We have all wondered why boys seem to be at least as smart as girls in real life, yet do so badly in school. The usual explanations range from the merely condescending (“The boyz is lazy” ) to the downright hateful( “The boyz is just stoopid, so let them rot,”) but those of us who don’t buy all the female supremacist hogwash have always suspected there may be an anti-boy bias in the marking.
Well, now we can stop conjecturing — a study by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics has just shown that female teachers are giving boys lower marks than they deserve. The study itself was about student perceptions of discrimination, and it found that boys perceived female teachers as giving them lesser marks than merited. This could be put down to paranoia, except that the research backs the boys’ perceptions. Half the classes involved had their paper marked by in-house teachers whoknew who they were dealing with, and the other half by external examiners who had no idea whose work they were assessing. And wouldn’t you know it, the external examiners gave the boys higher marks than the in-house teachers. I’m sorry to say that the reverse is also true, that male teachers tend to be kinder when marking boys than when marking girls and that obviously isn’t cool, but for every male teacher giving the boys more than they deserve there are three or four female teachers giving the girls more than is their due, and you don’t need to be a mathematics genius to figure out which sex is going to suffer more.
There are other factors of course — a culture that tells boys they are morons can’t be helping any, neither can the lack of male role models in front of those blackboards — but this is one factor which is measurable, and in that sense this bad news is also good news – let’s just hope it doesn’t get buried by the feminists and their mates in the mainstream media.
Article in the left-leaning The Independent, which is a nice surprise.
Abstract here
