There has been a long standing debate on who is internally wired to perform out of boys and girls. While boys are thought to be good with tasks that involve use of muscle control, girls are believed to be better at verbal tasks involving memory and intuition. Boys may perform better than girls in some tests while girls may outperform boys in others. But if we compare the performance of students in CBSE Boards over the last three years, girls have time and again proved themselves by performing better than boys across the country. This begs a sensitive question: Are marks an indicator of who is internally wired to perform better? And does gender has anything to do with performance?
With passage of time, studies are throwing light that the differences in achievement between boys and girls may have to do more with nurture than nature. From the infant stage, boys are given cars to play with while girls are given dolls conforming to gender stereotypes. Their performance may be the result of the atmosphere they have been brought up in. In families where education of girl child is supported and encouraged have witnessed tremendous performance by girls. In contrast, families where girls are confined to household chores and where education of their brother is given preference over theirs have added to the illiterate girl child population.
They say, boys and girls are “wired differently”, leading to all kinds of alleged problems and disparities. According to a study from Penn Medicine, there are striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women about their behaviour. In males, the brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring suggests that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition. This further sheds light that men are better at learning and performing a single task at hand, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group.
Though gender is gradually losing any predictive value in ascertaining a student’s academic ability, girls do tend to succeed in some fields, while boys dominate others.
For centuries, boys have topped the class and performed best in mathematics and science. But the scenario has undergone a dramatic change in today’s time. Across all grade levels and in many academic subjects, girls now score higher than boys. Strategic planning, setting realistic academic goals and their successful implementation have helped them achieve their goals. Moreover, once under-represented in science and engineering, the number of female scientists and engineers is gradually increasing. Though, boys do score, girls have improved their performance on certain measures a lot faster. As a result, girls have narrowed or even closed some academic gaps that previously favoured boys.
It is yet interesting to note that boys still dominate a number of fields in terms of performance. For instance, fields like engineering, construction, defence services, law enforcement etc is largely male dominated. Apart from that, we see more boys choosing Accounting and Finance as career and less females due to the prowess that boys enjoy when it comes to numbers and calculations. This may sound surprising, but the world of professional cooking is also largely male dominated as males have proved themselves as better cooks.
True, girls have overshadowed boys in many fields, while boys have outpaced them in many others; nothing firm can be concluded on who is internally wired to perform better as performance is the product of strong will power, firm determination and immense hard work. Irrespective of gender, anyone can perform better if you have the right attitude and aptitude. The bottom line here is, with laser focus, resilience and confidence in one’s abilities, anyone and everyone can do better.
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