Gender and education

Nature plus nurture

Girls do better than boys in school and university. But both can still improve—sometimes for surprising reasons

Mar 7th 2015 | From the print edition

来源：Economist
翻译：Z.K.

STENDHAL once wrote that all geniuses who were born women were lost to the public good. At least in the rich world, that wasteful truth has been triumphantly overcome. More than half of new graduates in the OECD club of mostly rich countries are now female. In several the share is around 60%. Former male redoubts such as medicine and law have increasingly been captured by women. Indeed, elite American colleges are widely suspected of admitting male applicants with lower grades, to even up the numbers. Yet despite this monumental advance, prejudices continue to hamper girls—and boys, too. Happily, neutralising them, at least within schools, should be much easier than reversing centuries of patriarchy.

STENDHAL曾经这样写道，“天生的女性天才都因为社会偏见而泯灭”。至少在富裕的国家，这种说法已经被彻底否定了。现在，多数富裕国家的OECD俱乐部里的应届毕业生有超过一半是女性。在某些国家，这个比例达到了60%。以往男性的堡垒领域，比如医学和法律现在越来越多的被女性占领。事实上，美国名牌大学普遍涉嫌接受成绩较低的男性申请人，以便男女生数目较为相等。然而，抛开这些巨大的进步，偏见仍然阻碍着女孩—同时还有男孩。令人高兴的是，化解这些偏见—至少在学校里面，要比扭转持续了几个世纪的父权制容易的多。

Educational results still seem to support the old idea that male and female intellectual capabilities differ. An analysis by the OECD of PISA tests for 15-year-olds in 60-odd countries turns up some eerily similar patterns. Girls trounce boys in literacy, but boys do better in mathematics. Boys do less homework and are more likely to fail in all subjects. The courses that both sexes choose at university mirror their earlier strengths at school. Women dominate in education, health, arts and humanities; men lead in computing, engineering and physics (see article).

教育的结果似乎还在印证着老观点：男性和女性的智力不同。由OECD筹划的PISA计划测试了60多个国家15岁的青少年，分析显示了一些极其相似的模式。女孩的读写能力要比男孩强的多，但是男孩在数学方面表现比女孩出色。男孩做的功课要少一些，更有可能在所有的科目上都表现得很糟糕。在大学里面，男性和女性都会选择的课程显示了他们早期在学校的能力。在教育，卫生，艺术和人文学科方面，女性占主导地位；在计算，工程和物理学方面，男性占主导地位。

All this might suggest that intellectual differences are hard-wired, with women abler and more assiduous, but men better at the exact sciences. A closer look at the data reveals a new version of Stendhal’s lament: that much ability, both male and female, is wasted because of tenacious stereotypes.

这些也许表明，智力差异确实存在。女性有才能，更勤奋，但是男性在精确科学上更为出色。仔细分析一下数据就会发现Stendhal感叹的另外一个版本：那些有能力的男人和女人都被顽固的刻板印象所埋没了。

One startling fact uncovered by the OECD number-crunchers is that, when teachers mark a reading test without knowing who took it, the gender gap shrinks by a third. Most of the world’s teachers are now women, who find it easier to spot ability when it appears in their own likeness. They give better marks, perhaps unconsciously, to the punctual, orderly and neat: fine qualities that society associates with girls, but which are not the same as reading and understanding a text. Poor grades damage motivation and mean that pupils are put in lower ability groups, so that biased assessments turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. Falling behind in literacy, as boys disproportionately do, is particularly worrying, since reading is needed to learn anything else. The solution is simple: whenever possible, school tests should be made anonymous.
OECD数据统计发现的一个令人吃惊的事实是：当一位老师批改阅读测验的时候，如果不知道是谁的，那么性别造成的成绩差距会缩小三分之一。目前，世界上大多数老师都是女性，她们更容易发现与自己相似的能力。也许是无意识的，她们给那些守时，有序，整洁的孩子更好的分数。这些品质都是跟女孩相关的好的社会品质，但是跟阅读和理解一篇文章是不一样的。成绩不好会打击积极性同时意味着把孩子放在能力较低的群体里面，因此，这种偏颇的评估变成了自我实现的预言。在读写能力方面，男孩大大落后尤其令人担忧，因为阅读是学习其他任何东西所必须的。解决方法很简单：只要有可能，学校的测试应该匿名处理。

Sometimes it makes sense to go with the grain. Young boys are more likely to read when the topic is zombies or superheroes; older ones prefer newspapers or comic books. So make them all available. More often stereotypes get in the way: if girls believe they cannot do sums and boys think that books are sissy, neither will do as well as they could. Pupils live down to low expectations or pick up subtle cues about gender differences. In maths, for instance, when female teenagers are asked how confident they feel about solving an abstract equation, they rate their chances almost as highly as boys. But when the question involves calculating a car’s fuel efficiency, many balk.
有时候，“粮食”是很重要的。小男孩更喜欢阅读有关僵尸或超级英雄的故事，年纪大一点的偏向报纸和漫画书。所以要让他们都可以接触到他们感兴趣的东西。有时候，成见会从中作梗，如果女孩认为她们不会数学，男孩认为书是娘娘腔才读的，那么他们都不能达到他们该有的水平。小学生忘掉低预期或者拾取关于性别差异的细微线索。比如说，在数学上，当年轻的女孩被询问有没有信心解决抽象方程时，她们几乎与男生一样自信。但是如果这个问题涉及到计算汽车的燃油效率时，许多女生就畏缩不前了。

Easy on the carburettors
The most encouraging finding is that gender gaps can be narrowed as attainment rises across the board. Even more important than rooting out hidden bias is improving education for all. Boys in countries with the best schools read better than girls elsewhere. In Shanghai hardly any youngsters, of either sex, fail in everything, and girls are almost as good at maths as their male classmates—and far ahead of boys elsewhere. Had there been a Mrs Stendhal, she would have smiled.

加一个“化油器”是很简单的
最令人振奋的发现是：当成就达到一定程度时，性别差异可以被缩小。比铲除隐藏的偏见更重要的是提高教育水平。那些拥有最好学校的国家的男孩比别的地方的女孩在阅读能力上要好。在上海几乎没有任何青少年，不论男女，在所有的科目上都很糟糕，女孩的数学跟她们的男同学相比几乎一样好。

注：

  1. STENDHAL:司汤达(1783~1842),十九世纪法国杰出的批判现实主义作家,代表作有《红与黑》，《巴马修道院》等。
  2. OECD：经济合作与发展组织（Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ），简称经合组织（OECD），是由35个市场经济国家组成的政府间国际经济组织，旨在共同应对全球化带来的经济、社会和政府治理等方面的挑战，并把握全球化带来的机遇。成立于1961年，目前成员国总数35个，总部设在巴黎。
  3. PISA：国际学生能力评估计划，由OECD筹划，针对全世界15岁学生学习水平的测试计划，最早开始于2000年，每三年进行一次，旨在发展教育方法与成果。