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Re:Why are boys academically underperforming? [audio] by AtlasBarfed on Thursday December 31, 2020 @12:47PM (#25594975)
I read 10 years ago that males were on the verge of getting preferential acceptance at colleges.

There's a pop theory / crackpot idea that men tend to be on average "dumber" than women, but with a higher standard distribution, so they will have more "geniuses".

Women will be on average "smarter", but lower standard deviation.

If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that, since while women will have a high chance of reproduction, male biology will need to have more variance and "risk" to achieve some sort of distinction to get to the comparatively lower reproductive success rate of males.

In reality, our schooling is now so screwed up between grade inflation, teaching for the test, over-prescribing ADD drugs (which is opioid dependence grooming by the drug companies), reduced funding, destruction of the middle class, and a host of other changes to society and policy.

Re:Why are boys academically underperforming? [audio] by monoideism on Thursday December 31, 2020 @03:03PM (#25596529)
That's not a "crackpot theory" but what the data currently show. This doesn't mean that there's a biological cause for this (although it's possible). But with IQ data, there's abundant evidence that the averages are similar, but men have greater variability:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/dr-paul-...

Re:Why are boys academically underperforming? [audio] by SamReidHughes on Thursday December 31, 2020 @02:06PM (#25595926)
> There's a pop theory / crackpot idea that men tend to be on average "dumber" than women, but with a higher standard distribution, so they will have more "geniuses".

The current understanding is that the average is generally similar, and males have greater variability. So yes, vastly more male geniuses. But men have larger brains for a reason, so it might be we're biased against measuring anything men are better at.

> If true, the disposable male theory might explain aspects of that

It doesn't. The main reason is because female mammals have duplicate sex chromosomes, and the effects get combined together. In some other kinds of animals (such as birds) females tend to have greater variability. So it's a haphazard consequence of some evolutionary split way back when. (Who knows, maybe the causation of disposable males is there, but in the other direction.)