andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2004-04-24 06:56 pm
andrewducker) wrote2004-04-24 06:56 pm
Women Suck!
Studies have shown that girls do better in all girl's schools than they do in mixed schools.
Which makes this study particularly interesting.
It's hard to summarise more than it already is, but it shows that when women compete with men and women they don't improve their performance significantly, whereas men do. Women competing solely with Women _do_ improve their performance, it's just when competing in mixed circumstances that they don't seem to improve as much.
I'm not sure what's going on, but it definitely deserves researching in more details to see what's going on.
Which makes this study particularly interesting.
It's hard to summarise more than it already is, but it shows that when women compete with men and women they don't improve their performance significantly, whereas men do. Women competing solely with Women _do_ improve their performance, it's just when competing in mixed circumstances that they don't seem to improve as much.
I'm not sure what's going on, but it definitely deserves researching in more details to see what's going on.
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No, you're right, I just checked the price. My mum has two paperback copies, one of which I nicked off her years ago, which cost something like £5 each.
Okay. To summarize (though I'm prepared to bet you won't like it) Dale Spender demonstrated through tape-recording lessons and interviewing pupils and teachers that in mixed sex classes teachers spend more time paying attention to the boys than to the girls. (I should say "tend", but Spender's data was that this was invariably so.) Boys tended to have an exaggerated view of their own intelligence, especially with respect to the girls in the same class.
(One anecdote which escaped into popular culture: work which a teacher thought was by a girl was invariably given a lower mark than when a teacher thought it was by a boy. This was an actual experiment actually carried out with multiple data and with quite astonishing consistency of results.)
There was a bunch of other stuff, but moving on: Spender's conclusion was that the reason girls do better in same-sex schools but worse in mixed-sex schools, while for boys it's the other way round, is that boys operate by putting others down - by setting up a hierarchy where some are worse than others, and denigrating them. In a mixed sex school, those who are put down and denigrated are invariably girls, and the teachers effectively cooperate in this by awarding girls less attention and by giving their work lower marks. In a same sex girls school, this system ceases to operate: girls on average do better. In a same sex boys school, the system continues to operate, and therefore boys on average do worse, because some of them have been, as Spender put it, made into "honorary girls". This conclusion is, naturally, unacceptable to non-feminists - and was therefore ignored.
What also fits is that since Spender carried out her research, feminism has performed the usual evolution: what was radical feminism twenty-five years ago has turned into moderate feminism: what was moderate feminism twenty-five years ago has turned into taken-for-granted-that-everyone-thinks-that-way. (Feminist ideas cease being regarded as feminist ideas once they have become generally accepted: this is why feminism is the most successful revolution the world has ever seen.) And over the past twenty-five years, girls have been doing better and better in mixed-sex schools: the denigration process simply isn't working as well as it used to back when Spender did her research. (I have been noting with ironic amusement for years how upset the newspapers get when "Girls outperform boys"... since I remember back when there was not the least upset by the newspapers when boys were outperforming girls.)
If I can find my copy of Invisible Women, I'll lend it to you.
Before I auction it on e-Bay.If you want. Spender is still uncomfortably radical as a feminist, and (annoyingly) though her books are packed with data, she has a rather clunky style: she doesn't write with Joanna Russ's grace.no subject
Actually, I did. That was fascinating. I'm generally a believer that girls and boys operate differently and the whole 'honorary girls' thing fits my experience. Harder to do when girls refuse to accept the role of second-class citizen, thank goodness.
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Times have changed! Last time I explained Dale Spender's theory to a guy, he informed me firmly that I didn't know what I was talking about because I wasn't a boy. True...
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_Anyone_ can analyse a situation. I get so fed up with people saying that only Black people can understand, or only women, or only men. All it takes is observational skill and the ability to feel a tiny amount of empathy.
Admittedly I'm not sure about the second part in either of our cases.
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