Kevin Drum tells us about a new study of the gender gap:
Ken Hilton is a New York statistician who has studied gender differences in school achievement and concluded that the reason more girls go to college than boys is because girls have way better reading skills. In the New Republic this week, Richard Whitmire investigates:
Combine Hilton’s local research with national neuroscience research, and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we’ve reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.…Ninth grade is where boys’ verbal deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic achievement. That’s the year guys run into the fruits of the school-reform movement that date back to the 1989 governors’ summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Democrats and Republicans vowed to shake up schools. One outcome of the summit is that, starting in ninth grade, every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it’s leaving boys in the dust.Read the whole thing — quickly and fluently if you’re female, slowly and laboriously if you’re male — to find out what he thinks we ought to do to fix this.