More boys are among top performers, girls get more intermediate results. The Pisa Study (Program for International Student Assessment of the OECD) shows major gender sex differences in almost all countries. Why is this so?

Pisa results: Boys perform better than girls (German) reports German News Magazine "Der Spiegel"

In the new Pisa Test, boys achieve top results more frequently then girls. This is not valid only for Germany, but for almost all 44 participating countries.

If males have an advantage in anything, our feminist society feels compelled to fix this inequality.

"We must analyze, if we give boys and girls equal incentive for top performance", says Franceso Avvisati, one of the authors of the study.

Of course, inborn sex differences must not exist, by Political correctness dogma. There must be other reasons.

Among the best performing 15 year old Germans there are significantly more boys (60%) then girls (40%). In almost all participating countries, more boys then girls are top performers. Among the weakest students boys and girls are equally distributed. In general boys’ results show more variance, while girls tend to be more average performers. Study Author Avisati has seen this before, in earlier Pisa Studies about math and reading competency.

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Different in countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, societies where men and women are quite equal: here equal numbers of girls and boys were found among the top performers. Avvisati presumes, that teachers have equal expectations of boys and girls, that they motivate girls differently

We dare to suggest the opposite, that in these countries’ feminized school system boys are disadvantaged and de-motivated.

As usual, Der Spiegel’s comments are uncensored by PC and much more interesting then the original article.

Boys continue to outperform girls in maths, despite attempts to close the gap, according to a study from the University of Leeds and the University of Missouri. Significantly, the gap is largest at the higher end of the academic scale; twice as many boys than girls are in the top 1% of maths students across the globe.

Sex differences in mental test scores, variability, and numbers of high-scoring individuals. Hedges LV, Nowell A. Science. 1995 Jul 7;269(5220).

From the abstract: "…the test scores of males consistently have larger variance"

In the EEA, most females had offspring, but only the top 40% of males. Thus males have a higher risk strategy to risk all to be in the top. Men are consistently among the best, and among the worst.

Men are top performers in tennis, chess, snooker, darts, and yes, cooking.

The findings also indicate that wide gaps in achievement between boys and girls in maths are common in more economically developed countries, where considerable efforts are typically being made to promote equality and encourage more girls to engage in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).

Again: no efforts to encourage the best and brightest to become better.

The gap in achievement in maths in the UK is one of the widest in the world, along with countries such as the US, the Netherlands and Germany.

The study used data of 1.5 million 15 year olds across 75 countries, and examined the gap between boys’ and girls’ achievement levels in maths and reading from 2000 to 2009.

Co-author of the study, Dr Gijsbert Stoet from the University of Leeds, said: “The maths gender gap continues to exist, with boys continuing to outperform girls at all levels. But what is more striking is the extent of the gap at the top, between the brightest girls compared to the brightest boys. This is where we see the biggest gap in maths, despite recent reports that the gap is closing.

Some hints are in the original PISA report. Of course, with efforts the data can be extracted and verified in the original reports.

The report also reveals worrying gender differences in students’ attitudes towards mathematics: even when girls perform as well as boys in mathematics, they report less perseverance, less motivation to learn mathematics, less belief in their own mathematics skills, and higher levels of anxiety about mathematics. While the average girl underperforms in mathematics compared with the average boy, the gender gap in favour of boys is even wider among the highest-achieving students . These findings have serious implications not only for higher education, where young women are already under-represented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields of study, but also later on, when these young women enter the labour market. This confirms the findings of the OECD Gender Strategy, which identifies some of the factors that create – and widen – the gender gap in education, labour and entrepreneurship. Supporting girls’ positive attitudes towards and investment in learning mathematics will go a long way towards narrowing this gap. Pisa 2012 foreword

Supporting top performing boys, of course, could yield even better results, an intellectual elite that could help advance science and mathematics. But if the Best get better, that would be good for society, but bad for equality.

With high levels of youth unemployment, rising inequality, a significant gender gap, and an urgent need to boost growth in many countries, we have no time to lose. The OECD stands ready to support policy makers in this challenging and crucial endeavour. Pisa 2012 foreword

We dare suggest that promoting top performing boys would boost growth, by raising a cutting edge scientific and Engineering elite. Oh, maybe if all are equally mediocre, there will be more equality and thus there will be more growth /sarcasm!

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