EVERY AUGUST the media throws a wobbly about the GCSE and A-level exam results. This year seems to have been a no-win situation: record passes at A level led to charges of “dumbing down”, while yesterday’s record failure rate at GCSE has been equally condemned.
In other years the usual concern has been the growing “gender gap” — the way girls are increasingly outperforming boys at all ages. Last week’s A-level results, for instance, showed girls stretching their small lead in overall passes (roughly 96 per cent to 94 per cent), and further consolidating their recent advantage in the topmost grades. Meanwhile, the past couple of years of GCSE results have shown girls widening their 10 per cent lead in overall pass rates.
At university level the same story is unfolding. In 2000 women, for the first time, got more first-class degrees than men. Indeed, the number of women getting firsts has trebled in a decade — at higher-education level they now outstrip men in a majority of disciplines.
Such is the notable and increasing tendency for males to lag behind that the authorities have been forced into concerned speeches, and even some action. Several studies have been instituted into why all this is happening and how Britain can get the lads up to speed again. The Department for Education and Skills, the Audit Commission, the people at Ofsted, various educationalists, sociologists and psychologists have all been recruited to the cause. The various studies have been told to focus on the way that boys, girls and modern British education interact.
One expert with a determined fix on the problem is Dr Madsen Pirie, president of the free-market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute. He thinks that the main problem (if you’re a boy) is that UK schools, and schooling, have been “feminised”.
“By this,” he says, “I mean essentially that the gender balance in the education profession has tilted markedly towards women. For many years women have outnumbered men in primary-school staff rooms, with men elsewhere in the majority. In recent decades, however, women teachers have come to outnumber men at secondary schools and at sixth form, and women are now making big inroads into university departments. In itself this is obviously no bad thing, but it does have unmeant effects that are bad for boys. Because it’s ultimately the teachers and lecturers who decide how exams are set and syllabuses taught, the way these things are done has become more ‘female’. We know, from behaviourists and psychologists, that boys are naturally more prone to taking risks, and to acting impulsively yet thinking abstractly. The old-style exams tended to reward this. Boys could do badly all year and save everything for the final throw. But now we have modular courses and continuous assessment, and these favour female traits: scrupulousness, diligence, systematic thought.”
Other experts have also used this same evidence of the feminisation of schools, but have a different take. John Acklaw, based in Essex, is a chartered educational psychologist and a one-time schools inspector. He thinks that the problem is our ‘new-laddish’ culture, although his analysis is dismissed by other experts who point out that the issue of “male failure” has had a long shelf-life for a supposedly “modern” problem.
Dilys Davies, a consultant clinical psychologist with a doctorate in gender differences, says: “Way back in the 1950s there was a report called The Laggards In Our Schools, which was all about boys falling behind. Girls have always performed better in primary and secondary schools because they tend to be harder-working, more obedient and more co-operative. What’s changed is that girls have caught up in sixth form and university.”
Starkly absent from all these debates is any mention that there might be an actual difference in intellectual ability between girls and boys. This is because the standard line to take is that no such difference exists, apart from the cliché that “boys are good at maps and girls are good at chaps” (ie, boys have better visuo-spatial ability, and girls are better at verbal reasoning and therefore relationships). Recently, however, research has thrown a new light on this vexatious topic.
Richard Lynn and Paul Irwin are professors at the University of Ulster who specialise in psychometrics: the measurement of intelligence. Going against the conventional wisdom, Lynn and Irwin concluded in December 2002 that there are significant differences in intelligence between girls and boys. To put it simply, girls start off a little bit smarter than boys, then boys become somewhat smarter than girls — and the boys stay on top.
Of course, it has long been known that girls mature earlier than boys physically and psychologically. What is new in Lynn and Irwin’s work is that they quantify this fact, and also find a small but significant adult male advantage in average IQ. This advantage appears to emerge at 15 years of age and keeps growing. In fact, Lynn and Irwin estimate that males are, on average, innately smarter than females by about five IQ points from the age of 21 onwards.
For an explanation we have to look anew at an old nostrum once known as “the mediocrity of women”. This relates to the unquestionable fact that the IQ “bell curve”, the spread of intelligence, is wider for men than it is for women — that men stretch to both extremes, whereas women bunch around the average.
It sounds insulting to both sexes when you put it like that. But the facts are incontestable: in the UK, 63 per cent of children with special needs are boys. When it comes to severe cases of special needs, boys are even more predominant: 72 per cent to 28 per cent. Similarly, if you look at other low-IQ groupings such as those children with dyslexia, autism and attention deficit disorder, boys are vastly in the majority.
At the other end of the scale, male predominance is also striking. It has been estimated that boys outnumber girls at genius IQ level by two or three to one. For IQs over 170, it is 13 to one.
Why is there such greater variability in male intelligence? There have been many explanations, but the most convincing focuses on the X and Y chromosomes. Because women have two X chromosomes and men only one, it is thought that the female chromosomes average each other out by lowering high potential and heightening low potential in certain faculties, such as intelligence. By contrast, any gene on the single male X chromosome that codes for, say, autism, or brilliance at chemistry, is not averaged away.
The result of all this for our girls and boys? Controversially, some academics believe it means that girls will never dominate the very top of society no matter how well they do at school, sixth form or university. What women face is not a “glass ceiling” but a “genetic ceiling” — they fail to reach the topmost positions in society not because they face discrimination, but simply because they are not quite as bright as the very bright men aiming for the same spot. As a result, what we can expect for the future of Britain is this: a society dominated by a male elite above a cadre of diligent and bright but not superbright women, with a bottom layer, an underclass, of considerably more stupid men.
DEBATE
Are girls more intelligent than boys?
E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
