Why do women have 1.6 MILLION MORE Bachelor Degrees Than Men?

I'm going to share something that you wrote about recently on your. On your substack, I think it was, where you said that there are currently 1.6 million more young women with a bachelor's degree than men. And to put this in perspective, that's just less than the population of West Virginia. So there's this sort of rising gender gap in education and specifically within college, and we hear these stats that there's less men graduating from college than ever before. I think it's something like 42% or 43% of college grads are men. I could be wrong on that. That and the rest are women, boys are doing worse in school, et cetera. Can you break down a little bit of your assessment in terms of why you see this happening, what the data is showing? And then I'd like to talk about the implications after, because I think socially, relationally, there's some very big implications.

Yes, or there could be, and I'd love to talk about that. So the basic facts here are not in dispute. Which is the. And pretty much every level of education, pretty much every subject, girls and women are ahead of boys and men in basically every advanced economy. So the details differ, but this is not something weird about the US system or the Canadian system or the UK system or the French system. It's. It's happening everywhere to slightly different degrees and at different levels. But. But this, the basic story of the last 30, 40 years is of a giant educational overtaking. So in the us, which is the data I know best, the chances of a man getting a college degree in 1972 was 13 percentage points higher than a woman. Today, the chances of a woman getting a college degree are 15 percentage points higher than a man. So the inequality has reversed. And 72 is an important year for people in the US because it's when Title IX was passed to promote women and girls in education, and it's coming up to its 50th anniversary. So 50 years after passing Title 9 to help women and girls, we actually have slightly wider gender gap in higher education than we did then. It's just reversed. And no one saw that coming. Quite importantly, that was never predicted, never expected. I've talked to a lot of people, did the work in the 70s, and I've gone back to some of the literature, and, like, you cannot find anybody predicting the overtaking. It was all about Catcher, quite rightly. Right. No one thought, well, what if the lines keep going? Will we one day have to start talking about gender gaps the other way around? Like, it just didn't occur to anybody that was going to happen. And it reflects what's happening in high school. So Again, in the US the ones, the students with the highest GPA, 2/3 of them are girls, the ones that are the lowest 2/3 of them are boys, et cetera. And being male, it's actually the single biggest risk factor for not being school ready at the age of five. And being male is the single biggest risk factor, obviously with the appropriate controls for other factors, the biggest risk factor for dropping out of college. So there's a kind of a risk, there's a sort of educational risk factor now that's just automatically attached to boys and men by anybody researching the field. And so as I say, that's true everywhere. Every OECD country, there are the advanced economies, there are more young women with a college degree. And actually the more gender equal countries, the Scandinavian countries, are the ones with the biggest gaps.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I think I've dug into this quite a bit and heard a lot of different conversation around it. And it's interesting to see and hear.

People'S responses to this data and their perspective in response to it. I've heard you talk about, let's just start from early age. Right. So I have a son that's two and this is something that I've been thinking about as he's developmentally started to speak quite a bit later than a lot of, you know, especially young girls. We were sitting on a plane and there was a girl that was sitting behind us and she was like 17, 18 months old and she was fluent, you know, she was just chatting away. And here's my boy, he's almost two and you know, he's not talking yet or he's just starting to form that. And I've heard you talk about maybe one possibility of what could be contributing to this is that young boys, prefrontal cortex develops later. So can you just outline some of the contributing factors that people should be aware of in terms of why this gap might be happening within the education system? And maybe we'll just start at the beginning and work our way up to college.

Yeah, so I mean, boys on average, of course, all of these are average differences. And the distributions, the extent to which the distributions overlap varies depending on which one of these I'm talking about. But the general picture is that boys develop somewhat more slowly than girls. They develop language skills a bit later than girls, as I've said, they're just, they're typically not as ready in terms of.

Spatial skills, verbal skills at the age of, say 4 or 5, which is very often when they'll start school as girls.

And that's reasonably well established in the neuroscience. It's not, this is not just behavioral. You can see it in the, you can see it in literally in the, in the MRI scans. And then as you move up through the school years and particularly into adolescence, early adolescence, a very big gap opens up in terms of the development of what you've called the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is sometimes called the CEO of the brain. It's the bit, the organizing bit of the brain. I sometimes refer to it as the turn in your chemistry homework bit of your brain because, right, turning into a chemistry homework is really hard. You have to take it at home, you have to do it, you have to remember it, then you have to remember to do it, then you have to take it back in, you have to remember to turn it in. It's a very, very hard thing to do if you're, especially if you're a boy. And so those kind of organizational skills or kind of non cognitive skills as they're sometimes referred to, are really associated with this prefrontal cortex. And that develops between a year and two years earlier in girls than in boys on average. And the main reason for that seems to be because it's triggered by puberty. So puberty has the second round effect of triggering the development of this bit of the brain. Girls hit puberty on average between a year or two earlier than boys. One of the reasons why I only discovered this fairly recently, why in the Jewish tradition, bat mitzvahs are a year earlier than bar mitzvahs. Not in every tradition, not in every Jewish tradition, but that's quite common in Judaism, apparently. So that's interesting, right?

That's a kind of well done. Of course, girls are ready before boys and they do hit puberty earlier. And the reason that matters for education, it matters for all kinds of reasons, is the education system in adolescence especially, really strongly rewards those organizational skills, the ability to control impulse, future orientation, back to your obsession with time. The prefrontal cortex is very strongly associated with having a future orientation and being able to see past today and tomorrow and see how your actions today will affect your future self. All of that comes at this prefrontal cortex. And so interestingly, while there's a very big gender gap in grades in high school, there isn't a very big gender gap in test scores, which are just more about cognitive ability. So it's very important this framed the right way. It's not that girls are smarter than boys or vice versa. It doesn't appear to be much difference in terms of those just smarts, intellectual processing ability and cognitive skill. It's non cognitive. It's the chemistry homework, book bag planning, future orientation stuff where girls and young women are way ahead of boys and they remain ahead of them on that front through into the early 20s. So that has a huge impact during what turns out to be the critical years for educational trajectory are also the years when there's the biggest gender gap in neurological development. And there's no controversy about that, there's a controversy about how much they overlap, et cetera. But whereas there's a big debate about male and female brains and adults, there's no debate about this. Like I, when I wrote that section, one of my most progressive liberal feminist colleagues wrote in the, in the margins when she reviewed the book. I have a son and a daughter, so. Well, duh. And I think that like, if you want to make this very visceral, walk into any classroom of 12 or 13 year old boys and girls and ask them to open their book bags and see what happens. For the boys it's very often like a controlled explosion when they open their bags. And for the girls it's much more like to be quite organized little tabs and all the rest of it. Now these are stereotypes, but they're stereotypes for a reason. Because they're based in actual brain science. That means boys are at a slight disadvantage in the education system.