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Lately I’ve been thinking about this: In Stephen Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he refers briefly in his chapter on Gender to the fact that boys’ educational achievements are quite differently spread when compared to those of girls. Effectively, the standard deviation curve for boys' achievement is not as high as that for girls and so also much more spread out. That is, boys are much more likely to both under and over perform when compared to girls. From an evolutionary biological perspective I assume this can be explained as boys dividing up into alpha and beta males, but women needing to be much more consistent given that for most of our evolutionary history polygny has been the norm (at least according to some evolutionary biologists, see Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire-- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do). Pinker doesn’t really explain why this result ought to confirm evolutionary biological predictions, but does say that it does – see page 344.

I’ve been reading a lot about gender and education at the moment, and that includes lots of what Pinker complains about as gender construction nonsense in his book. But I’ve found this report by the OECD utterly fascinating, not least because it gives what I take to be a much more interesting tack in explaining the fact of the spread out bell curve for boys – that is, much more interesting than biobabble.

Teachers treat boys and girls differently in classrooms. They allow boys much more leeway when it comes to them being naughty than they do girls. Research has shown that teachers will not tolerate girls questioning them or being naughty in the ways boys get away with. The consequence for this toleration of bad behaviour in boys is that some boys utterly fail at school, never learning to master the fundamental skills necessary to succeed. Girls, forced to be quiet and to pay attention, are much less likely to fail to master these basic skills.

However, being quiet and not questioning the teacher will only take you so far. By the latter years of high school success is not measured in regurgitating what has been learnt from the teacher, but in challenging and questioning and in having an opinion of your own. The fact boys are encouraged to be more independent and ‘challenging’ finally pays dividends, as this is behaviour that matches the requirements of education. The girls, however, who have been socialised to be quiet, respectful of authority and not to question now find themselves at a distinct disadvantage.

Perhaps I don't need to say I find this second explanation much more reasonable than the evolutionary biological one. I’m becoming a little obsessed with the question of the construction of gender and the responsibilities teachers have in challenging gender stereotypes through their teaching practice.

For example, I’ve watched a female lecturer look over the top of the hand of a female student who rarely speaks in the class, a hand that had been in the air for quite some time, so as to ask a male student for his opinion, a male student who speaks all of the time and who had barely shown any intention to speak at this point in the class beyond wearing a slightly bewildered expression on his face. These are behaviours. To me they are socially constructed and socially endorsed behaviours, rather than behaviours compelled upon us by our genes. And even if there is a genetic basis to the under and over achievement of boys when compared to girls at school, surely a solution to this problem needs to be found, if there is ever to be one, and just as surely that solution will be social and not genetic.