World
Girls outperform boys in academic achievements globally
Washington: Using international data, researchers have found that girls outperform boys in educational achievements in 70 percent of the countries they studied – regardless of the level of gender, political, economic or social equality.
According to the data, boys fall behind girls in overall achievement across reading, mathematics and science worldwide.
Boys outperform girls in only three countries or regions: Colombia, Costa Rica and the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, said the team from University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) in the US and the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland.
“We studied the educational achievement levels of 1.5 million 15-year-olds from around the world using data collected between 2000 and 2010,” said David Geary, curators professor of psychological sciences at MU.
“Even in countries where women’s liberties are severely restricted, we found that girls are outperforming boys in reading, mathematics, and science literacy by age 15, regardless of political, economic, social or gender equality issues and policies found in those countries,” he said.
In countries, known for relatively low gender equality ratings, such as Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the educational achievement gap is relatively large and favours girls.
The one exception worldwide is among students in economically developed nations where high achieving boys outperform high achieving girls, researchers said.
“With the exception of high-achievers, boys have poorer educational outcomes than girls around the world, independent of social equality indicators,” said Gijsbert Stoet, reader in psychology at the University of Glasgow.
Results show that a commitment to gender equality on its own is not enough to close the achievement gaps in global education; the gap is not increasing.
“Although it is vital that we promote gender equality in schools, w e also need to make sure that we are doing more to understand why these gaps, especially among boys, persist and what other policies we can develop to close them,” Stoet said.
The study also has important implications for educational policy, the researchers concluded.
The paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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