This is New?
The New York Times relates how women are doing better than men in college courses, at least in terms of grades. [Link] Of course, it then follows that they are doing better at those things that grades determine, like scholarships and starting salaries in highly structured organizations.
At the risk of being pilloried as genderist or sexist or even ageist, I feel the need to comment, at least anecdotally.
As I recall, women made better grades than men when I was an undergraduate.
While I worried about grades in all of my classes, I mentally divided them into two categories: those that were important and those that weren’t important. The important courses were in math, physics, and chemistry. The unimportant courses were everything else.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy some of the unimportant courses, nor that I didn’t have to work hard in some of them, just that I was willing to settle for a “B” with less fight than in an important course.
With a few notable exceptions, women got the best grades in the unimportant courses. Those exceptions included things like new world archaeology, which I thoroughly enjoyed despite its then irrelevance. You have to remember this was in the days when women, especially respectable Southron women, weren’t seen in public without hose and girdle. And you can dig in the dirt, even a practice dig, in girdle and hose.
In fact, there weren’t many women in the important courses. Not sure why, but part of it was the girdle and hose thing.
Of course, there were women in the important introductory classes, but they didn’t seem to find them important. Maths wasn’t very interesting evidently, although I do know anecdotally that some of the maths instructors were anti-female in those days. I recall women doing well in introductory chemistry, in large part because they were more exacting in lab, but the opposite was the case in introductory physics. I can recall being assigned two women as lab partners in introductory physics so “they don’t have to climb and bend.” So I got to do the boy stuff with the equipment and they did the girl stuff of taking data and writing reports.
Not fair! I hate data taking to this day and have had to work hard to perfect my writing skills (which have a LONG way to go.) (And I almost got expelled over those two ladies.)
Anyway, as I progressed to the higher courses, the demographics changed. By the time I had gone through calculus and was into differential equations, there were few women in the class. By the time I took complex variables and tensor analysis as a senior, there were none.
Chemistry lasted a bit longer. Organic Chemistry had a lot of women and they made the best grades but in Physical Chemistry there was only one woman and she was a Chemical Engineering major. And she hated lab.
Physics was the most abrupt. After introductory (freshman) physics, there were no women. There were a few when I got to grad school, but I never had any classes with them.
But in the classes I had with women, they definitely made better grades than the men, in the mean.
