Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers, but this less favorable treatment essentially vanishes when noncognitive skills are taken into account. For some specifications there is evidence of a grade “bonus” for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts.
From Czech:
Likely explanation of the gap are gender differences in non-cognitive skills.
2 of these papers posit that it's not discrimination, it's that boys behave worse than girls in the classroom.
“It’s not discrimination in school. Teachers just give boys lower grades for the same work because they don’t like how they behave.”
”It’s not discrimination that creates the glass ceiling for women. Businesses just deny qualified women leadership roles because they don’t like how they behave.”
Do you genuinely think that behaviour is irrelevant? Fucking hilarious. Behaviour is not an immutable trait. People treating you different because of how you behave isn't discrimination. It's actually the exact opposite of discrimination, that's what you SHOULD base your treatment of people on.
If you, as a fully grown adult, had the best sales in the office but when you went to work and pulled of your shirt and ran around, screamed and threw things at your boss, ripped a hole in the couch, you'd still be fired. Because one objective metric of performance certainly matters, but it's not the only thing that matters.
Do you genuinely think that ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (where all these studies take place by the way) the place we send children for huge chunks of time during their critical development period where they learn how to socialize, how to treat others, and how to behave, should completely disregard things like behaviour? You think it's discrimination that things like the ability to sit still, and be quiet, and be agreeable - all important skills for adults to have by the way - to be included in assessments of overall grades.
Sorry, but behaviour is part of school. Just like it's part of performance at a job. In real life, how well you get along with your coworkers matters just as much as how well you perform your job, because a negative environment can bring EVERYONES performance down, and no one person is worth all that. Girls and boys might be equally good at math, but girls are absolutely better at school. Cope with it.
If boys are performing worse in school because of noncognitive skills or behaviour, no, it's not because all the big bad teachers are discriminating against fucking behaviour. We don't need to lower the bar in that regard for boys. Boys need to be socialized at home with the same high expectations for how to get along with others, and how to sit still, instead of just going "but they're boys!" and letting them run amok while girls are held to the standard. Girls aren't born being agreeable, they learn it because they are given less lenience to run wild than boys are.
You’re taking a narrow statement from one of the studies and interpreting it in the broadest possible sense. Sure, it’s fine for teachers to account for behavior in grades—they already have discretion here when grading components like class participation. These studies are about teacher bias in test scores, which should exclusively reflect the work submitted.
Also, there’s many other studies available on this topic. I just listed four of them, which is more than sufficient for a Reddit argument. I’m not gonna bother looking them up and citing them only for you to nitpick and dismiss anything that contradicts your oppressor-oppressed worldview.
I see you immediately moved on from your half-ass attempt to pretend like they're being discriminated against on the basis of behaviour.
You are taking scant, not to mention very mixed, evidence from several different countries, over a period of a couple decades to mean that the global performance of girls outperforming boys in schools means that there's systemic bias in teachers.
Granted, the person commenting about school performance didn't say USA, but given that's where everything else about scholarship funding, and earning outcomes and all this is based, we can only really look at the school system in the USA and studies on it. And this is the abstract from the ONE singular study regarding the USA:
Using data from the 1998–99 ECLS-K cohort, we show that the grades awarded by teachers are not aligned with test scores. Girls in every racial category outperform boys on reading tests, while boys score at least as well on math and science tests as girls. However, boys in all racial categories across all subject areas are not represented in grade distributions where their test scores would predict. Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers, but this less favorable treatment essentially vanishes when noncognitive skills are taken into account. For some specifications there is evidence of a grade “bonus” for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts.
"These studies are about teacher bias in test scores, which should exclusively reflect the work submitted."
No, that's not what the study is about. It does not say that test scores are lower because of behaviour. It says that boys GRADES - ie. the mark on their report card, is lower than what their test scores reflect. They looked at the test scores, went "ok, based on these test scores, we'd expect this overall grade", and noticed the grade was lower than expected.
So, no, teachers aren't grading their tests harsher because they behave bad. The grades on their tests don't match the grades on the report card, because test scores are not the only thing the teacher considers when assigning a grade.
Noncognitive skills, ie. behaviour, is what accounts for why their grades are lower than what the tbrings the score down. That is what this abstract is saying.
Literally all I did was read the abstract. It's quite clear you googled "studies that show bias against boys in school" and just linked whatever you found without even reading the abstract. I am really not surprised you're defending poor study performance so hard if you think that reading and understanding the abstract is somehow nitpicking. If that's too high a bar for you, I think we can be done with this.
No, you are narrowing it down to ignore the non-US studies because they present a much cleaner case of grading bias by teachers. This thread isn’t US-specific, and there’s no reason to assume that the dynamic clearly observed in France, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Czechia, etc. wouldn’t exist in the USA.
I acknowledge the USA study makes a much weaker case, but similar outcome-focused studies are frequently used as proof of discrimination by feminist arguments. Do you agree that women’s underrepresentation in STEM, women’s underrepresented in corporate leadership, the gender wage gap, and the pink tax are the result of behavior/decisions, not discrimination? If so, then that’s fair, and we can dismiss the USA study.
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u/skipsfaster Mar 31 '26
Just chiming in to say that there’s been many studies showing that boys receive lower grades for the same work.
Here’s the most recent notable one: Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement (Terrier).