

Let me elaborate.

No need, being the gifted person I am, I already knew that’s what you meant.  You seem to have skipped over the part where “gifted” is defined through test scores and innate ability (to the extent that such a thing exists) does not always match up with test scores.  (jesus)

I have seen kids get skipped over and not get the attention that will help them tap into that mythical innate ability because the adults in their lives think that they are doing well enough.  My personal experience is that this happens more than usual when it comes to girls and math or science.  (And, as others have pointed out, working class and non-white kids when it comes to just about anything.)

I see the value in both of them, and to be perfectly honest, hard sciences always seemed easier to me.  It was memorization.  You don’t have to analyze that a fluid in motion has a lower pressure (though you may have to test it), it just is.

apropos of nothing, I find that comment really funny.

First off, totally agree with the first part.

Re: memorization though…oh, god….You know, it’s entirely possible that everyone else in my intro physics classes thought that’s what they were, but they were never that to me.  In fact, if they had been, I would sunk like an anchor because I can’t memorize for shit.  (My professors, however, must have agreed with me, as all our final exams were open book, and you don’t do that when you are testing memory.)

This was, in fact, why I came close to failing my pre-calc class in high school.  Since I learn best by thinking things through, I could never do the tests, which were designed for speed and not depth, fast enough.

Which, actually, phylosopher, was my real issue with the math portion of the IOWA basic skills test.  I was so very not a perfectionist.  (And I very much didn’t mean to imply that I was.)  I just actually enjoyed working it all out and so took my sweet time doing so.  Part of what my parents taught me was to spend less time reading the word problems and imagining them in my head and instead just skip ahead to math that I immediately knew how to do.

It hurt my head to think like that.  It still does.

This need to think things through and understand them continued to fuck with all my standardized tests all the up through grad school.  When I sat down to study for the GRE, the study guide I had gave as a math example some question about circles and lines and crossing or not crossing…whatever.  The point is it was one of those logic problems I love to do.  And so I sat down to do it.  When I was sure I had the answer, I checked it.  I was right, and yet oh so wrong, because according to the book I should never, ever attempt to do that.  I should instead just make an educated guess, as that is faster.  Which I can do…and well…but god, how boring is that?

The danger I mean is being seen as asserting women’s right to sit on their asses and get drunk/shoot pool all day instead of working too, which while possibly feminist is not exactly what I think we should be pushing society towards.

*My* point was: considering the testimonies of women on that other thread

1) why the hell would you being worried about women, en masse, doing any of that shit?
2) You do realize many women will internally translate “one day spent shooting pool and drinking and not washing the dishes and leaving the kids at home” as the above, yes?  So maybe it’s not such a bad thing for us to give ourselves permission to do that.

The girls came to me during office hours (often dragging a male friend along who was too stubborn to admit HE needed the help) and sought extra help to understand the material, asking me to read first drafts of their essays, etc.

You know, I wonder how much this explains a lot of what we’ve been talking about.  Because this?  Totally fits the whole trend of “When boys succeed they credit themselves, when they fail, they blame others.  When girls succeed they credit others, when they fail, they blame themselves.”

It seems to me that the private funding of university studies in the US really facilitates male privilege when it comes to studying, and how long it takes/should take to finish it.

As a counterpoint, in the UK university study is (for the most part) publically funded.  Yes, there are now fees to be paid, but they are a relatively small proportion of higher education funding, and they are (for the time being) uniform across all institutions.  Public funding, and therefore public control, results in degrees being a fixed length (three years mostly), unless there are specific and extraordinary circumstances in play.  If you want to repeat a year, in order to get the funding for it, you have to have that signed off by the funding body.  And have the university accept you back for the extra year, which they won’t do if you’ve had to repeat a year because you’ve sat on your lazy arse for a year.

So, you don’t get people (men) taking 5,6 or however many years to get a degree because it is pretty much structurally impossible to do so, except under extraordinary circumstances.  The US structure seems not only to make this possible, but also positively encourage privileged men to take advantage of the structural possibility.

The only classes I ever failed in college were in the studio arts.  It’s hard to get a bullshit passing grade on the test/evaluation if you didn’t do any work on your projects.  I did get bullshit passing grades in literature, hitstory, science and math, because I didn’t always have to study for those.  Showing up at the lectures almost guaranteed a C or D provided I wasn’t asleep.

I’m not sure the pissing match needed another entry, but I’d put successful art graduates in a category of Worked Their Butts Off.  Most won’t drive a Mercedes, but they could afford a nice 70s model if they chose to.  (I dropped out of college mostly because of my failure and frustration with my stupid dream of being an artist, which I quickly realized needed more work than I was willing to put in to it.  Now I’m a librarian, which is the perfect career for me: helping others learn to learn was the thing that always appealed to me most.)

Still, for everything studio artists do, it’s the dancers I most admire.  If I hadn’t been so afraid of being labeled gay as a youth, I would have gladly taken dance classes all my life.  And if effort is what is being judged, Division I college football coaches could learn lessons from dance teachers.

Well, at least for me, I had to work throughout college to be able to both go to college and live and eat; a reduced course load was pretty much mandatory, and it took me eleven semesters rather than eight to be graduated.

J K Rowling tells us that Hermoine studies very hard, but in the books she’s just as available for adventure as Harry and Ron; she’s never too busy studying to be part of the plot.  About the only places we see stress in that vein is in Harry, who is constantly on the verge of running behind due to all of the homework he has been given compounded by quiddich practice.

The exception would be Prisoner, in which Hermione is taking more classes than there are hours in the day, using the time turner.

Could the difference not also be due to the fact that if women are to complete education before starting to have children (which I would think would make it easier to have both, but I could be wrong), then they would be much better served by being more focused in their educational endeavors.  I’m not sure how you feel about the ‘ticking biological clock’ line of argument, but I feel like it would at least play a role, at least for those women who do want to have children and education.

Thank you, realitybeam for putting the issue in a better perspective.  The issue for the colleges is still there, but the vast differences aren’t so vast when put in that way.  The biggest problem for men and women who don’t get through college quickly was, is, and probably always will be debt.  A couple of years of immaturity is one thing, but debt tends to linger.  Getting the diploma is one problem, but the costs of not getting it quickly is a compounding problem.

Hermione is like my high school friend who insisted she wasn’t necessarily smart (she didn’t qualify as gifted, for example), but she just studied hard and well.  Of course she isn’t stupid at all.  She’s in medical school now and she graduated with a 4.0 in high school and something high in her pre-med course (but was devastated when she got her first B).  It never quite made sense to me (I was labeled as gifted and thought she should be too), but when I think about it, I got through school with very little effort and a very high GPA, but she had to study her butt off.  I might have had a 4.0 if I’d studied ... maybe half my butt off.  Maybe 1/3. 

This doesn’t always hold true, but it’s just my observation RE giftedness and studying hard and so on.  The difference between “gifted” and “good at studying.”  Not sure if there is much of a difference.  But I’ve also met some pretty stupid “gifted” people. 

Speaking of her and myself and whatever else, it’s worth noting that in the top 10% of our graduating class there were TWO boys.  Out of roughly 20 students.  Everyone else was female.  I seem to remember my brother’s class was similar. 

Regarding graduation, my own anecdote is that I would have graduated in four years if I hadn’t gotten sick.  And frankly, if you take out the semesters I had to drop due to illness, I did graduate in four years.  And with a good GPA.  My brother took a similar amount of time to graduate, but he wasn’t sick.  Just lazy.  He didn’t turn in homework, he overslept, he didn’t study, etc. etc.  When I was pretty young it was instilled in me that if I did poorly in school (Bs) I was a failure and had tarnished the family name.  If I got a B, I was punished.  Something was taken away from me until the next report card.  But for my brother, he so regularly refused to turn in homework and whatever that my mom started to BRIBE him to make As.  And when he didn’t, well, she wasn’t torn up about it.  He just didn’t get the bribe.  So we both learned very different lessons regarding our educations.  He learned that his failures would be tolerated (and he did actually fail classes), whereas I learned that anything less than an A would be punished.  And in my mother’s eyes, my B and his F were equivalent.

Whether this has to do with our genders, I have no idea, but I bet it does.  My mom can be pretty sexist even though she’s a member of NOW.  Lots of cognitive dissonance going on too.  And even now in our lives, my brother still gets rewarded for his failures in life, while I get punished for having anything less than 100% success.  It is really quite frustrating ...

There’s my anecdote.  Tra la.

to antigone@ 131 Here’s the primer on IQ - written for parents:

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/iq_varies.htm

Yes, your IQ scores can vary - but not your IQ and everything I’ve read says that you’re probably at/near the higher side.  Every kid/adult can have a bad day, but, again, IQ tests are almost always false negatives (lower scores relative to actual intelligence) than false positives.  And the type of IQ test matters.  Individual assessments with trained administrators will be more accurate. They know not to start too low, which, with kids, can lead to boredom and opting out mentally before they ceiling.  Other tests have too low of a ceiling.

Yeah, we’re at the tutor point or the parent back in math classes point.  But since I’ve seen ratios in the text, but never expressed as a decimal, I was checking to make sure nothing was missed.

Both I and my husband could dispense assistance with algebra while tied up underwater and sedated.  As evidence that the universe is totally unfair, our kids don’t need much help - but I get calls to come over of an evening and help out the teen girls with the math stuff from time to time.

Probably has something to do with my madly scribbling a linearized algebraic interpolation approximation of Cox PH regression results on a napkin (reverse engineering some disingenuous assumptions made by a “sceptic” of the science) while waiting for an administrator to start a presentation on high school classes.  This because my job is at the interface of science and policy, which demands a lot of reading, writing for lay/non-scientific audiences, and other “humanities” knowledge.

3letterjon wrote:

he biggest problem for men and women who don’t get through college quickly was, is, and probably always will be debt.  A couple of years of immaturity is one thing, but debt tends to linger.  Getting the diploma is one problem, but the costs of not getting it quickly is a compounding problem.

Maybe not.  It took me 5½ years to get through, because I had to work to live while in college, but I was graduated with no debt.  Your statement assumes that the methods of paying living expenses while in college are identical for those who do it in four years as compared to those who take longer.

If we want to look at differences between male and female STEM majors, we have a stratified laboratory folks.  There are a bunch of schools that start with (state name) and end with INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.

I started college as a computer science major and dropped it when I got sick of being practically the only girl and my professors always calling on me because they could remember who *I* was, but not any of the boys sitting next to me.  I was like, look, sometimes I should get to not do the reading, you know?

I switched majors and still managed to graduate in four years, keeping the CS as a minor, but hey, I was expected to, you know?  My little brothers?  One just barely managed to scrape a history degree out of a fairly crappy school, and the other transferred twice, got kicked out of one school for raping a girl, and never managed to graduate.

When I lost my job in September, my dad freaked out, my dad who has been supporting both of my unemployed brothers for over a year.  When I told him that really, I didn’t think it was asking for much for him to support me the way he has those two for, like, ages, he realized that yes, I actually have been gainfully employed since college (even through grad school) and maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I start my new job on Monday.  I’m back on salary & medical benefits.  My brother just got fired again.  Sigh.

Yet somehow, in my middle school years I lost interest in math as a field. By high school, while still an outstanding math student, I was no longer blowing the roof off of the curves. Did all my aptitude magically vanish, or is it just possible that while my brother was given plaudits, encouraged to play around and have fun with math, and otherwise just be comfortable with it, math was my grim duty, something I was made fun of for doing (what the hell was the fifth grade girl doing in the algebra class, anyway, huh?) and rapidly became associated with all the things I most hated about school.

These days, nobody follows me as a major math talent, nor do I appear in any of the studies that include my brother as part of the study group. So pardon me for taking the “inherent math skills” just -so stories with a giant grain of salt.
Comment #137: Tapetum on 02/26 at 01:19 AM

Yes, yes, yes.  So many public schools are anti-acceleration, or their gt courses are such a joke, and it’s our frickin’ drill and kill curriculums. Like I said, I think, like my offspring, drill and kill brings boredom, which leads to sloppiness, which leads to errors.  As an adult, I’m having a blast with math because the curriculum presents them as puzzles to be solved, like logic puzzles with math/algebra problems as part of them, instead of a page of totally abstract numbers.

RPM wrote:

Could the difference not also be due to the fact that if women are to complete education before starting to have children (which I would think would make it easier to have both, but I could be wrong), then they would be much better served by being more focused in their educational endeavors.

I’ve only skimmed the comments, so maybe this has already been addressed, but I wonder if part of the difference in completion ages might be that men delay finishing college due to their wives’ pregnancies while women who get pregnant in college might be less likely to return and finish college in the first place.

Firstly, as a “mature aged student” (I’m 24 I don’t feel like a “mature aged” anything), I have really really enjoyed being at Uni, I think being in the workforce, especially in a customer serviced based job, really teaches you the value of doing something you love. So I work my butt off, I’m trying to be organised this semester and I really suck at it, But luckily I have a wonderful boyfriend who is ok with taking the majority of the financial burden for a while, so I have a dedicated study day.

Secondly, in response to this “gifted testing is totes accurate” nonsense, I have Motor Dyspraxia and I have so serious hand writing skills problems so my IQ tests had a large difference in the verbal and non verbal sections. There tends to be a high percentage of spacial reasoning questions to answer too, and given time, and a pencil and paper I could work them out, but seeing as thats not the case, I will not be able to answer those questions well.

I also took (a) high-level philosophy class, like I said—it required a lot of thought on my part, and quite a bit of effort…

Comment #144: truth is life on 02/26 at 01:44 AM

Well, there is a point where the two intersect.  Logic is considered to fill many a lower level math requirement (esp. symbolic).  Plato - “Let no one un-versed in geometry enter.” (Over his Academy).

“gifted refers to intelligence or intellectual ability.”

Phylosopher, what the word means is understood.  How accurate is the testing and how fairly the testing policy is applied at any given school is debatable.

The distinction I was making there was that intellgence doesn’t necessarily translate into “does well in school.”  Especially in a school system where things like neat handwriting and sitting still and executive function are often valued more.  Nor does an IQ test look for LD’s which can often mask a high IQ.

I was identified in the sixth grade as gifted.  Maybe I was.  Maybe I still am, though I kind of doubt it.  But I know as surely as I know anything that not everyone in the program at my Southern, suburban middle school was in any way more intelligent or intellectually able than anyone else not in the program.  It seems odd to me that, in a school where about half of the student body was nonwhite, all three grades of gifted students (7th-9th at my school) were almost entirely white with exactly one latina.  Hundreds of black kids, many of them highly accomplished A students, and not one of them was gifted?

Also, of all the gifted students, you could count on one hand those whose parents were, like mine, working class.  Virtually all of the gifted students were the children of professionals, some very well connected, the kind of folks who donate to school board elections or could credibly threaten an administrator’s job if their precious tyke wasn’t tested and retested.

Of course, because they used more than the IQ score to decide who went into those calsses.  In my neck of the woods, they have actually changed the criteria to “High Ability” but the material is actually too low fot real GT, especially those at the higher ends.  They also, (esp,. in elem and middle schools, require students to develop evenly across subjects - gt doesn’t always do that.   

Also, dittoing Antigone, Ive gone from a 149 IQ as a child to 128 IQ 15 years ago, the last time I took a test.  Apparently I got significantly less intelligent between ages 11 and 28.  At this rate, I’ll probably be at 100 IQ when I’m 50 and a Libertarian when I retire.

Maybe the testing isn’t actually effective at measuring inherent intelligence, or maybe it was all the marijuana.
Comment #150: RobW, Sushi No Gakusei on 02/26 at 02:16 AM

If you mean you’ve taken one of those online tests - well, really?  And IQ testing is most accurate at the younger ages - of course experience /opportunity/culture will have more influence the larger a part they are of your life.

@ jennygadget @ #153.  The Iowa isn’t an intelligence test, and group tests have a lot of problems. 

Again, for those interested, here’s a good resource:
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/tests_tell_us.htm

I haven’t read through all the comments yet because I’m short on time, but I have to agree with this post.  As a female in a 75% male school, I have to say the pressure is INTENSE.  The guys fuck up all the time. The second a girl fucks up, people are jumping to rub it in her face that it’s because she’s a GIRL, and it was bound to happen, due to some evo psych bullshit.  We have so much more pressure on us: from our families, from our peers, from ourselves. 

Guys tend to give themselves easy workloads, and change majors at least once.  Girls however tend to have packed schedules, and break down from the pressure.

to purpleshoes @ #156

Then credit the Internet, with giving parents a lot more chutzpah in advocating for their kids.  And homeschooling.  Even if a parent doesn’t homeschool, they know kids who do and they see an alternative.

Poor parents have less time to advocate for their kids. 

But some things are changing.  Before, teachers were gods, especially to a parent, immigrant or not, who hadn’t completed high school. Today, fully 1/3 of the population has completed college - they are more wiling to trust themselves in knowing their kids.  And they have the language to advocate. 

Yeah, gt is a pain in the ass, and expensive, because of the cohort mentality of the school bureaucracy.  I actually had one admin tell me that my tested highly gifted kid would NOT be accelerated (although this would be the cheapest method of educating him) they wouldn’t even test him for early entrance because in high school he wouldn’t be able to play sports because he would be smaller!

G&T;is one of those things whose concept I’ve not been able to understand. If certain students in a class are more advanced at reading, give them more challenging reading assignments. Same for math. If certain students can’t handle that at their level, then don’t give them those lessons. The concept of G&T;seems to work from the assumption that everyone in a grammar school class should be learning the same thing at the same pace, unless you specifically demand something special for your child. If there are so many G&T;students that you can have a special program for them, then why aren’t the teachers giving them more advanced material to begin with?

Maybe this is something I’d have to have a grammar school aged child to understand. In general, I tend to think that our grammar school curiculum is too slow.

What I see it is, is that liberal arts have lower barrier to entry, so to speak. Anyone can pick up books and start reading about the history of different countries (and indeed, I have a second life as a history nerd in addition to my physics/math thing). It’s not inconceivable that an undergraduate will have a novel and interesting idea from that. It is much more time-consuming to learn the math needed to do the fluid dynamics problem, and even a high-level undergraduate will rarely have a tremendous new idea.

First, can we please STOP USING THE TERM “LIBERAL ARTS” when we really mean arts, humanities, and social sciences?!!! The Liberal Arts, properly defined, does include the sciences even though most people seem to forget this fact. 

Secondly, the reason for the above perception about “lower barrier of entry” among STEM majors is that most STEM majors, especially those at lower-tiered universities tend to take entry-level or courses for non-majors which have extremely light reading loads(Anything less than 180 pages/week/class for a 100-level course), 1-3 page papers, and mostly multiple choice exams emphasizing rote memorization with few/no short answers.  This is not only dependent on the type of course or the Professor giving the course, but also the department and the school in question. 

This is not the case at my undergrad where there were no watered-down courses for non-majors in the arts, humanities, and social sciences and they expected more rigorous and heavier workloads emphasizing analysis and deep thinking on the topic rather than rote memorization.  So many STEM…and non-STEM majors for that matter who assumed “lower barrier of entry” == easy were so disappointed when they found they had to read 180+ pages/week, write 5-10 page essays, and the tests required far more than rote memorization/process of elimination…and we’re talking the 100-level courses.  The whining about the reading load and the essay lengths were especially common among the STEM majors who weren’t used to writing essays of that length and/or hated to write period….and most were quite disappointed when the grade turned out to be a B- or lower rather than the “east A” they assumed. 

In this respect, their complaints are remarkably similar to those from IR/public administration grad students my college classmate and I encountered at one lionized Ivy university when they complain about having to do 200-300 pages of reading/week and writing 15-20 page essays for each of their grad courses. 

Nearly all of these complainers were single 20-somethings and had few responsibilities because their well-off families/trust-funds/governments/corporations were footing the bill.  They weren’t too happy when I mentioned that the reading loads they were complaining about was par for the course in my undergrad’s intro and easier intermediate courses and second….if they were going to be complaining about a 200-300 page reading load/course and writing 15-20 page essays in grad school….maybe they had no business being there….especially when, 15-20 pages were very common in the mid-advanced undergrad level undergrad courses, each of my advanced undergrad courses had double and even triple the weekly reading load of the ones they were complaining about….and I had to submit a 20 page senior thesis just to graduate from an urban public magnet high school… 

Thinking about those who change majors: A friend of mine who had always done well in math and science hit a wall when he got to college. Things went from bad to worse till he finally bailed into business.. He was not undisciplined, because his Cs immediately turned into As and Bs. But he did have to make up coursework, thus he took longer to graduate.

Another characteristic of engineering and science: where I went to school the classes were strictly curved. Guys used to getting As and Bs were now getting Cs and Ds. You can easily get on academic probation, and be asked to leave.

@ phylosopher

*headdesk*

I damn well know it’s not.

And yet my scores on it were still what labeled me as gifted.

And that - not IQ scores specifically - actually addresses the original question of if there is inequality in who is labeled gifted or not.

I know many schools now use IQ tests, or at least something more like them than the current version of the IOWA basic skills tests, in order to determine who gets into gifted programs.  Which, on the surface seems more fair.  The problem is that they don’t give those tests to every kid - the parents and/or teacher needs to request them.  So, even assuming that bias can’t affect the test scores (which is a huge and definitely incorrect assumption), bias definitely comes into play when talking about who even gets tested in the first place.

Tyro

To answer your question as to the reasoning behind labeling kids gifted and talented, it’s actually the same reasoning as labeling kids as learning disabled.  In theory the goal is to make sure they get the modified attention they need and aren’t just given the same stuff as everyone else.  In California, and I believe in Colorado, kids that are G&T;are supposed to be on an Individual Education Plan, just like kids that have other special needs.  What that plan actually is can vary.  Most schools take the easy way out and lump the kids together in a special class once to twice a week - that way their regular teacher doesn’t have to come up with specialized lesson plans for them.  I agree that’s gotta be one of the crappiest ways to do it.

My sister had a slightly different choice when it came to my niece - who, among other things, is barely 6 and has been reading second grade books for over a year.  Her options were to send Niece to the magnet school or to have her stay at their neighborhood school but have extra projects to do.  She opted for the latter, for now.  So far, that hasn’t translated into much more than her being the only kindergartener to do a science fair project this year.  (and omg! the cuteness! Her experiments were on what kinds of things a flashlight would shine through.  Items tested included her stuffed heffalump and various other toys.)  But this all just happened in the last couple months, so we’ll see.

The thing that keeps popping into my head, though, as we talk about this and how kids get labeled gifted is that, while there was no doubt in the minds of any of the adults in her family (many of whom are in education) that Niece would be labeled gifted, it took a while - and a decent amount of prodding from my sister - for her teacher to catch onto that fact.  For example, because of the assumption is that none of the kids can read much more than their name, there were no opportunities for Niece to demonstrate her skills in the classroom.  So her teacher didn’t even know she could read, much less at what level, for the first several months.  Worse, Niece started school super eager and excited, but - until the science fair project - she ended up just being kinda “meh” about it all.

Thinking about those who change majors: A friend of mine who had always done well in math and science hit a wall when he got to college. Things went from bad to worse till he finally bailed into business.. He was not undisciplined, because his Cs immediately turned into As and Bs. But he did have to make up coursework, thus he took longer to graduate.

Had one college classmate who started out as a STEM major and got bored with it because math/science came too easy to him and he wanted a challenge in an area he felt he was weak in…the humanities and social sciences.  As a result, he switched his major to poli-sci, and ended up graduating college with the highest honors after years of placing his nose to the grindstone.  He later pursued a PhD in poli-sci, finished in around 4 years, and is now a tenure-tracked Prof at a university in NW North America. 

Another characteristic of engineering and science: where I went to school the classes were strictly curved. Guys used to getting As and Bs were now getting Cs and Ds. You can easily get on academic probation, and be asked to leave.

Sounds like the story of many overconfident undergrad classmates, whether STEM majors or not, who came from topflight privates and suburban publics and had stratospheric high school GPAs and standardized board scores. 

It is also a constant theme to accounts I heard from high school classmates who attended harsh grading schools like UChicago….nearly every one of their classmates received their first Cs, Ds, or even Fs within the first quarter/semester….and this was not exclusive to the STEM majors….

Jeez, can we make an agreement?

Please lay off the strawman arguments.

When you mean to say, “That’s not exactly what I said”, don’t substitute “Strawman!! Strawman!!”

This is the most overused word on blogs, now, and probably the most misused. When I say, “Some people say that the US should surrender to terrorists”, this is a strawman argument. Lying is not a strawman. Exaggerating is not a strawman. Paraphrasing is not a strawman.

IQ is a measurement of how you’ve kept up with the average intellectual development of your age-group. It’s not a static, absolute measurement of your innate intellectual capacity.

There are also different IQ tests.  I took one that I got all the answers right, so it gave me the maximal score (I believe that it was age adjusted, so that score was 142).  Other tests claim to measure much higher ranges, and I took one of those when I was in Junior High school and got a score that was ... um ... a bit higher than that?

The point is, she may have taken two different tests with two different scoring systems.

tyro @ #93:

One should also note that JphnGor0 complains that he is being unfairly stereotyped as having videogamed his way through 6 years of college and then fesses up to playing in a band full time while he was a student. You don’t see a lot of nursing students trying to juggle finishing their degrees while trying to handle booking gigs and hoping to get signed to a record label.

Tyro, are you equating cold-calling bars, booking gigs, marketing, managing rehearsals, and all that with playing video games? Someone might call the pursuit of medicine a passion. I don’t really care, but (anecdotally) I see many people try to pursue a creative career (acting, music, graphic arts, dance), or work a job that can become a trade (carpentry, sales) while in college, only to have those serious pursuits cut into their school time, and ultimately, delay their graduation.

I think it’s possible that men view entrempeneurialism as a definite avenue to success that would supercede college, whereas women may not feel like those tracks are as open to them, and that college is the only clear option for most women. And, yes, this is culturally driven. Men are encouraged through all media to strike out and make their fortune, where the examples where that’s offered to women I’ve always seen in cigarette ad campaigns.

I’m going to whine some more, here, and say that my sample group is all people who went to community colleges here in Chicago, and didn’t go away to school. None of us (men or women) could afford that, and most of us were working full time by graduation. I’m talking about 12-20 people in my circle of family and friends.

I’m trying to find out what the matriculation statistics are for MIT and Caltech - schools with good proportions of women, and nearly all students are STEM majors.  That might tell us something about the larger patterns by gender, particularly since there is much whining about how it is supposedly much easier for women to get into these places (based on the 3 to 1 application ratio, not comparative qualifications, or any meaningful statistical significance of differences in qualifications, or eventual grades or matriculation rates ...)

The girls seemed to recognize college as the first step to getting a job which pays better than minimum wage. The boys don’t really seem to realize they need jobs at all.

I think there is a class issue going on that gets exaggerated by male/female comparisons here. Thinking of my high school classmates and other friends in my community I grew up with, most all of us finished college in 4 years. The one that didn’t was the absolute least academically inclined who would never have qualified for anything resembling a scholarship. The cultural expectations might be different within a community where not everyone has a white collar job that requires a college degree or themselves finished college in 4 years. I guess I am not seeing the 50% dropout rate of scholarship boys that you are. If graduating in 4 years isn’t considered “normal,” then the only people that are going to do it are the ones that are specifically focused on that, which seem to be the women who feel like it is their “only way out.” It is a good demonstration of how intelligence doesn’t really get you very much unless you have a specific focus and drive for using it.

Tyro, are you equating cold-calling bars, booking gigs, marketing, managing rehearsals, and all that with playing video games?

I am equating it to not really caring that much about graduating in 4 years and instead consuming yourself with other nonacademic distractions. You cared as much or more about your band than you did about school. At least be at peace with the fact that your female classmates were more interested in focusing on their studies than you were rather than trying to dress it up as anything else. Plus the fact that this is considered something men can “get away with,” while for women it would be considered a sign of not taking academics seriously.

I’m trying to find out what the matriculation statistics are for MIT and Caltech - schools with good proportions of women, and nearly all students are STEM majors.  That might tell us something about the larger patterns by gender, particularly since there is much whining about how it is supposedly much easier for women to get into these places (based on the 3 to 1 application ratio,

You’ll probably have a self-selection bias for MIT women then.  Sorry.

jennygadget:

1) why the hell would you being worried about women, en masse, doing any of that shit?
2) You do realize many women will internally translate ”one day spent shooting pool and drinking and not washing the dishes and leaving the kids at home” as the above, yes?  So maybe it’s not such a bad thing for us to give ourselves permission to do that.

1) Why in the hell wouldn’t I be?  (Unless you’re saying I don’t get a vote on this issue because I’m male.)  I worry about everyone.  If men have it in their character to lay around and drink and shoot pool all day, so do women, right?  There is an imbalance with two routes to equality:  either empower women with the same ability to laze around and be unproductive, or get those slacker men to accept the responsibilities currently being foisted off on women.  One is a positive development, one is negative.  I’d rather shoot for the positive, wouldn’t you?  Maybe going Jane Galt would work, but I think it would take longer than expected and what about those abandoned responsibilities in the meantime…
2) That would be a mistaken interpretation of what I said.  Taking or getting a day off once in a while would be good thing, certainly.  We’re talking about long-term, here.

purpleshoes:

I really like talking about Harry Potter characters, what?

No argument here, I love discussing characters too.

Someone may have already pointed this out, but at my school the number of classes for a CS undergrad was 2-3 times* the number of classes compared to english or sociology. So it’s not just scheduling requirements that might cause slower graduation rates, but the fact that the major requires a ton more work. Certainly possible to do in 4 years (me) or 3 years (the boyfriend - he also worked two jobs the whole time, but then he’s awesome like that), but it’s hard to do, and next to impossible if you want to minor/double major in something else.

Note: this is not weighing in on the techie/fuzzy difficulty/intelligence debate. And it may be true that the number of courses is what turns women away (not my experience, but hey, it’s possible). It is absolutely not true that the longer graduation rates are because the CS/EE folks slack off.

*The major required 1.5-2x the number of credits as any other major, but the number of credits/class was usually 3 instead of 4-5, and the hours/class was way more. Some students had a hard time keeping financial aid because the number of credits required to be a full time student would require you to take classes such that the cumulative expected workload was 120 hours/wk

I see the original questions:

1. Men are taking longer to graduate high school.  This may reflect parents enrolling their sons in school later than their daughters.
2. Men are taking longer to do a college degree.  It is becoming increasingly uncommon to finish college in four years, and many students take even longer.  Are there gender differences in this?  Why?
3. Perhaps men are more likely to take a gap year (or years)—seeing the world—before going to college.

as preliminary questions, where they’re looking for data (I don’t know why they don’t try to get this data themselves, but that’s another question).
I think this because these questions are very similar to the reasons given in the BLS report for why more women get a bachelor’s degree than men:

(i) Women were more likely to have graduated from high school;
(ii) among high school graduates, women were more likely to attend college;
(iii) once enrolled in college, women were less likely than men to leave college between school years without graduating.

Once you get that preliminary data, you can then ask why that happens—so once you know that men are less likely to finish high school, you can then ask why that’s true. Once you form a hypothesis, you can then look for additional data to see if it’s true.

Therefore, it makes sense to ignore your questions until we have more data. If it turns out that men start college at about the same age as women, but stay in college longer it makes sense to look at current college students and look at what they’re studying, how much they work, their goals, if they switch majors, their perceptions ... . If it turns out that men start college later but stay in college for about the same amount of time then you would ask different questions. Notice that the reason that there is a difference could be because of sexism in both cases.

As an aside, I teach at a co-op university so almost all the students take at least 5 years to graduate (pretty much all of those that do co-op).

Oh, and for the STEM debate, remember that there are female dominated programs that have at least as many required courses and tend to take longer (for example, at my university if you go into Physical Therapy, which is considered one of the most intensive programs here, it takes you 6 years to finish with a degree—it’s a doctorate, but there’s no shorter option).

liberob:

(rolls eyes)

re: # 1 - I was asking what realistic reason do you have for thinking that women will suddenly en masse decide that it’s no longer their job to do all of the things already discussed?  capacity =/= probablility

re: #2 - Sorry, I forgot that you will be making house visits to every woman in the world and explaining to them that they should think exactly like you do.  Seriously did you read what I wrote at all? *Women* consider one day of goofing off to = “being a lazy bum” when it comes to themselves.  Therefore, women giving themselves permission to be a lazy bum will generally =/= spending <b>every</i> day goofing off.  The typical effect will be to give ourselves a break every so often….and still feel guilty about it.

John L

Physical therapy is also a “caring” field and so women get cut more slack for spending longer to get their degree in it than they would with other fields.  It’s also a field where it’s more ok to drift in and out of it, so people perceive it as less likely to mess with womens’ ability to be the primary caregiver, etc.

I have cousin who just finished a top notch physical therapy program (I’m pretty sure it’s not a PhD she has, though), and while her parents and fiance are very proud of her for doing that, I have a feeling that she would have gotten a least a little more resistance if she had chosen a different field.  One that didn’t fit as well into what they consider her role to be or one that would place more demands on her throughout the years.  Her sister, for example, was a STEM major, but there was no way that was going to get in the way of her getting married on schedule, and she wasn’t getting married until she graduated.  Ergo, if it hadn’t been possible to graduate in four years, she would have switched majors (or do crazy class schedules to make it happen, which I think is what she did).

This isn’t the same as matriculation from undergrad schools, but I think it’s also interesting that even though women now outnumber men in Biology Ph.D. programs, men are still the majority in MD-Ph.D. programs. I wonder if that is related at all to the female student’s apparent need-for-speed we see in undergrad; when it comes to MD-Ph.D.s maybe men are more likely to think “why not? I’m a genius! And there’s no rush—being supported financially is awesome” and go ahead and sign up for another 7-8 year degree because they don’t see a problem with staying in school past 30, while women may be thinking “a Ph.D. is good enough for me, I guess. And there’s no *way* I could have kids if I did an MD-Ph.D. Spending another 8 years on myself—just to make more money!—seems wasteful” so they aim a for a slightly earlier graduation date.

Liberalrob: I personally think it *would* be beneficial to give women more downtime, even if men did not fully pick up the slack (as a USAmerican—I can’t speak for other places.) People work their asses off, and I don’t think our country would collapse into ruin if we were a little more laid back. Furthermore, if this got-nothing-to-do downtime would not *require* that women played videogames and ate bonbons, then I think it could be really valuable. Give women time and support to just fuck around like (rich) guys always have historically; let a woman have a stupid expensive time-consuming hobby screwing around with computers and she could invent the first non-sex-related humanoid robot. Let women stare vacantly into space for days on end and invent the Unifying Theory of Everything while eating some string cheese. Let a woman hang out in the middle of the woods in a shack while her relatives quietly support their own damn selves and let her write stuff that would blow zombie-Thoreau’s zombie mind. And let the few totally useless women just be a lump for a while. They probably earned it by having to put up with the useless men in their lives. :D

First, can we please STOP USING THE TERM “LIBERAL ARTS” when we really mean arts, humanities, and social sciences?!!! The Liberal Arts, properly defined, does include the sciences even though most people seem to forget this fact. 

Well, I’ve never seen anyone (until now) use “liberal arts” in the modern sense to include sciences (in fact, at my school it’s the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences—psych and sociology people a tack-on). I’m a descriptivist in outlook, so I’ll stick to the common usage. (Sorry)

<blockquoteSecondly, the reason for the above perception about “lower barrier of entry” among STEM majors is that most STEM majors, especially those at lower-tiered universities tend to take entry-level or courses for non-majors which have extremely light reading loads(Anything less than 180 pages/week/class for a 100-level course), 1-3 page papers, and mostly multiple choice exams emphasizing rote memorization with few/no short answers.  This is not only dependent on the type of course or the Professor giving the course, but also the department and the school in question. 
This is not the case at my undergrad where there were no watered-down courses for non-majors in the arts, humanities, and social sciences and they expected more rigorous and heavier workloads emphasizing analysis and deep thinking on the topic rather than rote memorization.  So many STEM…and non-STEM majors for that matter who assumed “lower barrier of entry” == easy were so disappointed when they found they had to read 180+ pages/week, write 5-10 page essays, and the tests required far more than rote memorization/process of elimination…and we’re talking the 100-level courses.  The whining about the reading load and the essay lengths were especially common among the STEM majors who weren’t used to writing essays of that length and/or hated to write period….and most were quite disappointed when the grade turned out to be a B- or lower rather than the “east A” they assumed. </blockquote>

The perception is what is important, since it controls what other people will think about the area, which is after all what I was talking about. Like I said, of course it’s not true that the humanities or liberal arts or whatever you want to call them are easier than STEM courses—but the fact that:
a. STEM people, as you say, tend to look down on them as “easy As”
b. Most people, if they have a degree, have a humanities or business degree
c. Most people really dislike math a lot, but merely ignore reading
means that they have that perception. And I was suggesting that one reason people might look down on them is that they go “oh, that’s just a lot of reading. No trouble, right?” without thinking or experiencing it.

And note that I am very much in favor of reading and writing—I was surprised when the required introductory course of the much-ballyhooed honors program here was much easier than my high-school AP English course, particularly insofar as it requried much less writing (just 4-5 papers per semester, max). I own several hundred books personally, although about half of those are SF&F;. And I have (now) twice done supplementary projects involving reading Courant’s Methods of Mathematical Physics and preparing a presentation on it. And yes, that book is every bit as dense as it sounds. Everyone should read a lot and write a lot.

Liberalrob: I personally think it *would* be beneficial to give women more downtime, even if men did not fully pick up the slack (as a USAmerican—I can’t speak for other places.) People work their asses off, and I don’t think our country would collapse into ruin if we were a little more laid back. Furthermore, if this got-nothing-to-do downtime would not *require* that women played videogames and ate bonbons, then I think it could be really valuable. Give women time and support to just fuck around like (rich) guys always have historically; let a woman have a stupid expensive time-consuming hobby screwing around with computers and she could invent the first non-sex-related humanoid robot. Let women stare vacantly into space for days on end and invent the Unifying Theory of Everything while eating some string cheese. Let a woman hang out in the middle of the woods in a shack while her relatives quietly support their own damn selves and let her write stuff that would blow zombie-Thoreau’s zombie mind. And let the few totally useless women just be a lump for a while. They probably earned it by having to put up with the useless men in their lives. :D

QFT. The American work ethic is a little over the top. People in other countries work less than we do, and still get things done just fine. Why can’t we?

@ Tyro #179 and purpleshoes #180:

1) Give them different assignments - uhm, OK, but you also have to teach those assignments, so with inclusion today, at any given point you are speaking to only 1/3 of the class.  And then you have to grade.  So, does student GT get graded on the harder work, or and receive a “B” while Student “Average” gets easier work but gets an “A”.  Can you imagine what happens to the meaning of a grade at that point?  And when GPA can mean getting into a better college or even High School, parents and even 3rd graders quickly figure out that doing better means getting punished GPA-wise.

2) Tracking is verboten in favor of diversity and inclusion - somebody will get their feelings hirt, thus EVERYBODY MUST GET A TROPHY!!!!  ANd GT kids are to be used to teach others in the class, which wouldn’t be bad, except that the promised “reward” for them never seems to happen due to lack of time.

Uhm, Amanda, gifted isn’t something you can earn through effort, and “labeling” technically involves some pretty specific testing, in which one is far likelier to get a false negative than a false positive.  If you mean “bright” or above average in intelligence but inside the one standard deviation area, OK.
Comment #102: phylosopher on 02/25 at 10:41 PM

Wrong.

There was a prestigious math and science talent search when I was in junior high school.  The teachers in my school didn’t submit my name when asked for candidates.  However, my mother noticed my abilities and called the talent search people when she saw an ad in the newspaper about it and got me in. 

I scored highly even among the “gifted” group selected to participate in the search, and outstripped most of the students from my school who had been referred by the school (mostly boys, surprise)—especially in math and logic.  But I might never have been classified as such if it had been up to the school to make that determination.

Benbow and Staley’s work at Hopkins found the overwhelming majority (94 % or so ) of math gifted persons were male. (This was established by having 6-8th graders take SAT’s in math Those scoring over 700-on a subject matter to which they’d never been exposed were labeled extremely gifted. )
Comment #107: corwin on 02/25 at 11:03 PM

Wow, guess I’ll have to out myself after trying to be all anoymous about it—I was in that cohort.  I was one of the girls that would have not been in the room to exceed 700 on the SATs had it not been for my mother.  I would have counted as a failure because I wouldn’t have appeared in the list at all.  I can think of a couple of girls at my school who probably should have been there too.

They also assumed that we all got the same educations prior to being included in the study.  This when I was not allowed to take shop because that was for boys.

Oops, after reading the smpy website, I should update that I’m not from cohort three, which I think corwin is referring to, but cohort one.  But since they didn’t seem to see any problem with their search and inclusion method in my cohort, I’d be surprised if they did anything to improve it in cohort three.

Hi old feminist! That’s one of the studies my brother is in, that I’m not. Despite outscoring him on the entry tests. Funny that. If you were in that cohort, you might actually know him.

And funny, but I could have sworn it was Professor Stanley, not Staley. Nice old guy. Took me to lunch when I was college hunting and tried to persuade me to come to Johns Hopkins.

I scored highly even among the “gifted” group selected to participate in the search, and outstripped most of the students from my school who had been referred by the school (mostly boys, surprise)—especially in math and logic.  But I might never have been classified as such if it had been up to the school to make that determination.
Comment #205: oldfeminist on 02/26 at 08:48 PM

Not what I’m talking about.  real gt versus teachers pet or assumptions gt can’t be “efforted” into.  And yeah, I tend to have very little respect for teachers today as judges of gt.  Most wouldn’t know gt if it jumped up and bit them-as one or two posts on here have anec-noted.  Lots of gt kids are pains in the ass, teachers are overworked, teachers credentialing programs have low GPA requirements so they attract those who aren’t stellar students,  conforming and not breaking the box is paramount, breaking the box (via testing or requiring an IEP) is expensive and more hassle - no wonder teachers don’t want to identify gt’s - the bureaucracy surely gives them no reward.  My school district “rewards” gt’s by giving them longer bus rides to the programs which are all in schools that otherwise have lower income students, more multifamily housing, which correlates with lower overall NCLB testing scores.  SO the GT kids raise the scores, getting the schools more $$ from the state and less parent bitching.

Hi Tapetum, yeah, it was Julian Stanley and Camilla Benbow.

I took a computer programming course (in the basement of some Hopkins building). 

phylosopher:

Not what I’m talking about.  real gt versus teachers pet or assumptions gt can’t be “efforted” into.  And yeah, I tend to have very little respect for teachers today as judges of gt.  Most wouldn’t know gt if it jumped up and bit them-as one or two posts on here have anec-noted.

But you were arguing with Amanda’s statement, “Even though girls do better in school, boys are far liklier to be labeled “gifted”, for instance.”  I don’t think “girls do better in school” is because girls are grinds and boys are carefree eccentric but unrecognized geniuses.  I think there’s equal numbers of gt boys and girls, but the girls who do well are thought to be grinds and the ones who don’t are thought to be, well, girls.

I was eccentric and lived in my head and labeled “weird” and told to try to fit in with the other girls.  Similar boys were dug out and prized and put in chess club and tutored by the (male) science teachers told how special they were.  “Different” boys can be good; “different” girls are not.  So girls succeed in ways that fit the girly mold, unless they’re so hopelessly weird it’s not going to be possible (like me).

exholt, I should say too that in discussions, I love a good challenging debate - that’s fine, that’s when I want the students to go off, though I don’t know what you mean by “button pushing” - if it’s personal, rather than relevant to the subject under discussion, then it is inappropriate. Basically I expect students to be “professional” during discussion - I have a student who likes to use casual profanity in discussion, and now I have to worry about putting a stop to that - I don’t mind personally, but not in class. And I do take questions/comments in lecture, but I do not appreciate lecture derailers - of which I have several this semester.

I did this in high school because I’ve found far too many teachers and some Profs who felt entitled to not only voice their political opinions in class, but do so in an overbearing way that seriously discourages students from voicing contrary perspectives without the real perceived risk of a lowered grade in retaliation.  Not a good situation when the students are an effective captive audience due to mandatory education laws. 

Some of that carried over into college….though what I did in undergrad was not only more toned down once I realized none of my profs were nearly as overbearing about it, but also that being argumentative in class….even in a heated manner was not only commonplace, but encouraged by the Profs….a reason why many class discussions on campus resembled shouting matches to outsiders unfamiliar with the campus culture. 

I think it’s possible that men view entrempeneurialism as a definite avenue to success that would supercede college, whereas women may not feel like those tracks are as open to them, and that college is the only clear option for most women. And, yes, this is culturally driven. Men are encouraged through all media to strike out and make their fortune, where the examples where that’s offered to women I’ve always seen in cigarette ad campaigns.

Other than being a serious time-commitment which could detract from one’s academics in college, there are also two other reason why most people are not going to be very sympathetic. 

First, being in a musical band is not the main purpose of going/attending college…so doing so, especially when it detracts from one’s studies is seen by many as forgetting one’s priorities and purpose in attending.  Second, it also does not help that there are more than a few isolated cases of college graduates who did the rock-band thing during college and managed somehow to graduate in 4 or less years with decent or even honors-level academic performances.  Met several of them at alumni events and at various live-performances of indie bands in and around Boston and NYC. 

Not what I’m talking about.  real gt versus teachers pet or assumptions gt can’t be “efforted” into.  And yeah, I tend to have very little respect for teachers today as judges of gt.  Most wouldn’t know gt if it jumped up and bit them-as one or two posts on here have anec-noted.  Lots of gt kids are pains in the ass, teachers are overworked, teachers credentialing programs have low GPA requirements so they attract those who aren’t stellar students, conforming and not breaking the box is paramount, breaking the box (via testing or requiring an IEP) is expensive and more hassle

Related to this is also the jealousy factor among many K-12 teachers who themselves weren’t great students and thus, resent seeing a younger person whose intellectual capabilities indicate that s(he) will or has already far outstripped their own.  Saw a lot of this dynamic among some junior high school teachers who seemed to prefer dealing with mediocre/average students they felt were “under their control” vs the academic excellers/overachievers who they felt were/could “undermine their authoritah”.  A dynamic made worse if the latter type of student had the gall to be female, non-White, and/or working-class.  Though this dynamic was also present to a lesser extent in high school, most teachers find that it is futile to pull that BS….especially when it comes with the territory of teaching a school filled with academic overachiever and quite a few brilliant genius type students who are more than capable of finding other ways of undermining such teachers….

Among traditional-age students who are financially dependent on their parents, multiple years of data consistently show that for each racial/ethnic group, the gender gap in enrollment disappears as family income rises.

I’m not sure if the graduating by age 22 stats are as class based - but it makes sense. There are more jobs available to men with no degree - electrician, etc. with decent pay.

Has anyone mentioned that the rate of learning disabilities is much higher for boys than girls, and that more of both sexes are going to college, implying that people who might never have gone to college at all once upon a time are doing so now?

While I do think that girls are underdiagnosed with ADHD and boys are overdiagnosed with it, I also know, from observing my own son, that it’s a very real syndrome, and it does seem to hit more boys than girls. It may be that boys whose learning disabilities might have kept them out of college entirely in the past are going now, but dyslexia and ADHD make it very hard for them to pull as high of a load as people without such problems and still get ahead, so they have to take it slower than people without learning disabilities… and proportionately there are more boys with learning disabilities than there are girls.

That might be part of it.

Give them different assignments - uhm, OK, but you also have to teach those assignments, so with inclusion today, at any given point you are speaking to only 1/3 of the class.

Well, they do that with reading: don’t you remember how there was the gold group, the silver group, and the brown group?

/Matt Groening

Skipping grades, having school curriculums that are more intense and challenging and giving students the option of attending those instead of less intense ones, etc. makes sense to me. What the heck is a Gifted and Talented program supposed to do?

oldfeminist - re: this:

But you were arguing with Amanda’s statement, “Even though girls do better in school, boys are far liklier to be labeled “gifted”, for instance.”

thank you

Alara - re: ADHD/ADD.

I’m not sure that I’d agree with the assertion that ADD “hit[s] boys more than girls” - simply because I don’t think we have enough unbiased data - but I do think ADD affects more boys in ways that are likely to mess with their academics in more consistent, noticable, and immediately frustrating ways.

Part of this is because of the way that ADD tends to manifest in girls versus boys.  While there are plenty of girls with ADD that match the “Chatty Cathy” type of ADHD, most girls with ADD don’t have the hyperactive part, we tend to be more daydreamy.*  Which is related to why it’s often missed in girls - girls with ADD tend to be able to exist in structured environments without causing teachers the kind of trouble that gets them noticed.  Constantly.  So it’s still more likely to be chalked up to lack of willpower, maturity, etc. - as ADD traditionally has been - rather than reaching the point for everyone around the kid where this needs to be taken care of now.

It’s when they -er, we - have to manage our own time and such that it is most likely to get to the point of blowing up in our faces.  That’s why girls/women are more likely to be diagnosed after completing high school or college - what worked in the environment before doesn’t work anymore, and so what was always there is finally noticed.

*I’m not going to discuss which of these types is worse to have, because I think that question misses the point.  But I can see people thinking “oh, well, if what you are talking about is simply daydreaming a lot, is that really on the same level as ...[blah blah blah]”  So I’ll just clarify: “daydreamy” is how it looks from the outside, that’s not really an accurate description of what is going on inside.

Tyro @ #193:

I am equating it to not really caring that much about graduating in 4 years and instead consuming yourself with other nonacademic distractions. You cared as much or more about your band than you did about school. At least be at peace with the fact that your female classmates were more interested in focusing on their studies than you were rather than trying to dress it up as anything else. Plus the fact that this is considered something men can “get away with,” while for women it would be considered a sign of not taking academics seriously.

Tyro, seriously, I don’t give a shit what my female classmates were into.

I was working a full time job, trying to make a band work, trying to finish my degree. I wasn’t trying to dress up anything.

Instead of just digging in and trying to win an argument from anything between the bus schedule and the clock, why not just acknowledge that some people had different expereinces, and admit you don’t have to “win” every single post?

Really, I don’t know what you’re shadow boxing with, here. Admit you’re wrong, and move on.

p.s. I know women who pursued art or drama, or music throughout college, and I totally respected their decisions, and had great relationships with them. Why do you judge them? Why do you judge me?

And Amanda - this would be a STRAWMAN -

Sorry to have offended you, John, but that some men undoubtably work hard in no way, shape, or form means that the pressures described here aren’t real.  Women do have to work twice as hard to get half as far, still, and that will, across the board—-though individual mileage will vary—-create situations where women do things like graduate younger.  They have fewer choices, and are reacting accordingly.

Could you please point out where anyone said that when men work hard, that means that all struggles by any non-white, non-males are completely nullified?

You introduced a bigotted notion that men waste their time on play video games during college, and that’s why they don’t graduate as fast as women.

Cut the bullshit, and quit the hating.
I’m on your side.

You introduced a bigotted notion that men waste their time on play video games during college, and that’s why they don’t graduate as fast as women.

No, she related an observation that most of the college students she observed slacking were male, you’re the one who conflates it to her saying, “Men play video games while women study their ass off, men drool while girls rule!”

You obviously had a nerve touched by her comment, and it reminds of this quote:

“Detach yourself, Archie, personal resentment
of a general statement is a barbarous remnant of a fetish-superstition.”

Rex Stout,  Fer-de-Lance

A side-note on that study on gifted & talented youth by Professors Stanley & Benbow. During that lunch with Professor Stanley, some ten years after I got run through his various hoops, he commented that had things worked out such that I could have been included in the study, I would have been put in the SVPY group rather than the SMPY group - verbally rather than mathematically precocious. So I still wouldn’t have been counted as mathematically g&t;, despite outscoring my mathematically precocious brother. Essentially, what I gathered from his description was that kids who scored equally well mathematically and verbally were put into the verbal group - and the verbal group was much more heavily female than the mathematics group.

(Nothing against Professor Stanley here. oldfeminist’s description of the pre-discouragement of girls from even trying for inclusion strikes me as a likely source of much data tilting. For me, I couldn’t be included in that study in particular because my initial testing was completely ad hoc, rather than under proper conditions - and retesting would produce adulterated data since I’d already been tested once.)

And now I’m curious if there’s a case study on me floating around in the academic ether somewhere, because for all I couldn’t go into the Precocious Youth program, they sure spent quite a lot of time putting me through the wringer when I was sevenish.

Essentially, what I gathered from his description was that kids who scored equally well mathematically and verbally were put into the verbal group - and the verbal group was much more heavily female than the mathematics group.

Oh, wow.  And that’s going to create quite the feeback loop, yes?  Especially as I’m sure that’s not the only instance of that kind of thinking.

As an undergraduate student, I asked for favors from Professors in exactly two instances:
1 - my spouse and I had two overlapping courses the semester my daughter was born and I asked for permission to either bring her to class for the last two weeks (she was born end of Nov) or come late (both allowed me to “Bring her and see how it goes”; she slept through one every time and was quiet through the other which was an ed class)
2 - my son was born two weeks early and two weeks before end of semester; I asked for incompletes. [Both gave me the grade I would have earned had I received a C on the final (B), with the option of doing extra work to raise to an A instead.]
Yes, 25 years ago (BA, inland west) and again 15 years ago (BSCE, NE coast), college women were expected to perform much more consistantly than college men or be dismissed completely as “not serious students” or “Going for their Mrs.” and were granted much less slack.

My first ug degree was a BA.  It took me 8 years because I also had two children, worked full-time and balanced childcare with a spouse in a STEM degree program and either part or fulltime work for most of it. 
My second ug degree took an additional 4 years and was in engineering.  It took fewer years because I only had to balance after school child care and part time work as the spouse had a fulltime job with benefits (finally!) and the kids were in school.
Huge, huge difference in family responsibilities made a huge difference in durationfor me; I can see how any individual item from them could impact graduation “on time” rates.  As I worked for those 8 years for the 1st in student support services, I actually did see it do that.

Just in case jennygadget is still reading this:

(rolls eyes)

Cute.

re: # 1 - I was asking what realistic reason do you have for thinking that women will suddenly en masse decide that it’s no longer their job to do all of the things already discussed?  capacity =/= probablility

What you and I consider “realistic” are probably different things.  Why, in the context of this discussion, is it not “realistic” to consider that one possible outcome is indeed that women “will suddenly en masse decide that it’s no longer their job to do all of the things already discussed?”  Are you claiming that women are innately more virtuous than men, and would not tend to avail themselves of this opportunity?  Why </i>wouldn’t</i> they?

re: #2 - Sorry, I forgot that you will be making house visits to every woman in the world and explaining to them that they should think exactly like you do.

Excuse me for having values and trying to persuade people to agree with me.

Seriously did you read what I wrote at all?

If I hadn’t, I doubt I would be responding to you by name.  Don’t you agree?

“Did you read what I wrote” is such a messageboard cliche’...it’s lost all its power as a put-down.

*Women* consider one day of goofing off to = “being a lazy bum” when it comes to themselves.  Therefore, women giving themselves permission to be a lazy bum will generally =/= spending <b>every</i> day goofing off.  The typical effect will be to give ourselves a break every so often….and still feel guilty about it.

They shouldn’t think that, but that’s what feminism is supposed to be fixing, right?  And once women are so empowered, and the constraints of hidebound acculturation are removed, and they no longer feel guilty about taking a day off every once in a while…what stops them from taking a day off for weeks or months at a time?  What keeps them from hanging out at the pool hall all day, drinking beers and shooting the breeze with their buds just like the unproductive men do?  I don’t object to the empowerment, at all.  I don’t like the choice to be unproductive layabouts, by men or women.

They shouldn’t think that, but that’s what feminism is supposed to be fixing, right?

One does not go about fixing things by giving people “advice” as if the things that needed fixing were already fixed.

If I hadn’t, I doubt I would be responding to you by name.  Don’t you agree?

Clearly, I don’t.

Excuse me for having values and trying to persuade people to agree with me.

How the fuck does anything I said suggest that I have a problem with you having values?  Or trying (emphasis on the trying) to be persuasive?  (Also, speaking of childish, overused internet whines…)

As I’ve said several times now, my issue is not that I think everyone should by layabouts and you are wrong wrong wrong for even suggesting otherwise but

1) that it’s fucking counterproductive to act as if men and women have the same expectations for themselves and how they spend their time.  That is, after all, the very reason why this post even exists, yes?

2) that you are being a bit of an asshole by ignoring women’s voices on the kinds of expectations we have for ourselves, the kinds of expectations others have for us, and how neither of those usually allows for the kinds of things we need to be happy and healthy.

3) given this post/thread and the other post/thread I linked to, it’s not at all obvious to me that what we need is simply for men to buckle down.  In fact, I think it’s quite obvious that, as Amanda said on the other post:

There’s a reason that women are less likely to start bands or blogs, are fewer in number in the world of gaming, or play sports as a hobby instead of grimly trying to drop 5 pounds on the treadmill.  This is because there are dishes to do, and women have to do them.  Feminism has given us many things, but the task of giving us the same freedom as men to flow or to loaf is far from over.

Acting as if women already have the same right/privilege to loaf as men do, and “advising” them accordingly, is as harmful and counterproducting as any other time you assume that women have the same rights/privileges that men do when it’s clear that we don’t.

Acting as if women already have the same right/privilege to loaf as men do, and “advising” them accordingly, is as harmful and counterproducting as any other time you assume that women have the same rights/privileges that men do when it’s clear that we don’t.

Maybe that’s the problem.  I’m trying to look at the possible end states, not how we get there.  That’s why I “assume that women have the same rights/privileges that men do,” because that’s the end state feminism wants to achieve, right?  So in that hypothetical world, what rights and privileges (that men have now and women don’t) would those be?  One of them, apparently, is the right to slack off as a lifestyle; and that’s what I’m saying is something we should probably try to avoid.  I’m not saying that no one can ever take a vacation or get away from their responsibilities for a while.  And I’m not even really saying that everyone has to work 8 hours a day at hard manual labor; many different activities have a positive value to society.  Maybe even slacking off, I’m open to that.  The example given was men sitting around all day shooting pool and drinking beer while the women did all the work; and if the only change made was that the women also get to sit around all day shooting pool and drinking beer, then nobody does the work and that’s not a good thing. 

It’s also not a good thing to keep the status quo.  So that seems to me to leave really only one way forward, and that’s to get those slacker men to take up some of that work the women are currently doing.  I have no problem with that.  I think it’s going to take a while, but that’s a different issue.

Now for some meta:

How the fuck does anything I said suggest that I have a problem with you having values?  Or trying (emphasis on the trying) to be persuasive?

Your snide and snarky tone.  “Sorry, I forgot that you will be making house visits to every woman in the world and explaining to them that they should think exactly like you do.”  In other words, STFU liberalrob, no woman in the world wants to hear your opinion.  And it’s not whining when you are indeed trying to shut me down.

you are being a bit of an asshole by ignoring women’s voices on the kinds of expectations we have for ourselves

I’m not ignoring.  But I also don’t have total recall, nor do I read every post and comment thread related to a particular subject that’s ever been posted before I comment.  And I don’t see myself as “a bit of an asshole,” though I may come across as one from time to time.

I’m not ignoring.  But I also don’t have total recall, nor do I read every post and comment thread related to a particular subject that’s ever been posted before I comment.

And this is why I asked if you actually bothered to read what I had written.  because I referenced that post in my very first comment that was in response to you.  That thread, is, in fact, the whole crux of my argument.  So if you didn’t know to which I was referring, but had actually bothered to read what I had written, a logical person would think that would would ask wtf I was talking about.

And if you still haven’t bothered to read any of those links yet, you are ignoring women’s voices - by ignoring all the women on this very thread that have have disagreed with you (I’m not the only one) and by not even bothering to educate yourself when the information is plopped right in front you.

also-

Are you fucking kidding me?  You “don’t have total recall?”  Like the fact that women have different expectations for themselves (and that ppl have dif expectations for women) when it comes to drudgery like housework or caring for others is some fucking random trivia question.  Even beyond it being feminism 101 level info - or what us women would otherwise call “life” - for the billionth time it’s part the fucking reason this very post exists in the first place.

No, I’m not fucking kidding you.  Calm down.

So it’s not about whether I had read what you had written, but whether I had read everything you had linked to that others had written.  I did.  (And in reality, your first response to me- #87- had no links in it whatsoever; you didn’t give links until post #224.)  And I did read the bluebird post too, and your links back to it.  I don’t disagree with anything said there.  It relates to the situation as it is now; my point was about the situation as it might exist in the future, that there are two possible outcomes, and I think one is better than the other.  I don’t argue for the status quo, so I really don’t know why you keep insisting that I’m the enemy.

Your point seems to be that we shouldn’t worry about where we wind up, because where we are is unacceptable and anywhere is better than where we are now.  In my experience, that’s not necessarily true.

Calm down.

Go fuck yourself.

You know, my brother has close to the most perfect auditory memory ever.  Especially in the short term.  You get into an argument with him and he can spit out what you said word for word a half hour later without even having to think about it.  So I learned really early on to separate someone having physically heard what I said versus someone actually processing it, considering it, and giving it due thought.

The fact that you had no idea what I was talking about in my first post, but didn’t bother to ask for clarification, and simply went on to repeat exactly what you had said before shows me that you don’t actually give a shit about anything I was saying except to tell me once again that you were right, right, right.

The fact that you think that I *should* hold your hand and walk you through feminism 101 and send you all sorts of links and not, you know, expect you to actually consider what others are telling you and ask questions when you aren’t sure also tells me that you aren’t actually interested in what I have to say, but rather in making sure I know that you know that you are right, right, right.

Even, after all this time, you can’t even paraphrase what I’ve said reasonably well.  Because your last paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with anything I’ve said.  You are either being dishonest in order to paint me in a bad light to make yourself feel better, or you still haven’t bothered to read and consider anything that I’ve written.

I don’t think of you as anything, by the way.  If you feel like I am treating you like you are “the enemy” it’s because you keep acting like one.  Like, you know, telling a woman to calm down when she gets pissed at you for ignoring women’s voices about their own lives.  To which I again say:

GO FUCK YOURSELF