Clues About the Gender Gap

The growing gender gap in college enrollments and outcomes is a vexing problem, and no single, simple explanation or potential solution exists. But a new survey of incoming freshmen suggests that those concerned about the college performance of men might focus their attention on getting high-school boys to turn off their Play Station 3’s and hit the books.

Related stories
A Warning on Measuring Learning Outcomes, Jan. 26
Seeking a New Skills Revolution, Dec. 15
Coming Back for More, July 7
Up, Up and Away, Feb. 14, 2006
Graduated but Not Literate, Dec. 16, 2005
E-mail
Print
“The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report,” a survey of nearly 100,000 incoming freshmen at 292 public and private two- and four-year colleges, finds that men and women share high expectations for getting a degree, “no matter what obstacles get in my way.” But male students at the same time report coming into college with far less ambitious intellectual interests and sharply lesser study habits than their female counterparts. Even so, male students in general express greater confidence in their academic abilities than do female students.

The report by Noel-Levitz, which consults with colleges on admissions, financial aid and retention issues, is based on a written survey of incoming students during summer orientation courses or their initial weeks on campus last fall.

The survey found that students of both genders come into college with lofty goals and expectations for what they will accomplish while there, as seen in the following table:

All Students
Male Students
Female Students

Strong desire
to continue
education
94.6%
92.6%
96.2%

Very strongly
dedicated to
finishing degree
93.6
91.7
95.1

Deeply committed to educational goals; prepared to sacrifice to achieve them
88.8
85.3
91.6

Male students’ ambitions are in the same ballpark as those of female students. But the gap between the two genders is much wider in areas that would indicate the students’ likelihood of actually accomplishing their goals. Female students are much likelier than men to say that they like reading and books:

All Students
Male Students
Female Students

Books have broadened my horizons
57.1%
49.5%
63.1%

Get great satisfaction from reading
46.7
37.8
53.7

Books have never excited me
39.6
48.1
32.9

Women are also much more likely than their male counterparts to describe themselves as having study habits that are conducive to academic success:

All Students
Male Students
Female Students

Take careful notes and review thoroughly before test
59.5%
47.4%
69.0%

Study hard for all courses (even those I dislike)
57.9
49.8
64.4

Studying is irregular and unpredictable
32.9
38.9
28.2

Although those answers would appear to make women more poised for success at the college level, male students in general seem to start college with more confidence in their abilities than female students have, particularly in math and the sciences. For instance, 53.4 percent of male students surveyed said they have “a very good grasp of the scientific ideas I’ve studied in school,” compared to 42.4 percent of female students. And 42.2 percent of women said that “math has always been a challenge for me,” compared to 35.2 percent of men.

None of the science numbers are likely to hearten educators who work in those fields, however. Fewer than 40 percent of all students said that they enjoy the challenge of trying to solve complex math problems and that they have a “very good understanding” of general biology, including cell structure and genetics.

Beyond the questions and answers on academic goals and preparation, the Noel-Levitz survey includes data, broken down by institution type as well as gender, on career goals, family emotional support, financial security, and receptivity to academic and other kinds of counseling, among other topics.

Among the findings:

Nearly 45 percent of students at two-year institutions said they planned to work more than 20 hours a week, compared to nearly 27 percent of students entering four-year private colleges and 19 percent of those at four-year public institutions.

Almost four in five students said they had already found a potential career that attracts them.

Fewer than half said they had the financial resources that they need to finish college.

— Doug Lederman

Comments
Nothing New
I’m 55, and this isn’t exactly news in the USA. In the old days it was playing cards and watching TV. The girls have always studied harder and been more likely to want to go to college.

Craig C, political pundit at http://blogresponder.blogspot.com, at 6:55 am EST on January 15, 2007
Very interesting report.

Thanks to IHE for calling it to our attention.

math prof, at 7:06 am EST on January 15, 2007
Since men continue to outnumber women in math and science classes, and in faculty hiring, and in top positions in business and academia, perhaps the lesson from this is that girls are doing it wrong. We should be advising girls to give up books and go develop their social skills.

Bewildered, at 9:30 am EST on January 15, 2007
Canada
While anecdotal, my son who is a freshman at a Canadian university, reports the same phenomenon there.

Patrick Mattimore, Teacher, at 9:30 am EST on January 15, 2007
To Bewildered:
To suggest that social skills should prevail over intellect in business and academe supports an ideal that evoked the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Such a statement by “Bewildered” is disconcerting in that the men who are the majority in those areas support the “good ole boys” and behave in such ways that oppress other groups in society. This ideal completely negates our human capacity to place intellect over emotion, and it negates the core suggestion in the article that male students should start working harder and taking their ability to study seriously.

Puzzled, at 10:30 am EST on January 15, 2007
I’m with bewildered. Clearly the vexing problem for women is level of confidence. They clearly perform at high levels yet men continue to dominate in these very fields. It’s maddening.

Bewildered as well, at 11:10 am EST on January 15, 2007
Maybe the boys are on to something
Perhaps the boys intuit that they will get ahead whether or not they study: the work world is still sexist, after all.

Lucretia, at 11:10 am EST on January 15, 2007
Are you suggesting that the reason that there are more men than women hired at top universities is because women are in some way discriminated against? Thus, that a male graduate student applying for an academic job is more likely to get the job than an equally talented female student? Such an assumption, though certainly politically correct, is totally at odds with everything I have ever witnessed in the academic job market. Typically a woman job candidate will be much more likely to get job offers than her male counterpart. I have seen similar things in hiring at institutions like the IMF in Washington D.C. You might seriously consider an alternative explanation for gender differences in academics.

To puzzled and bewildered, at 11:10 am EST on January 15, 2007
What about boys and games?
The author’s suggestion that the gender gap could be improved by “getting high-school boys to turn off their Play Station 3’s and hit the books” hits home! It’s true that boys spend far more time playing video games, massive multiplayer online role-playing games and looking at online pornography than girls do. Yet this survey’s only questions about recreational time were related to “sociability” — questions about time spent at social gatherings. Anyone know of research that looks at the relationship between GPA, school persistence and gender differences in gaming and online habits??

Linda, at 12:00 pm EST on January 15, 2007
Ignore the gender differences for a minute and focus on the big picture. 9 out of 10 students (male & female) EXPRESS great ambition towards obtaining a college degree, yet only half (very roughly) of these same students describe traits that indicate that they actually have a history of making the sacrifices required to obtain a MEANINGFUL education (note: big difference between a degree and an education).

Mike, at 1:30 pm EST on January 15, 2007
maybe it’s a different problem
As a former teacher (mid-school level) I would suggest that boys who spend 60-80% of their free time playing video games have very little trouble maintaining a good GPA in high school. This may lead them to assume college will be as free of effort....

viejita del oeste, at 3:15 pm EST on January 15, 2007
Does anyone have the guts
... perform a similar analysis comparing the study habits of students from different racial groups?

Max Planck, at 3:15 pm EST on January 15, 2007
gender discrimination in hiring
to “To puzzled and bewildered,"actually there is a considerable amount of research demonstrating that women face many social obstacles (discrimination) in getting academic jobs in the sciences. When I return to my campus later this week I can post a few sources if you need. The problems start with inequality of treatment in classes, also include unequal support from advisors and mentors when seeking jobs — a key issue — and continue through unequal treatment in tenture decisions. Yes, many depts actively seek out qualified women applicants to even out their imbalance. But while that does mean that there is usually a gender imbalance already, it doesn’t mean that all candidates are judged on the same criteria.

hl, at 4:45 pm EST on January 15, 2007
To Bewildered
I really have nothing nice to say, so I will keep this short. The article was about how men are not showing themselves as committed individuals in the educational setting. I am not sure exactly what article you were reading. Men are getting paid more then women and have higher positions, because since the beginning men thought that women should be seen and not heard. Well times are changing my friend. This article goes to show that women are gaining their self respect and know what their self worth is, I say that it is high time. I am not attending a University to upgrade my social skills, I am attending to upgrade every skill that I know that I already possess. GIRLPOWER!!!

Brandy, student at Indiana State University, at 9:00 pm EST on January 15, 2007
re: Brandy
It is only a matter a time before females overtake males in salaries. This is because males, with less education, will have to rely on more low-wage, low-skill occupations — ones that are increasingly being outscored, offshored, and lost to productivity gains — while females armed with degrees and high-skill levels will have no problem finding high paying jobs. You go girl.

(A major exception, of course, will be university faculty, where income disparities by gender will continue and not slow down. Changes in income structures will require major restructuring and faculty are notoriously resistant — even hostile — towards innovation and change. They will immediately oppose any move towards progressive thought and action; see stories related to the U of I’s recent on-line university for evidence).

PS, at 11:20 pm EST on January 15, 2007
To Brandy and ‘PS’
Ladies,Ockham once enjoined us to pursue (ideally) the simplest explanation for phenomena. I suggest you apply this maxim to the phenomenon in question and, instead of invoking some sort of nonexistent male prejudice in hiring (men, after all, delight in hiring women, especially those of above-average aesthetic appeal) you simply face the very apparent fact that, between the sexes, men naturally possess the greater number of highly intelligent individuals. Indeed, as this article clearly implies, for all the studying females do, they ought to be as successful or more successful than their male counterparts. But, as is obvious, they aren’t, even when reverse discrimination against male hiring is taken into consideration. In sum, what we have here is, plainly, a distinction in IQ spread: though males and females have comparable IQ’s on average, individual female cases tend to center around the average, whereas individual male cases cluster much more at the high (genius) and low (stupid) ends of the IQ spectrum. Therefore, though females can console themselves with the knowledge that males disproportionately contribute to the world’s ranks of stupidity, they must also face the harsh truth that theirs is not a sex which tends to produce genius.

Goethe, Herr, at 4:30 am EST on January 16, 2007
Gender Gap
Some professional women still believe that women must work twice as hard as men to make half as much in income. What a sad attitude! The numbers still bear out an income gap across the genders. Let’s hope those attitudes and habits don’t begin in high school and college, even today!

Jill Fox Bernaciak, Education Consultant at What’s Your Major?, at 6:20 am EST on January 16, 2007
response to the response to puzzeled and bewildered
So,,, if women are getting all the jobs why when I look around at academia and the administration of academia and all the big businesses is it ALL men??? Yes it is politically correct and unfortunatly the truth,,, we discriminate against women.

Red

Red Taylor, BYUI, at 1:01 pm EST on January 16, 2007
Occam’s ravor
Did ‘Goethe’ actually just suggest that the fact that men will prefer to hire women for their looks means that there *isn’t* gender discrimination in employment?As for the implied suggestion that men have more and better science jobs because all of those engineers come from the highest IQ spectrum, I suggest that you are not giving the empirical measurement its due.

impressed, at 2:16 pm EST on January 16, 2007
‘impressed’, My suggestion was not that gender discimination is non-existent, but rather that there exists no significant male aversion toward hiring women qua women, mainly due to the fact that women with much to be desired in terms of intellectual ability can compensate through aesthetic appeal. With respect to your comment that my statements concerning IQ disparity between the sexes rest on misinterpreted empirical measurement, I can only refer you to Paul Irwing’s recent study on male/female IQ variance, presented in the British Journal of Psychology in late 2005, and concluding that “[a]t scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman” (Observer).

Goethe, Herr, at 5:20 pm EST on January 16, 2007
Biology is destiny.
Until men begin to carry their share of the responsibilities of raising children and maintaining households, women will continue to find that biology is destiny. Housework, cooking, shopping, washing dishes, changing diapers, caring for sick children, and making holidays and birthdays special may be fulfilling activities for some people, but they most certainly do not foster genius.

le, UNM, Executive Project Director at Univ of NM Health Sciences Center, at 7:05 pm EST on January 16, 2007
Men want money, women want fulfillment
One way to explain the data would be to suggest that the boys that are undecided what they want to do in life are more likely to choose a major in university that will get them the most money when they get out. Girls may be more likely to choose something that is the most interesting — and for most people in general mathematics isn’t that interesting. However mathematics allows more leeway in group work or outright copying than English, for example, and generally have no seminars that require preparation. It’s no surprise when two students get the exact same answer in math, but it is when they are writing an essay. One way to even the wage gap is to convince girls to do what boys do: study something you are not interested in to get a job that you hate so you have enough disposable income to do the things you do enjoy.

Mark, at 5:45 am EST on January 18, 2007
IQ
Goethe, I still take issue with the idea that hiring women of lesser talent, for their looks, is not a massive and damaging form of discrimination, particularly against the older, more talented and accomplished women who are not taken seriously.But let me clarify my other statement. Assuming that men have more extreme iq scores at both ends, and that therefore the highest iqs in the world are mostly men, that still only has anything to do with this case if we assume that the male majority in academic jobs is caused by universities hiring significant numbers of people in the highest iq range. I strongly suspect that (1) there just aren’t enough extreme cases to skew the hiring patterns; (2) the truely extreme cases might not be our colleagues in our depts; and (3) there is unlikely to be a significant iq difference between the working men and working women in our fields. I.e., the IQ argument is a red herring. When we have job searches, we get a great many applications from qualified candidates of all genders. Most of those hired are men, but not men who stand out as massively more qualified than the women. Simply qualified candidates, who are male.

impressed, at 12:05 pm EST on January 18, 2007
Last call
‘impressed’,I never said that the privileged hiring of especially attractive women was not a damaging form of discrimination. It is indeed damaging— to those who are more qualified, male or female.

With respect to your other comments, I remain unconvinced that IQ has no effect on the acquisition of and success in the more competitive educational institutions and businesses, despite what you have to say about the apparent comparability of male and female curriculum vitae in your particular place of work.

Goethe, Herr, at 5:05 pm EST on January 19, 2007
It is time to support our boys in K-12th grade to study and drop the play stations. And for bewildered and all out there who feel women are suject to institutional discrimination in our society, check out the stats for women admitted to medical school, law school, veterinary school, and the number of women in colleges across the nation. There are more women admitted then men in each case and this has been the case for a good number of years. Be careful what you wish for — the number of women binge drinkers, alcoholics and women in prison is also equally on the rise.

Rosalind, at 9:00 pm EST on January 23, 2007