Girls are overrepresented in gifted programs - Building Gender Balanced Business

What’s the situation?

• Throughout New York City’s school system, there is an important disparity between the number of boys and the number of girls in gifted classrooms.

• 51% of the city’s student body is male but girls are overrepresented among those students qualified as gifted.

• In 2009-2010, 56% of gifted kindergartners are girls and in 2008-2009, the number was only one percentage point lower.

• The National Academy of Sciences released a study in 2002 that concluded that boys were “overrepresented in programs for learning disabilities, mental retardation and emotional disturbance, and slightly underrepresented in gifted programs.”

• It is understood that girls outperform boys when it comes to high school graduation rates and college enrollment, but it comes as quite a surprise that the discrepancy between boys and girls appears at such an early age.

Are there any explanations?

• There is no definitive explanation for this phenomenon, but a number of hypotheses have been emitted.

• Girls tend to mature, verbally and socially, much quicker than boys.

• These are the skills required by the admissions tests which naturally end up favoring the young girls.

• The admissions tests revolve around two separate tests which respectively account for 25 and 75% of the final result.

• The test with the larger coefficient is considered more verbal than other tests, which might advantage the girls.

• The admissions tests were standardized in 2008. Before that, individual schools could construct their own tests which often resulted in an effort to gender balance the incoming classes.

• Over the past five years, the number of girls in gifted programs has been steadily rising.

What does the imbalance reveal?

• Above all else, the disparity between girls and boys confirms the notion that the two sexes are different.

• The tests favor the girls and lead to the lack of gender balance in the classrooms because they focus on verbal and social skills.

• The boys seem to be better at thinking spatially and mathematically, focusing on active play and hands-on activities.

• A teacher stated that she saw no clear differences between the achievements of the two sexes.

It is time to recognize the differences between boys and girls so as to play to the respective strengths of both sexes.

The New York Times