[ac1294]

As someone who has been in school for his entire life, I've always noticed that the average girl typically outperforms the average male in my classes. But it seems like the distribution of males was much wider.

For example, if each gender's academic capabilities were normally distributed, then I would expect the mean for girls to be higher than the mean for boys, but the variance for boys to be larger than the variance for girls. I say this because I tend to see many boys at the very bottom of my classes, but also at the very top.

Of course this is all based on my experiences in school, and I have no data to back this up. But I'd be interested in seeing distributions of academic performance for each gender.

[jimbokun]

Careful, Larry Summers got fired for saying that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_be...

[Issac]

I have to agree to this , i have to mention that i am just now in my last semester for my bachelor , and my school life is now only about 2 years in the past and I am from Germany so may be still different from the experiences in other countrys. What I recall is that most of the time the absolut top performers have been men and not woman , but contrary to this I dont really recall many woman being at the bottom of the class in any subject. This effect i woud say was because most of the girls did almost all assignments and maybe tried to not leave the given path in a way, but also did not try to stand out that much so they were willing to work more for school. While the boys generally were good in some subjekt and focused on their strengths but we were not as willing to pull up our efforts in those subjects we thought of as not really needed for our future.

I really can relate with this I since I myself was really strong in all science and math related subjects as well as in english and art... but regarding languages like latin i did fail , sometimes even handing in a completly white paper, since i could choose which subjekts were going to count in my Abitur ( think of it as A levels ).

[marrs]

Just trying to think back to my schooling... I went to a mixed secondary school and I think there the girls generally outperformed the boys at all levels. I went to a different school at 6th form and there I think the best achievers were mostly boys, but they all came from the local boys-only school.

I think that it is true statistically that boys perform better if they go to a boys-only school. I don't remember if the same is true for girls or not.

[stared]

A good essay on this phenomenon: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm. In short, evolutionary biology; variance of number of children in men is much higher and it makes sense to take risk (both in terms of genes and behaviour).

[pokpokpok]

I think this is a misnomer, in my experience boys just telegraph their academic ability more than girls do.

[mbrameld]

Is misnomer the right word in that context?

[vampirechicken]

Are you saying that misnomer might be a misnomer?

[Dewie]

A greater variance among men is a widely-noted phenomena. But by all means, keep selling the narcissism[1]-line if it's more soothing to you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153685

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Lots of widely-noted phenomena do not stand up to actual evidence. (http://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rtx1...)

[sanxiyn]

Thank you for a great reference. It seems to me that Figure 1B (girls' versus boys' variance scatter plot) clearly shows greater variance for boys.

[dang]

> But by all means, keep selling the narcissism[1]-line if it's more soothing to you.

No personal jabs, please. This comment would be much better without the second sentence.

[Dewie]

It's a personal subject to me. I take it personally when men/boys keep being painted as being self-absorbed, lazy and incompetent (or one of them).

Maybe I shouldn't.

[dang]

We all have our sore spots, and one can't always stop feeling something simply by deciding one shouldn't. So that expectation might be too high. One can, though, be aware of them and stop oneself from responding reflexively when they come up. (Or, more easily, edit the defensiveness out of one's comments after writing them.)

The quantity and range of posts to HN—plus the fact that there's one big site/community and not a bunch of little siloed ones—guarantee that whatever buttons you have will eventually get pushed here, just like any exposed spot will eventually get wet in a rainstorm. This isn't personal; it's a statistical process. But we're not hard-wired to experience statistical processes, so unless one is careful, it feels like one is dealing with a person—usually an annoying adversary with demonic powers to drive one crazy. I think this is why people often post comments personifying "HN". We each have a different imaginary arch-enemy in our heads.

I mention this in the hope that it might be helpful to anyone else who recognizes the pattern. In our case, exposure to it is an occupational hazard, so we've had little choice but to learn about it.