Are Girls More Clever than Boys?
Girls think they are cleverer and more hard-working than boys from the age of four, according to a new study.
In Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat, academics at the University of Kent in the UK say that girls think they will do better than boys from the moment they start school. Boys take till they are eight to come round to the idea. The problem, say the authors, is that teachers expect girls to outperform boys from the get-go, and that expectation is self-fulfilling.
We seem to have come a long way in the last 20 or 30 years with the education system now being seen as biased towards girls. Partly, this is the result of changes in the system, post-feminism, because it was viewed as biased towards boys. Partly it is due to the impact of "girl power".
But I think the rise and rise of biological determinism, fueled by new developments in and a media obsession with genetic research, is a huge factor.
I have four children; three are girls and the youngest, a newborn baby, is a boy. I can scarcely go through a day without someone telling me that everything he does, from his sleep patterns to his feeding, is related to his gender.
"What differences have you noticed?" people ask expectantly. He is just three months old. I haven't noticed any difference at all. I am too sleep deprived for starters. All my children have woken up every two to three hours for the first six months or so. If I mention that he is waking this often, though, I usually get told that it is because he is a boy. Often, however, I get told completely contradictory information about what his behavior will be like "because he is a boy."
"Boys just take, take, take all the time," said one person. "Boys are so affectionate. There's nothing like the love of a son," says another. It comes from all sorts of people, regardless of their background.
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