Word: genderism
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...thing we know about the brain is that it is vulnerable to the power of suggestion. There is plenty of evidence that when young women are motivated and encouraged, they excel at science. For most of the 1800s, for example, physics, astronomy, chemistry and botany were considered gender-appropriate subjects for middle-and upper-class American girls. By the 1890s, girls outnumbered boys in public high school science courses across the country, according to The Science Education of American Girls, a 2003 book by Kim Tolley. Records from top schools in Boston show that girls outperformed boys in physics...
...sport to the élite ranks. The U.S. took two medals--a silver for Sara McMann and a bronze for Patricia Miranda--at Athens in 2004. Women's wrestling is growing in the U.S., where girls have gradually gained access to the mat, thanks to Title IX's gender-parity provision. Schools are required to give the girls a shot with the boys if there aren't enough females or funding for a girls team. And so about 7,000 female students from grade school through college are working out and wrestling against guys...
Meanwhile, scores of elementary and middle schools have started separating classes by gender in an effort to eliminate the shrinking-violet syndrome. In San Antonio, Texas, for example, a dozen public middle schools offer single-sex math courses, which has helped Latinas, in particular, speak up in class. In a similar vein, North Carolina State University last year became one of several colleges that have created dorms solely populated by female science and engineering students. This year the number of freshmen and sophomores bunking there has more than doubled, to 165. The biggest benefit, according to program director Rachel Collins...
...teachers of Sandgerdi's 254 students were only mildly surprised by the results. They say the gender gap is a story not of talent but motivation. Boys think of school as purgatory on the way to a future of finding riches at sea; for girls, it's their ticket out of town. Margret Ingporsdottir and Hanna Maria Heidarsdottir, both 15, students at Sandgerdi's gleaming school--which has a science laboratory, a computer room and a well-stocked library--have no doubt that they are headed for university. "I think I will be a pharmacist," says Heidarsdottir. The teens...
...high school in Kevlavík tried the same experiment in 2002 and '03, separating 16-to-20-year-olds by gender for two years. That time the boys slipped even further behind. "The boys said the girls were better anyway," says Kristjan Asmundsson, who taught the 25 boys. "They didn't even try." --By Vivienne Walt