Sad that I need a throwaway account to talk about this, but such is life.
Spend some time doing searches on terms like "gender grading gap" and reading the recent research. What you find may surprise you, is consistent across multiple Western democracies, and can be summarized thusly:
* When assessment is left to teachers, there is a grading gap in favor of girls; girls receive grades that are inflated relative to their performance on non-teacher assessments. This seems to be partly due to teachers including factors like "engagement" or "focus" in the classroom, which is known to favor girls, and partly due to bias by teachers in favor of students of their own gender (and many teachers are women, meaning the effect is most pronounced for girls).
* By surprisingly young ages, girls in public school systems internalize "we're better than boys" and boys internalize "we're worse than girls" (one UK study estimated boys internalize this by age eight), producing a performance/effort gap similar to that associated with racial stereotypes.
* This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone. Boys and young men are increasingly more likely to be held back and/or disciplined/medicated in early school years, increasingly less likely to get into advanced courses in later years, less likely to graduate local equivalent of "high school" and less likely to enter college/university or earn a degree.
I'm confused by what seems to be a non-sequitur. I'm talking about educational achievement, and there is an absolute, well-documented and undeniable gap there.
While it's true that within the highest ranks of Western society, gender plays a significant role, it's also true that socioeconomic background -- "class", for lack of a better word -- has a sunlight-to-candle relationship to gender in terms of getting into those ranks in the first place. Western society has drastically limited mobility right now, and the highest ranks are, unfortunately, more conservative in their views on gender.
And as an aside, there's a good example of a broader application of Kleinfeld's thesis there. Men dominate at the extreme high end, but also at the extreme low end. Efforts toward true equality need to address the root cause of that, which has more to do with rigid gender roles imposed on both men and women than with outright favoring of men over women.
You said: "This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone."
And I say, I do not understand how this achievement gap, as you call it, actually matters or is holding men back when men hold most of the advanced degrees, and wealth in this society. I don't think you need a throwaway account to discuss this stuff so long as everyone stays calm.
Meanwhile, you're spot on in my opinion about the role of class as well as gender. This is very true. It's also why the "right" way of doing many things is so often a "male" way of doing things, accepted as the default. They are absolutely interconnected and probably inseparable. Most feminists will absolutely agree that rigid gender roles hurt men and women, and we want everyone to fulfill their potential, and not be stuck in those roles.
I do not understand how this achievement gap, as you call it, actually matters or is holding men back when men hold most of the advanced degrees, and wealth in this society.
Well, at the moment women are earning more bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and yes, even Ph.Ds than men. That doesn't immediately erase a pre-existing gap among the older generations, but it does tell us that in the future we still won't have equality -- we'll have simply replaced one gap by another.
The goal really ought to be to start raising generation after generation of kids where boys and girls are equal in educational opportunity and achievement. We've thus far failed at that goal, and I don't truly understand how someone can call themself "feminist" whilst thinking that's not something that "actually matters".
The prevalence of people who do call themself "feminist" and hold such beliefs is why I shelter in my warm, snug anonymity. Pointing out such contradictions does not typically result in calm discussions.
> The goal really ought to be to start raising generation after generation of kids where boys and girls are equal in educational opportunity and achievement.
There are two very different goals stated there and they may not be compatible.
Books are tricky since the required funding/publicity tends to mean that only people with reactionary/highly-conservative viewpoints can break into that, and come with their own views on why we have this gap and how to address it. Mostly this is something you'll find in academic articles and published statistics.
The US Department of Education's June 2012 report on gender equity is a decent starting point:
What you'll find there is that the conventionally-assumed narratives don't hold; there's a lot more parity in enrollment for higher-level courses including sciences and many maths courses (and sometimes even a gap in the unexpected direction, as with girls outnumbering boys in AP science courses), for example. Girls are also more likely (and have been more likely for nearly 40 years) to be enrolled into programs for gifted/talented students, while boys are nearly 1.5 times more likely to be held back and forced to repeat a grade.
Judith Kleinfeld (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) has written a few articles -- though fully-cited and sourced versions are hard to find free -- arguing that a major component of perceived gaps in performance may also be from greater variability in boys; focusing only on achieving parity at the highest levels of achievement has meant that boys' original overrepresentation at the lowest levels has not only persisted but grown, and remains unaddressed.
A study at the University of Georgia published this year looked into why girls receive higher grades and lower standardized-test scores.
Girls and boys both persistently believe that girls "are cleverer, better-behaved and try harder than boys at school".
And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. But like I said, spend some time searching on relevant terms and you'll turn up a lot of research that may make you question what "everybody knows" about gender and education.
Spend some time doing searches on terms like "gender grading gap" and reading the recent research. What you find may surprise you, is consistent across multiple Western democracies, and can be summarized thusly:
* When assessment is left to teachers, there is a grading gap in favor of girls; girls receive grades that are inflated relative to their performance on non-teacher assessments. This seems to be partly due to teachers including factors like "engagement" or "focus" in the classroom, which is known to favor girls, and partly due to bias by teachers in favor of students of their own gender (and many teachers are women, meaning the effect is most pronounced for girls).
* By surprisingly young ages, girls in public school systems internalize "we're better than boys" and boys internalize "we're worse than girls" (one UK study estimated boys internalize this by age eight), producing a performance/effort gap similar to that associated with racial stereotypes.
* This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone. Boys and young men are increasingly more likely to be held back and/or disciplined/medicated in early school years, increasingly less likely to get into advanced courses in later years, less likely to graduate local equivalent of "high school" and less likely to enter college/university or earn a degree.