Pachyderms anyone?
May 18, 2009 | Filed Under The Heartless Bitch Way | 14 Comments
According to this article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, girls are now outnumbering boys in science fairs in Canada. According to the article,
“Five years ago, boys made up 55 per cent of the competitors at the annual Canada-Wide Science Fair, a national competition where youth in grades 7 to 12 compete against other regional representatives. After a steady decline, this year boys are in the minority at 44 per cent. “
Not only that,
“Girls are also claiming the lion’s share of prize money available each year: Eight of the last nine overall winners have been female.”
Time and time again, when girls start to actually excel, and, heaven forefend, surpass boys, there are those who insist that there MUST be a problem with the education system. I’ve heard excuses like “feminization” of the education system, and even,
“Carole Charlebois, executive director of Quebec’s provincial branch of YSC, says she suspects the pendulum has swung too far in the girls’ direction and boys are being left out and left behind. “We’re seeing a real decrease in interest and good marks from the boys.”
Of course, at least a couple of the girls kicking their asses, have a somewhat different theory,
“If I were to say [why] — I know this might sound a bit sexist — but most of the time, the girls are more persistent in the work,” said Ronan Lefol, a Grade 12 student from Saskatoon, who started competing in science fairs in Grade 1 and has gone on to win thousands of dollars in scholarship money.
Megan Hawse, 13, said many of her male peers in Mount Pearl, Nfld., would rather play sports than spend the hours she logged on evenings and weekends for her experiment on whether algae could be a sufficient source of Omega 3 for humans.
Yes, there are now a few scholarships specifically designed to encourage women to go into the sciences, but I doubt that is a barrier to 12-year-old males participating in science fairs.
Far be it for anyone to point out the elephant in the room - could it be, perhaps, rather than an education system that favors girls, and disadvantages boys, it’s just that when the barriers are removed, and girls are actually encouraged to participate in science and math, they actually ARE better at it than the guys?
Wouldn’t THAT be a terrifying thought for the men….
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Oh c’mon. You are a little sexist indeed :P. I don’t think girls or boys are better then hte other at anything. Though it may be cooler for a girl to win a science fair prize, usualy reserved for the boys, then for a guy that wins expectedly or looses to a girl.
when the barriers are removed, and girls are actually encouraged to participate in science and math, they actually ARE better at it than the guys?
I’m a guy and I’d agree with that. The “education system that favors girls” canard is just so much crap, yes. Why would it be biased, especially when math and science are used in so many fields in which people’s lives are at stake? We can’t afford to do anything less than just teach the principles and say may the best people at learning them make the best grades.
Hello HBI,
Firstly I would just like to say that this does not relate specifically to pachyderms but this is a recent post and I could not find another way to email the writer.
I stumbled upon your website today and I would just like to say I am appalled at most of what I am reading. If I have understood correctly that this is a serious site and not a collection of sexist jokes then I think you have a serious problem and really give women today a bad name.
If men voiced opinions like yours but from the male perspective they would be accused of extreme sexism and I have failed to see a blog entry which has not outraged me in some way. I will pick up on ‘”Standards” or “unrealistic expectations”‘ you take a moral high horse and say that race height etc shouldn’t matter which is admirable but you say as a standard that a partner must not have a ‘history of mental illness’, I think this is short sighted, uncompassionate and highly objectionable. Especially as you said ‘history’ i.e. in the past. I could carry on picking out disgusting opinions that, if I have grasped your mentality rightly, you think are acceptable to share because you are a woman?
I do hope you post this e-mail on your site, although I doubt you will have the courage, so that your readers will see they are being sucked into sexist and obnoxious view points and maybe save a few the embarrassment of saying things they have picked up here in public.
Yours, George Rix.
Clearly the therapy hasn’t removed the large stick stuck up your ass, George. You’d probably love the bumper sticker I have that says, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to be stuck with a psycho the rest of your life”.
What makes this piece of hatemail from George particularly funny for me is that there is a “Contact Us” link on the homepage of HBI. Very visible in the “Mail Room” column. That he apparently couldn’t find. One that expressly warns that if you send hatemail, you’re probably going to be publicly mocked for it.
Chalk ol’ Georgie there as someone who Does Not Get It.
As a woman and a scientist, particularly one in which the women in the field outnumber the men (neuroscience), I see it as an encouraging sign that women now realize that they have opportunities that do not involve being barefoot and pregnant and making dinner for Her Man, and are availing themselves of those opportunities.
Do I think we’re necessarily *better* at science and math than the guys? No. But I think we’re *as good as* the guys, and have different ways of looking at the world, which can be beneficial.
Wow. Isn’t it amazing how these “men” are so easily offended by a female who speaks the truth? Earlier today, I was watching a “family” show that ran in the 1970s and a male actor was scripted to say, “You can insult a man’s wife but never his boat.” I guess George is still in the 1970s eh?
I’d wager there is no difference between the sexes when it comes to the ability to achieve sth. in academics. But at least here in Germany there have been studies that show quite clearly that boys get worse grades for the same achievements. I fail to see how the feminists that always claim “everything is in the upbringing” can also claim that this is only the case for one sex: girls an boys are still raised largely different and some of the things that are expected of the behaviour of girls are clearly beneficial in being good in school.
“girls an boys are still raised largely different and some of the things that are expected of the behaviour of girls are clearly beneficial in being good in school.”
There, you said it yourself.
Why are you blaming all of society’s ills on feminists?
Ida, perhaps what David is trying to say is that feminists (as if we are one homogenous lump), think/say that the only differentiator between the sexes is in the upbringing, yet what I posited is that there might be something innately in girls that allows them to learn/be better at this kind of stuff, (thereby cutting me out of David’s League of Evil Feminists, I suppose).
Numerous studies on rhesus monkeys have shown that testosterone *does* have an impact on learning at various stages in development. What I did was throw into the arena a challenge to the long-held misconception that men are innately better than women at math, sciences and abstract thought. This is not to say that I don’t think that culture, society, (i.e. “nurture”) doesn’t play a significant part. I just have a hard time swallowing the rhetoric that the education system is somehow favoring girls and disadvantaging boys any time girls start to surpass boys in traditionally male-dominated areas.
Why does it have to be a competition? If a man wrote a smug, gloating piece about boys outperforming girls in some field, complete with inferences that they must be superior in some way, he’d be instantly blasted from a dozen directions. Yet here it’s “Hooray, female empowerment”? Drop the us vs them attitude and judge people on individual merit.
(For what it’s worth, a few studies seem to show that girls are better equipped to succeed in our current educational system, which rewards long hours of sitting still, being quiet and engaging in repetitious tasks (studying) – as opposed to being active/aggressive, creative and spontaneous).
Johnny, Aside from the fact that things like university entrance ARE highly competitive, and a science fair IS a competition… and that many pundits have long argued that women are ill-suited to sciences+math, since when is a winning science fair project NOT creative?
Ok, first off: Natalie, you rock. This post is dead-on.
I can remember some junior-league MRA that I went to high school with publishing an article in our school newspaper about our school needing ‘a few good men’. “The girls are BEATING us, guys! Step it up!” was the basic gist.
I’m all for stepping up the learning, no matter who you are–but why did girls achieving have to be so villified? Why was it a bad thing? I’d love to go back in time and ask that guy. (Didn’t like him much anyway, now that I think about it. He was kind of pompous.)
George, David and Johnny B, you guys crack me up. You probably think all us feminists live on Summersisle, wearing frowsy shapeless dresses and sacrificing innocent menz to random pagan dieties.
“BITCHES! KILLING ME WON’T BRING BACK YOUR GODDAMN HONEY!”
I’m sorry, Natalie–the Wicker Man reference was too tempting not to use.
First of all I’ve got to say I laughed my ass off when I read this, you will soon understand why…
My name is Ronan, and yes I am the same Ronan quoted in the article.
I was looking around my name on Google and ended up here and figured I should clear a thing up. I am not a girl but a guy ;)
well that’s my word on the subject seeing as how the rest has been cut I don’t believe it is important^^’