The Silent Gender Gap
Recent reports have confirmed that boys, not girls, are increasingly on the unfavorable side of the gender gap in education and developmental matters. For example, enrollments in institutions of higher education in the 1990s favor females by a ratio of 54-to-46. As recently as 1980, the ratio was 50-50. Of course, in 1970 the ratio favored males by 59-to-41. Similarly, in 1971, only 43 percent of those who received a baccalaureate degree and 40 percent of those who received a master's degree were women, compared with 54 percent for each degree in 1993. Because of the large gap favoring males just 25 years ago, it is easy to understand how the reversal has gone unnoticed. Among African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, the gap actually favored females in 1970, and has expanded substantially during these past two decades. This pattern is repeated throughout Europe. The issue has recently become a matter of concern to college officials interested in maintaining a balanced male-female ratio.
The U.S. Department of Education's 1995 Condition of Education report concluded that "the gap in reading proficiency [favoring girls] is roughly equivalent to about 11/2 years of schooling." In the July 7, 1995, issue of Science , Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell show that boys' writing skills are significantly and profoundly below the skill levels of girls. It is true that all of the above sources show differences favoring boys in mathematics and science, but the differences are smaller, and these deficits for girls in science and mathematics have been provided with special treatments over the past 20 years or so. And, in fact, the data do show that the achievement-test-score differences in math have been reduced considerably as a result.
The Educational Testing Service has released a four-year study reinforcing this emergent view regarding the gender gap. For this report, Warren Willingham and Nancy Cole (1997) analyzed data from 400 different tests from more than 1,500 different data sets. They found that for most subject-matter tests, gender differences were very small, and whenever a gender difference was found, it "cut both ways." The researchers acknowledge that the results contradict the view that girls need to catch up with boys. In particular, they note that "12th grade girls have substantially closed the familiar math and science gap over the past 30 years but there continues to be a fairly large gap in writing skills that...
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