Girls make you stupid, Or: We're never to young to carry the can
So, you know I have this slightly Ben Goldacre thing going on with mainstream media reporting on women's issues, especially their passion for taking the most transparently speculative of evo-psych apologies and running away with them like they're the new Big Bang Theory.
Today's case is a bit special, though. Because you see, while this article in our beloved progressive rag, Teh Grauniad, is imbecilic to the point of comedy, utterly meaningless and essentially free of all actual information except for the following:
"Boys do best with "as few girls as possible" in English lessons at primary and secondary school"
this is a rare case where the reporter (if you can call the illiterate regurgitation of press releases "reporting") has not overstated the misogynistic intent of the study itself.
First of all, let's get something straight; this is not a peer reviewed study in the normal sense of the word. It's a talk being given at an economics conference by a research student and teaching assistant from Bristol U. Not, I think you will agree, the sort of scientific pedigree that you'd normally expect to make it the front page of guardian.co.uk. Here's an example of the depth of this dude's analysis and his general ideas of what is due girls in our education system:
"Proud [said research student] said boys may do worse in English when there is a high proportion of girls in their class because they realise that the girls are better than them. It could also be that teachers use teaching styles more appropriate to girls when there are more girls than boys in the class."
Bear in mind his paper is called "Girl Power? [etc.]" - and the power he thinks girls (as young as seven) have over boys is to maliciously cause educators to use teaching methods that suit their needs, and intimidating their poor beleaguered male peers to the point where their feeble skills can find no expression. Performance anxiety, indeed.
Apparently there is no age at which women are free from the obligation to bolster, nurture and support male privilege and success[1]. With all of the advantages heaped on them from birth, if boys are seen to in any way give ground in the entitlement stakes, that is women's fault. Even seven year old women.
Don't believe me that this dude is looking at how girls harm boys, and not doing some sort of even handed analysis of gender relations in the classroom? Here's a quote from the paper's abstract:
"This paper builds on the work of Hoxby (2000) and uses exogenous changes in the proportion of girls within UK school cohorts to estimate the effect of a more female peer group." (emphasis mine)
We rag on rags a lot, don't we, saying how they're all about the sensationalism and aren't reporting science very well, all the while piously telling ourselves that the actual scientists - by virtue of engaging in Science - are blamelessly even handed beings of pure reason who would never dream of performing biased research and who cannot be blamed for occasionally coming up with unpleasant or inconvenient results.
What if the unpleasant and inconvenient results are the ones they'd set out to find, though? What if universities as prestigious as Bristol are giving teaching jobs to dudes who think it's really important to write their PhDs about how harmful a "feminised" environment is for the poor little baby menz? Is that the kind of "evidence" we want to draw on for our evidence based policies?
This isn't just bad science reporting (although it's a stellar example of how so called "discoveries" confirming misogynist tropes are highly prized by reporters and readers alike); it's bad science, pure and simple. And there's plenty more of it around, confirming any number of woman-hating tropes for the delectation of the patriarchal masses. The male ego, and its concomitant addiction to the myth of female malice and inferiority, must be nurtured.
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[1] Anecdote: When I was in primary school, my form teacher made me sit next to the most under-achieving and disruptive boy in the class. This was supposed to exercise an improving influence - on him, of course. I was utterly terrified of him - he was genuinely violent and carried a legacy of violence with him (his brother was later implicated in the suicide of a girlfriend he date-raped and then threatened to expose to her uber conservative father, and there was all sorts of other scary stuff going on with that family). I spent the semester perched on the edge of my seat, trying to avoid eye contact, hoping to not provoke him into lashing out at me. The effects of the pairing on my academic development were not considered worth examining, though.