11 Comments
Jul 26Liked by K. Liam Smith

Excellent article. Not that I am a follower, but I stumbled on a Dr. Jordan Peterson interview where he predicted, qualitatively, that after most men have left the university, in a few years women will notice and follow suit. Of course that is different from the gender ratio, but a decline in women students propping up these institutions would upset the balance. Not necessarily towards men though, as administrators start screeching "Bring back our girls!" and enact even more women-centric recruitment and retention programs. Thoughts?

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Jul 29Liked by K. Liam Smith

I'd love to see this analysis spread more widely, and have one suggestion to that end. You've shown how the declines are not driven by changes in male learning outcomes. That's a very important part of the story, because it eliminates a lot of possible causes. But I predict that would be the most contested part of your analysis: partly for culture war reasons, but also because most people aren't accustomed to thinking of the PSAT and SAT as demonstrating learning, as such (as opposed to ability, or for some, test prep). I think it's worth making that case more forcefully, with additional (and perhaps different types) of data, if it's out there.

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Excellent write up and walk through. In my high school, we all knew that teachers on subjective test leaned toward the girls (late 70's) but guys faired slightly better on the standardized tests The PSAT and National Merit Scholar ranking (based solely on the PSAT) pretty much matched the schools

gender ratio.

I wonder how this would shake out looking at grad school admissions vs testing outcomes. I'd like to believe that it's less gendered but I just looked at my alma mater's MBA class and nope. Maybe one day we will have enough data to compare transmen vs transwomen.

Again thanks.

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As a clue to one dimension of the grading gap that favors girls, I remember this article from last year "Attractive female students no longer earned higher grades when classes moved online during COVID-19", https://www.psypost.org/2022/11/attractive-female-students-no-longer-earned-higher-grades-when-classes-moved-online-during-covid-19-64251

(They link to the peer-reviewed study in Economic Letters, which is open access.)

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It would be also interesting to break the numbers down on race and analyze it. The Asian gender gap is the smallest. Meanwhile, black women graduate college twice as much as black men! Many black women with college educations that prefer black men end up dating men below their educational caliber because of it. If we forecast the race-and-gender rates, we might even see 3x the number of black women graduates compared to black men.

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