Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Boys overrepresented at GT magnet

This is one thing that worries me about the gifted magnet where DD will start in the fall. They are unbalanced WRT gender--it looks to be about 60/40 m/f. Somehow DD has been consistently in situations where boys way outnumber girls since toddlerhood, purely by happenstance, and here we are again. Was wondering if others experienced this, and if so, how it went for their girls.

I was wondering why this would be at the magnet, also. Aren't males and females essentially statistically equivalent WRT IQ? I seem to remember that there are slightly more PG males than females (also more profoundly developmentally delayed males than females), but why would one see a major discrepancy like this in a program that requires "only" 130 IQ to apply? Does this tend to be true of GT programs generally? Could it be that parents of boys think they "need" the magnet school more?

DD is not stereotypically girly--she enjoys math, science, bugs, and dirt, for instance, as well as fairies, butterflies, and drawing--but she hates war play and violence and is not into things like Star Wars and Legos. Her best friend is a boy, but the friendship is getting more and more tenuous as they age. She tends to gravitate to kids who are less wedded to gender-normed interests, generally.

Many GT magnet schools have a math and science focus. Does this one? If so, that could explain it, since there is some evidence that females have relative strength in verbal skills and males have a relative strength in math, including spatial skills.

No, it does not. And the math difference only appears at older ages, IIRC, and is quite small. I'm not sure exactly how this applies at the GT end of the spectrum, however.

Ah, just found something I have bookmarked about this (it's relevant to my job):

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2008/07/24-01.html?ref=hp

"Her team sifted through scores from standardized tests taken in 2005, 2006, and 2007 by nearly 7 million students in 10 states. Overall, the researchers found "no gender difference" in scores among children in grades two through 11. Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests."

Maybe you should just call the school and ask?

Val

You mean, call and ask why there are more boys than girls? I'm much too reserved to do any such thing, TBH. Anyway, they may not know themselves, although I supposed they probably know the gender breakdown re: children who are eligible vs. children who apply, are accepted, and decide to attend.

Interestingly, many other parents have expressed surprise about this imbalance, since their perception is that girls are better students than boys. (Good student not being equivalent to gifted, of course.)

We're all in as far as the school, in any case--no turning back now.

According to 2010 SAT statistical report at http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile-report-cbs.pdf , there were 65,606 males and 38,728 females with math SAT scores >= 700 . That is a large difference, and the male/female ratio is probably larger at higher math SAT thresholds.

For 12-year-olds, a math SAT >= 700 is much more unusual than for students in grades 11-12, and the male/female ratio has been about 4 for the past 20 years http://www.tip.duke.edu/node/945 . So the math difference appears by at least age 12, at least in the right tail.

My off the cuff guess is that a few different things could be going on. One, boys may be more likely to be the squeaky wheel by misbehaving when needs aren't met. Two, boys may be more represented in math which tends to impress the verbal, nonmath oriented people more. There is a clearer path of advancement in math. Three, some parents may an unstated belief that school is more important for boys and getting along is more important for girls.

At any rate to me 60/40 is no big deal and I wouldn't give it another thought. In much of life people won't always be in perfect 50/50 environments. More women than men go to college and at many small liberal arts college especially that plays out to 60% women and 40% men.

I don't think a 60/40 split is anything to worry about. Remember that in any given school, you aren't looking at a very big sample size, population-wise, so it is to be expected that the numbers of kids of each gender might be a bit "lumpy". If the numbers were perfectly balanced, I might suspect that some qualified kids were being denied services or that the cutoffs were being massaged in the name of gender equality, which would worry me a great deal more. I grew up the only girl in a family with five brothers, and most of my friends growing up were boys, and it doesn't appear to have damaged me in any way.

From my reading there is evidence that boys are more likely to be identified than girls, and boys are more likely to show disruptive maladaptive behaviour in the wrong learning enviornment, so it may just be that boys stand out and get selected for the schools more?

Not sure what that means for your decision though, sorry!

on this:


from the Science article:

"Does this greater variability translate into gender differences at the upper tail of the distribution (13)? Data from the state assessments provide information on the percentage of boys and girls scoring above a selective cut point. Results vary by ethnic group. The bottom table on p. 494 shows data for grade 11 for the state of Minnesota. For whites, the ratios of boys: girls scoring above the 95th percentile and 99th percentile are 1.45 and 2.06, respectively, and are similar to predictions from theoretical models. For Asian Americans, ratios are 1.09 and 0.91, respectively. Even at the 99th percentile, the gender ratio favoring males is small for whites and is reversed for Asian Americans. If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women. "

What's your explanation for the very different ratios among Asians? (I am going to guess that it's because Asian families value and recognize math ability in both genders. But I don't know.)

Also:

"In contrast to earlier findings, these very current data provide no evidence of a gender difference favoring males emerging in the high school years; effect sizes for gender differences are uniformly <0.10 for grades 10 and 11 (see table, top left, and table S1)."

The gap has apparently closed dramatically when compared to, say, 20 years ago because girls now are much more likely to take upper level math classes.