{"id":1426,"date":"2017-03-22T19:58:30","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T19:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/families\/?p=839"},"modified":"2017-03-22T19:58:30","modified_gmt":"2017-03-22T19:58:30","slug":"revisit-gender-gap-puzzles-and-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2017\/03\/22\/revisit-gender-gap-puzzles-and-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisit: Gender Gap, Puzzles, and Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is reposted from GirlwPen, where I wrote about several pieces of education and gender research in 2013.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Apples via Creative Commons by Nina Matthews<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have written previously about gender, debt, and college drop out rates<\/a>\u2013men\u2019s and women\u2019s different debt tolerance (women have more) is related to their early job market prospects (men have more) and helps explain why men drop out of college more.<\/p>\n

Now, here\u2019s a new piece of the gender gap in education puzzle. According to a new briefing report (from 2013, now) presented to the Council on Contemporary Families<\/a>, \u201cthe most important predictor of boys\u2019 achievement is the extent to which the school culture expects, values, and rewards academic effort.\u201d Sociologists Claudia Buchmann (Ohio State) and Thomas DiPrete (Columbia University) present their in-depth findings on the much-debated reasons why women outstrip men in education\u2014also the subject of their new book<\/a>\u2014in \u201cThe Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools<\/a>.\u201d The full CCF briefing report is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When did the gender gap begin? <\/strong>Some of the gender gap in schooling is new and some is not. For about 100 years, the authors explain, girls have been making better grades than boys. But only since the 1970s have women been catching up to\u2014and surpassing\u2014men in terms of graduation rates from college and graduate school. The authors report, \u201cBack in 1960, more than twice as many men as women between the ages of 26-28 were college graduates. Between 1970 and 2010, men\u2019s rate of B.A. completion grew by just 7 percent, rising from 20 to 27 percent in those 40 years. In contrast, women\u2019s rates almost tripled, rising from 14 percent to 36 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is the gender gap translating into wages? <\/strong>\u201cThe rise of women in the educational realm has not wiped out the gender wage gap \u2014\u00a0women with a college degree continue to earn less on average<\/a> than men with a college degree.\u201d\u00a0 But because more women are getting college degrees, growing numbers of women are earning more than their less-educated men age-mates, and the gender wage gap has narrowed considerably.\u201d But, report the authors, if men were keeping up with women in terms of education, men would on average be earning four percent more than they do now, and their unemployment rate would be one-half percentage point lower.<\/p>\n

What should schools do? <\/strong>The authors debunk the notion that boys\u2019 under-performance in school is caused by a \u201cfeminized\u201d learning environment that needs to be made more boy-friendly. Making curriculum, teachers, or classroom more \u201cmasculine\u201d is not the answer, they show. In fact, boys do better in school in classrooms that have more girls and that emphasize extracurricular activities such as music and art as well as holding both girls and boys to high academic standards. But boys do need to learn how much today\u2019s economy rewards academic achievement rather than traditionally masculine blue-collar work.<\/p>\n

Please visit here<\/a> to read more about the gender gap in educational achievement and the sources of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is reposted from GirlwPen, where I wrote about several pieces of education and gender research in 2013. I have written previously about gender, debt, and college drop out rates\u2013men\u2019s and women\u2019s different debt tolerance (women have more) is related to their early job market prospects (men have more) and helps explain why men drop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8959,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-families","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}