The US Congress in 1972 enacted Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools or in education programs that receive federal funding. Since then, many barriers that blocked women from receiving an education in the US have been effectively removed. In 1970, 56.9 percent of university graduates were men and 43.1 percent were women. Twelve years later, those figures were almost the same, but in 2019, the ratios were reversed, with 57.6 percent of graduates women and 42.4 percent men.
The shift is not just evident among those receiving bachelor’s degrees. The data for students obtaining associate, master’s and doctoral degrees also show similar gender gaps.
The disparity is not unique to the US. Data from many advanced countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show similar phenomena, but to varying degrees.
While the gender education gap in the UK is similar to the US’, it is more dramatic in Nordic countries. For example, the percentages of female university students in Sweden and Iceland are 61 percent and 64 percent respectively, likely as they have histories of practicing gender equality. In contrast, Germany’s gender gap is smaller, because technical colleges in its higher education system are especially effective at attracting male students.
Does this new gender gap in higher education mean that sex-equality laws such as Title IX have run their course, or are there deeper, more structural socioeconomic factors at play?
Why are men increasingly unable to compete with women in getting into universities? A major reason is that the academic performance of boys in high schools lags that of girls.
In the US, two-thirds of the top 10 percent of high-school students are female, while two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent are male. While the difference in grade-point averages (GPA) between high-school boys and girls is stark, their standardized test scores do not show any statistically meaningful differences.
As some standardized academic tests, such as the SATs, correlate strongly with IQ scores and are designed to measure students’ learning capabilities, boys appear to be as smart as girls.
However, GPA also reflects multiple aspects of noncognitive factors of academic performance, such as timely submission of homework, successful completion of projects, degree of engagement in classroom discussions, participation in extracurricular activities, etc. In these areas, girls are generally more engaged and perform better than boys, and are often rewarded with better grades.
Are such grading policies unfair? Not necessarily, as many studies have shown that GPA is a much more reliable predictor of students accomplishments than standardized test scores.
Generally speaking, girls are more patient and willing than boys to follow instructions prescribed or recommended by parents, teachers, schools and authorities, including taking more advanced courses, participating in extracurricular interschool competitions and volunteering, such as joining the Peace Corps. In other words, girls are more disciplined and persistent.
Although discipline might sometimes get in the way of unbridled creativity or explosive drive, it has a profound effect on a student’s overall academic performance and thus is considered an important life skill.
That girls are more disciplined than boys arises from nurture as well as nature. From early on, boys are encouraged or instructed to explore, to break things, to step outside boundaries, to walk paths less traveled, to be brave and adventurous, etc. These instructions are fundamentally incompatible with the “following the script” herd mentality encouraged for girls at most secondary schools.
In addition, male high-school students are biologically disadvantaged compared with their female counterparts when it comes to acquiring self-discipline skills. This is because female brains mature one to two years earlier than male brains.
More specifically, brain maturation refers to a process of trimming the brain’s neural circuits to eradicate infrequently used and shorter-distance neural connections. Such neural reorganization processes reduce low-quality signals or noises in inputs to neurons, and enable more efficient utilization of the limited neural connection resources. The external manifestations of brain maturation are better mood regulation, more effective impulse control and rationality-over-emotion decisionmaking, ie, being more disciplined.
Interestingly, the above gender gap does not seem to exist in East Asian countries. Perhaps because affirmative action for women’s education rights are not fully developed.
Last year, women accounted for 44.5 percent and 42.7 percent of university students in Japan and South Korea respectively. In 2021, 53.5 percent of university student in China were women, but as the ratio of women to men in the country is 104.61 to 100, an adjusted percentage would likely place it closer to that of the US.
The percentage of female university students in Taiwan last year was 49.5 percent, which is perfect, and has remained stubbornly constant since 2000.
Exactly what Taiwan gets right to achieve this remarkable feat is unclear, and warrants more in-depth studies. Somehow, Taiwanese men are generally more disciplined (and maybe less adventurous or ambitious as a result) than their counterparts abroad, and are thus able to escape the higher-education gender gap trap.
Although women have some competitive edge in university-level studies over men, once they graduate and enter the job market, they tend to face a different kind of gender gap in career development and pay. Gender gaps exist, but their nature are quite different. It behooves the government to acknowledge their existence, analyze the root causes and make every effort to eliminate them.
Chiueh Tzi-cker is a joint appointment professor in the Institute of Information Security at National Tsing Hua University.
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