PROFESSOR OF Social History at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, Verene Shepherd, has said that it is a myth that males are better at subjects that require perception, intuition and reasoning.
The UWI Professor was speaking on November 19 at the Planning Institute of Jamaica's Dialogue for Development Lecture 2002, at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, where she spoke on the topic "Challenging Masculine Myths; Gender, History Education and Development in Jamaica".
"It is a myth," she said, "that males are better than females in subjects that require cognitive skills". Citing 1997 CXC results, she said "the only subjects in which boys performed much better than girls were Mathematics and Integrated Science, with girls outperforming boys in the science subject of Physics".
That trend, she admitted however, has been reversed in the last three years, with more boys registering for CXC Physics, and outperforming girls in that subject. Nevertheless, she said that the number of girls sitting and passing Physics has increased.
Prof. Shepherd noted that the 1999, 2000, and 2001 CXC results also showed that girls outperformed boys in Information Technology, previously considered by some as a 'male subject'.
The Common Entrance Examination (CEE) results and those of the GSAT that replaced the CEE, she observed, had not escaped analytical attention in the debates over gender and examination results. "It has been shown that girls routinely gain over 50 per cent of the places to secondary schools, based on the CEE," she assured.
In terms of the GSAT, Professor Shepherd said the 2002 results reflected better performance by girls in all five subjects. Of the girls who sat mathematics, science, social studies, language arts, and communication tasks, 54.1 per cent, 56.6 per cent, 56.71 per cent, 58.3 per cent and 67.75 per cent passed in those subjects, respectively, compared to 47 per cent, 49.66 per cent, 49.52 per cent, 48.72 per cent, and 53.89 per cent respectively, for males.
Professor Shepherd, who has contributed to the development of History teaching in secondary schools through participation in textbook writing projects and the History Department's School Outreach Programme, believes that the concern with the gender gap in education and the performance of males, is neither confined to primary and secondary schools, nor the Caribbean.
Quoting recent figures from the Mona Campus of UWI, she said females account for 70 per cent of the student population, and that the gender gap was even more pronounced in the faculties of Humanities and Education.
"Furthermore," she argued, whereas in 1988 there were more females in all Arts Faculties, and more males in the Science Faculty, by 1997, only engineering had more males registered.
Citing the 2001 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, Professor Shepherd said that the high female enrolment at tertiary institutions was a global phenomenon. In this report, data on countries with high human development, as determined by their Human Development Index (HDI), has shown that only in eight of 43 countries for which information was supplied, was gross enrolment at the tertiary level higher for males than females.
