September 2001
What's Sex Got to Do With It?
by Stephen Easton
The Fraser Institute's focus on elementary and secondary education has been an important contributor to the national debate over education policy. The Report Cards for secondary schools in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario were developed to provide parents with systematic input about academic performance in the schools that their children attend; school administrators with benchmarks against which to improve; and taxpayers with an indication of value received for tax dollars spent.
Other of the Institute's work has chronicled the successes and failures of educational forms around the world (Hepburn, 1999), and the publication of the recent conference volume (Hepburn, 2001) has highlighted ways in which positive educational outcomes can be affected by policies that give parents more choice. But in all of this there is one theme that I think receives too little emphasis: sex.
What I mean by this is that boys and girls are different, and their educational outcomes in high schools are different. This is a refrain that Peter Cowley and I initially developed in Boys, Girls, and Grades in 1999. Moreover, we thought the results were of sufficient significance that we reworked all the Report Cards to include explicit recognition of a school's success in equalizing the academic performance of boys and girls (Cowley and Easton, 2001). Our review of the literature suggested that there is no reason that outcomes between boys and girls, at the high school level, should differ systematically. Taught properly, we believe that boys' and girls' achievement in school should be roughly similar. One sex is not innately a "better" student than the other, and one dimension of school success is to permit both boys and girls to achieve academic success.
In this we found support in the education literature, and we also satisfied ourselves that there was no sound "societal" interest in having one sex better educated than the other. At the least, parents and taxpayers give no overt indication of preferring to have girls or boys more successful than the other. Parents in particular are very concerned when we present evidence about differential relative performance. Nobody wants to have their own child, male or female, systematically performing less well merely because of their sex.
Yet our evidence for British Columbia showed two things. First, regardless of their performance on provincial exams, girls always received better school grades than boys. Figure 1 illustrates this point. Bars to the right of the centre-line mean that girls are more successful than boys— and the percentage points of difference are marked at the bottom of the chart. Bars pointing to the left mean that boys are more successful than girls. In the figure, the solid bars refer to the school mark (which have a 60 percent weight in the final course grade), and the shaded bars indicate the mark received on the common provincial examination given at the end of the year.
The courses for which the marks are applied are ranked according to the number of students taking them. Consequently, the most frequently taken course, grade 12 English (effectively the only required subject for all BC students), is listed first. Notice that girls do better than boys both in their school marks and on the exam marks. This is apparent in the figure as both bars point to the right.
For several of the other subjects, Math, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, and History, boys do less well than girls in their school marks, but do better on their exams. Girls do better in both their school marks and their exam marks in Physics and French as revealed in the final two bars of the table.
How important is this?
In developing our understanding of the importance of sex in school performance, there is one basic question: Does it matter? That is, do we care how well boys perform relative to girls? I think we do. For many years most of us have been concerned with women's issues. We are interested in women's equality in the workplace, the wages earned by women, whether women are treated equally by and before the law, and how women's health issues have been studied, just to mention a few examples. In the case of education, however, times have changed, and I think that our emphasis on enhancing the performance of young women should be revisited. The problem is not young women, it is young men—at least this is what the data suggest.
The gradual change in higher education participation
Do the grades received by young women relative to young men have a consequence? It is difficult to say in general how important high school grades are to lifetime success. However, in the short term, grades are an important contributor to university attendance. One must have high marks to go to university. If marks are important, and women are receiving better marks than men in high school, we would expect there to be more women in university than men. The evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, although to be clear, likely there are reasons other than simply grade 12 marks why more women than men are in university.
What does the pattern of university attendance look like? Figure 2 plots the recent history of Canadian university attendance. The data are for full time undergraduate enrollments.
There has been a steady increase in the number of female relative to male undergraduates over the past 40 years. Around 1986, the ratio passed unity, and we have now moved to a level consistent with the late 1970s—but in the opposite sense, as there are fewer men relative to women on campus. Clearly, with 1.2 women for every man on campus, there have been big changes to the sex ratio on campus. The data in this graph end in 1997, but a quick look at any university web site will confirm that the ratios are still climbing.
These are significant changes in the number of men at university. Their actual numbers are declining, both relative to women and absolutely. The importance of this phenomenon is not receiving the attention that it deserves. As the taxpayer paying the bill, or the parent encouraging the child, we need to understand why it is that fewer men are turning to higher education. But interestingly, even before we turn to a "made in Canada" explanation (something that has not yet been accomplished since we are only coming to recognize that there may be a problem), it is important to understand that this phenomenon is not unique to Canada.
We are not alone!
Although it is tempting to believe that everything we see in Canada is uniquely Canadian, it is not always the case. I have argued that some of the systematic increase in university participation by women relative to men may be due to the way we prepare young men for higher education. There are, of course, more complex forces at work. Elsewhere I have pointed to the economic return to education earned by women as a major source of the increase in the expansion of women's higher education (Easton, 2001), but this does not diminish the influence of high schools in the preparation of young men for higher education. If fewer are prepared, then fewer will attend. It does give one pause, however, to realize that Canada's experience is not unique. Perhaps placing more women in university in Canada is a result of similar forces at work throughout the world. Can it be that what we see at home is merely the reflection of some grander revolution in the return to education and preparation for education for women globally?
Internationally, the pattern of women's education in the countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (the OECD) is not so different from Canada. The data used in the following comparison are BA degrees awarded to women relative to men. Table 1 shows the ratio of women to men receiving a BA degree (or equivalent) for selected OECD countries.1
The table reveals several things. First, the first column reports that nine of the 21 countries start the sample with a ratio below unity. This means that more men than women are receiving degrees. Second, even though the data are for a relatively short period, comparing the first and last year of the data for each country, only 6 of 20 ratios lie below unity in their final reporting period. The proportion of women earning degrees has certainly increased. Among the 21 OECD counties, only two saw a decline in the relative number of women receiving degrees (although in Spain there was no change.)
A third interesting characteristic of the table lies in the number reported in boxes. This signifies the peak year of the ratio of women to men receiving degrees. In the OECD countries, 12 of the 21 have the last year as the peak year.
What all of this means is that there is a determined upward drift in the proportion of women attending and graduating from university in countries that in some ways are much like Canada, and which are a part of the OECD. Although there are differences among this group, Canada has many traditions in common with the OECD nations, so they are a natural group to look at when we are considering issues relating to education.
The table reveals some interesting differences between countries, as well. Norway displays the top ratio of women to men, 1.90 in 1990, or nearly two graduating women for every graduating man! The ratio has receded since then to 1.78 in 1996. Similarly, Denmark, which, apart from Norway had the highest ratio in 1992 (1.54), also fell (to 1.43) by 1996. This poses the question to whether there is some kind of limit or process that leads to ups and downs in the ratio. In the Canadian experience, there has been little decline in the ratio for more than 50 years.
Where will it end?
At this point, we know that the declining ratio of men to women in university is a phenomenon that we share with a number of countries. Will it lead to an undereducated class of men whose earning performance will be permanently impaired, or have they found employment in the computer and sports sectors for which a university degree is no longer a passport to success? Only further research over time will give the answers.
Notes
1 The OECD reports "[t]he graduation rate relates the number of people with bachelor's degrees to the number of people in the population at typical age of graduation. Germany data for 1989 are for the former West Germany." My calculation takes the ratio of these two ratios and eliminates the relative number of people in the population at the typical ages of graduation. Consequently, if there were large disparities in the actual number of men or women in the relevant age groups, the ratios would be inappropriate. There is no reason to believe that this is the case.
References
Cowley, Peter and Stephen T. Easton (1999). Boys, Girls and Grades: Academic Gender Balance in British Columbia's Secondary Schools Public Policy Sources, no. 26. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute.
_____ (2001). Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools: 2001 Edition. Studies in Educational Policy. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute (March).
Easton, Stephen T (2001). "Do We Have A Problem Yet? Women and Men in Higher Education." Presented at the Canadian Economics Association meetings, June. Forthcoming, C.D. Howe Institute.
Hepburn, Claudia R., ed (2001). Can the Market Save Our Schools? Vancouver: The Fraser Institute.
Hepburn, Claudia R (1999). The Case For School Choice: Models from the United States, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden Critical Issues Bulletin. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute.
National Center for Education Statistics. Digital document: http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/digest/dt402.html.
Statistics Canada (various). Education in Canada. Cat. 81-229. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada.
Statistics Canada (1983). Historical Statistics of Canada. 2nd ed. Edited by F.S. Leacy. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, http://www.nces.ed. gov/pubs2001/digest/dt402.htm. Unpublished tabulations.
Stephen Easton, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and Adjunct Scholar at The Fraser Institute.
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