Irish Times Poll: Are girls more intelligent than boys?

segadreamcast

This thread stinks of amateur senior debating and, worse still, amateur melodrama in some parts - give it a rest.

:Keith:

If you want my opinion, articles like this are only put in newspapers to stir up debate and it's doing so. The title of the article may be phrased incorrectly in relation to the context of the article and I think it can be viewed in numerous ways for example, it's raising the fact that statistically that girls are outclassing boys academically in the leaving cert. which is incorrectly seen as a test of intellect by alot of people.

Shrimp

dublindude wrote:

In Ireland, girls do better in school, guys do better in university.

It's just about priorities/focus etc. It has nothing to do with "intelligence".

that prolly goes back to a few generations ago, the way women (most fo them) would not go to college, but stay at home etc.. and guys would go on to Uni

fly_agaric

Some people have said that things level out at university. Of course, that assumes that the boys can actually get through the gates. AFAIK, the male/female ratio in Irish universities has been falling for a while. I think its ~ 40/60 in TCD. Engineering/Physics/Computing are the exceptions to the rule and there are constant complaints about that.
Take law for example...
Even this report by Ivana Bacik on Women in Law can't hide the facts behind the rhetoric about "old boys clubs" etc.

http://www.tcd.ie/Law/WomeninLaw.html

"It was found that two-thirds of all full-time undergraduate enrolments in Law at university nationally (66%) are now female."

The situation in teaching is well known too (another one the media like to bang on about).

edit.. I'm no so sure that things change in university either. Just generalising ridiculously from limited personal experience, the women still seem to be the ones with their heads screwed on who go to lectures and tutorials and study hard. The fellahs, well

defiantshrimp

Basically girls mature a lot faster than guys do and have that moment of epiphany that says to them that “damn, I better work at this if I want to go to university” much earlier than guys. That is not to say that all guys are less mature than girls during teenage years but that is the general trend. I had the (dis)pleasure of going to a boys school for the past 6 years and the immaturity of some of my classmates right up to the day we graduated before the leaving cert was shocking. I couldn’t find anything similar in any of the girls schools I had friends in.

I’m not sure if girls could be called smarter than guys but since a big part of any achievement is plain effort and motivation it is easy to see why they do better than guys in general. I know the statistics from IQ tests show that boys tend to have both more exceptionally brilliant and poor individuals in mathematical ability than girls who tend to have less variation, but the average ability is the same. There is just a greater standard deviation with guys. So you’d expect there to be more exceptional male mathematical minds than females but also more males than females with very poor mathematical ability. But beyond that I don’t know much. IMO guys are more overtly competitive (again in general) than girls but from my experience they don’t tend to compete on academics. In fact there seems to be this kind of idea that the less study one does the cooler you are among certain social groups. But that is really just immaturity.

Kate_17

LC DOES involve intelligence... people can work very hard and memorise everything but not get the top points, as I have seen this year - is this not proof? In groups like science subjects, there is perhaps a lot more memorising than there should be. But what about languages? Maths and Applied Maths, where you test your applications? Practical subjects, like Construction, Art or Music for example, where you show your abilities practically and also evaluate? Orals? ETC. Every subject has learning and applications. Hell, if it was all about memorising the results would be a lot better than they are. You need that bit of intelligence to go the full way.

DingChavez

I could have eaisly got top marks when I did the LC, if I worked months at it. But I couldn't be arsed as my first choice only needed 320 points. Does that make me unintelligent? I wasn't a bit stressed doing the leaving cert. Some people get way too worked up. It's not the end of the world..... it'll be there next year if you don't get enough points.

Kate_17

Ding, I am not saying that people who don't work or don't get 9A1's or whatever are unintelligent, I am saying that for high-points courses in particular, memorising alone won't work, you also need intelligence. You are right in what you say though, the LC is what you make of it yourself and whether you work or not is your own choice, as long as you'll be happy with what you get.

the smiley one

Kate_17 wrote:

LC DOES involve intelligence... people can work very hard and memorise everything but not get the top points, as I have seen this year - is this not proof? In groups like science subjects, there is perhaps a lot more memorising than there should be. But what about languages? Maths and Applied Maths, where you test your applications? Practical subjects, like Construction, Art or Music for example, where you show your abilities practically and also evaluate? Orals? ETC. Every subject has learning and applications. Hell, if it was all about memorising the results would be a lot better than they are. You need that bit of intelligence to go the full way.

hmmm...I dunno, a lot of hard work really can go a long way imo. Maths and Applied maths can be mastered by doing every past/sample/mock paper available. People who aren't naturally talented at art, music, construction studies etc. tend not to go for those type of subjects. Also a large part of orals can be learnt off- scary but true.
I think the secret lies in how much effort it takes for you to memorise the stuff.....that's where the intelligence comes in.

nobodythere

EamonnKeane wrote:

Yes, because in our society a woman does no wrong. She is not responsible for her actions. A pregnant 12-year-old was made to have sex by peer pressure and the media. A bulimic shoves her fingers down her gullet three times a day because of glossy magazines. A East European hooker was forced into the job by evil men who exploit her, it has nothing to do with her being able to make €200 an hour turning tricks for Irishmen compared to €40 back in Latvia.

This is not what I was saying at all. I actually don't see how you got that from my comment. I mean the teachers tell us all just how big a deal the LC is at the start of the year and girls tend to take it more to heart. First the MedHeads flip out and go into overdrive, and the rest of them go "OH **** THE LEAVING CERT THE LEAVVVVVING CERT!!!!". The importance of the exam appears to be dictated more by how important their fellow students think it is. This is just my personal experience - I do not know one girl who has not cried because of the leaving cert.

In my experience, more lads handle it rationally and do the reasoning independantly - i.e. when the MedHeads were flipping out I was thinking "right Arts is 400 - that's a C1 on average per subject - no need to flip". We kind of know it's not the end of the world.

I am not saying that this applies to everyone but it's a contributing factor to why girls do better. It's also true that they're more "mature", if by that you mean their ability to consider the long-term consequences over the immediate ones are generally better than lads.

D-Generate

Going off on a tangent here in relation to males and females attending university. It has already been said that there is now a greater attendance of females in university than males in all but the science faculties. However recently there has been a massive drive in promotion of positive discrimination in favour of women in these faculties.

As a case study we will examine UCC who have the ever popular (for females) "Women in Science" project. This involves organising trips and tours of the engineering and science faculties by UCC staff. This invitation is offered to all the female schools and the females in mixed schools in the Cork region. It has been applauded for being very informative and for increasing the numbers of females in these areas over the past couple of years but is it really that fair? Boys schools such as my own and perhaps worse so, boys in mixed schools, were not offered such opportunities to get to know what a course will entail other than reading the CAO handbook. The Guidance Counsellor in my school went well out of her way in organising such tours for our benefit but many schools do not have teachers with the same amount of dedications so what happens to them?
Do they get guided tours of faculties where women outnumber men by a substantial margin? Commerce for Men? Men in Medicine perhaps? Fortunately this is not the case because if they were to do so I (aswell as feminist pressure groups) would consider it sexit. Surely the characters in the Engineering faculty who pride themselves in being so logical consider this blatent discrimination against males to be inequality to the nth degree? Just because it is in favour of females does not make it fair.

Now back to the Leaving Cert. I think as we can see from the many studies in to how males and females brains work that men have a leaning towards so called Logic and Spatial subjects where as women prove much better at Creativity and Languages and subjects involving heavy absorption of reading matierial. But is the old Leaving Cert fair in accounting for these discrepincies? It is pretty obvious that it is not. Maths based subjects which for many males will be their strongest asset only accounts for two subjects, namely Mathematics and Applied Mathematics.
The latter is unavailable in many schools and it is generally only males schools that offer it. As has already been mentioned, 3 times more males take honours maths than females so there is another substantial fact showing how Maths appeals more to the male brain.
Another popular male subject is Physics. This subject proved to have very low numbers of females taking it with the old course but with the introduction of the new syllabus they took much of the maths sections off the course and increased the theory and in corrospondence wiht this female numbers rose sharply in it.
Chemistry too had a course change to make it more accesable to females and again much maths was taken off the course and replaced by theory. It is the second most popular science in general.
The most popular science is Biology, it is also the clear leader in most popular science by females. This is a heavily based theory subject with much learning and little to no maths.
The only other really number based subject other than teh ones mentioned above is Accounting and as anyone who can attest to taking the exam this year there was very little to none calculator work and incredible amounts of theory questions in comparrisson to other years.

It is hardly fair on males to take away their advantage in maths and logic based courses when there is already a disproportionate amount of theory and language based subjects. At the moment there are only 2 proper maths subjects but there are over 9 languages. To further punish males by diluting the maths part of subjects is highly sexist and just not contributing to a fair system.
I took all the available maths based subjects in my school that i could. Maths, Applied Maths, Chemistry and Physics. In each of these subjects I received an A1 but i was punished heavily by the languages. I was awarded a B3 in English and a C1 in German.
Am I thick because i'm poor in languages? I don't really think so, I and the general male brain just have an intelligence that is not fairly awarded in the current system of theory over logic and with the current trend it looks like we won't ever be.