Top of the class, bottom of the pay ladder

By JAN CORBETT

Gardeners toil in the bright morning sun out the front of St Cuthbert's College, where not only is a gracious appearance meticulously maintained, but academic performance is just as determinedly fought for.

And won.

For the past four years St Cuthbert's has topped the A Bursary exam results table for the top half of the North Island, adding to the growing body of evidence that girls are outpacing boys in the classroom.

(Put St Cuthbert's through the computer's spell checker and the first alternative spelling offered is "castrates". But fears of emasculation are not borne out in the workplace, where men typically hold between two-thirds and three-quarters of the top jobs across society.)

The top school in the country for A Bursary results last year was Rangi Ruru in Christchurch - also a girls' school and more evidence that girls do better when there are no boys around.

It is not so long ago that the most prestigious schools in the country were boys' colleges - with King's College and Wanganui Collegiate perhaps the most recognised. Not only have they been bumped down the exam results tables, they are no longer exclusively boys' schools either.

Proponents of single-sex education might suggest that the two trends are related. Notably, while the top boys' schools have opened their doors to girls, the top girls' schools have not returned the favour.

Once, families who could would send their sons to a private school and their daughter to the local state school because his education was more important than hers. But this year, for the first time, the numbers of girls in private schooling is almost equal to the number of boys - about 10,000 of each.

Considerable space and angst have been devoted to the question of whether girls are outstripping boys academically, and if so, why.

In last year's Competent Children report, Cathy Wylie, Jean Thompson and Cathy Lythe of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research found gender gaps in educational achievement.

Before reaching school, boys and girls were found to be on a par, except that boys had more curiosity and girls more perseverance. A year in the classroom and all that changes. By age 6, only mathematics and fine motor skills show no association with gender - girls outclass boys at everything else. By age 10 boys are still more curious than girls, but equal in mathematics.

When Otago University Associate Professor of Education Terry Crooks compared boys and girls of primary and intermediate age, he found less disparity in their performance. The glaring exception was writing skills, where he believes that girls excel because they are more interested in reading.

He accepts that girls perform better than boys at secondary school, but suggests the reason is that girls are more diligent and maybe have their social lives curtailed more than boys, rather than because of any difference in innate intellectual ability between the sexes. He wonders, too, if there is more peer pressure on boys not to perform academically.

Morning break at Mt Roskill Grammar, a large, co-ed, multiracial school in Auckland's heartland. Third and fourth form girls sit or stand in groups in the warm spring sunshine, while the boys play with balls.

Point that naturally occurring playground segregation out to principal Ken Rapson and he replies that boys and girls are different. Although it is Asian boys who are dominating academically, in general Rapson says girls mature faster and are ready to settle into the strictures of a school routine. It is hard to get a teenage boy to read a book. He also finds girls more interested in the broad spectrum of extra-curricular activities and they have made better student leaders in the past 10 years.

Associate principal Claire Balfour remembers that in her first co-ed school 20 years ago the boys got to do "all the fun stuff" like look after the sound and laboratory equipment. "It was like a club."

When she went to teach at a girls' school and the sound equipment failed, her first thought was, "What do we do now?" She was amazed when girls leaped up with screwdrivers. It taught her how girls without boys will fill the traditionally male roles, even down to deciding who will be the class ratbag.

When she arrived at Mt Roskill Grammar 10 years ago, Balfour found a similar segregation where boys looked after equipment. She "advertised" for some girls to come forward to be part of the sound crew, and from then on has never had to ask again.

It is that sort of informal affirmative action by both men and women teachers that has made a huge difference to girls' academic achievement.

At Mt Roskill Grammar, with its racially diverse student population, gender issues are now more likely to be rooted in ethnicity. There are girls from cultures where women are routinely subjugated. Some Afghan refugee children are not even numerate or literate in their own language. The school's ambition is to give these girls as much opportunity as possible to broaden their horizons - like the sexually segregated swimming lessons at lunchtime for Muslim girls who cannot swim in front of boys.

Rapson and Balfour's hope is to keep these girls in school for five years in the hope of giving them a ticket to respect and independence and educating their families in what is possible for their daughters. They notice happily over time how some of the restrictions on these girls loosen.

Whatever the reason girls do better at school than boys, these patterns follow through into secondary school and on into tertiary education, where women make up over half the numbers enrolling. Sixty-three per cent of university students are female.

Yet the culture on many campuses remains surprisingly macho. Emma Consedine, women's rights officer for the Auckland University Students Association - and the fact this position still exists is interesting in itself - describes student politics as peculiarly male dominated. Not only do more men stand for election to positions on the association, but the bulk of the voters are men too.

She says her job is "to regulate the boys who run the show".

Look no further than the type of entertainment the association runs at lunchtimes. Things like the drinking horn, sneers Consedine. "It's all very masculine."

She describes the drinking club as one of the most pervasive political forces on campus. Last year four members wrote a review of strip clubs for Craccum, the student newspaper.

Perhaps the women are too busy passing their exams. Auckland University planning director Robert Felix reports that women pass at a greater rate than men across all faculties. But the university has not analysed which sex gets the higher grades on average.

However, as we reported yesterday, higher qualifications have done little to close the income gap between the sexes. It exists not just when women reach the age where they spend less time at paid work because of children, but right from the beginning of their postgraduate careers (see graph on page 8).

The Graduate Destinations Survey says the most popular university subjects for women are commerce and business (where their numbers are on a par with men's) and social and behavioural sciences, which include law. Male students still dominate in mathematics, information sciences and technology and engineering.

That women are being left out of the information technology revolution concerns the US Institute for Women and Technology enough to write that "women today must fight for technology citizenship the way suffragettes fought for the vote ... Web use is not power. In a knowledge economy people with technical knowledge will impact the future of the world, and people without it will simply be impacted."

But though women borrow slightly less than men in student loans, women have a harder time paying them back because on average they earn less and are more likely to have long periods either not working or working part time when they have children.

The New Zealand University Students Association has calculated that it takes 14 years for a man to pay back the money he borrowed to study for a bachelor's degree, while for a woman it takes 28 years. With the interest rate on student loans running at 7 per cent, that's a lot of extra interest women are paying.

The injury is compounded by statistics showing women graduates earn less than their male counterparts right from the start of their careers.

One suggested reason girls do better at school is that women dominate the teaching profession and they are surrounded by female role models. Women may also run education in a way that nurtures girls and stymies boys. This is the opposite of how most companies are organised, which is perhaps why boys do better at work.

But while women dominate the teaching ranks, including at university, they are poorly represented in education management past primary school, and even there men are over-represented in principal roles relative to the number teaching the younger classes. The number of women in the executive ranks in universities, wananga and colleges of education is so small that they don't even rank as a percentage in the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust's 2001 Diversity Survey.

Women hold 25 per cent of the executive positions in secondary schools and 39 per cent in polytechnics.

Auckland University's Professor Dame Anne Salmond, pro vice-chancellor for equal opportunities, attributes the frustrating slowness of women to rise to management ranks in the university to the "people like me" syndrome operating in most organisations.

"It's a hidden template of what the successful person looks like. People don't realise they're doing it."

And this is not just about how men in power view women, but how women see themselves. "Some of the most effective barriers are the ones we internalise as we grow up," says Salmond.

So the university runs workshops on how to be impartial in deciding other people's futures. The key, says Salmond, is not to demonise people who subconsciously discriminate against women or ethnic minorities. Instead, treat them as decent human beings who will do things differently once they realise their behaviour is unfair to others.

The university has also been running a women in leadership programme to teach women important advancement techniques, such as how to effectively apply for promotion.

Back at Mt Roskill Grammar, Claire Balfour says she was at a conference recently where the feminisation of university departments was discussed. The view was that as they became more female dominated, they lost status.

She says the dearth of female secondary principals has a lot to do with the choices women make about their lives. Of the four top role holders at Mt Roskill Grammar, Balfour is the only woman and she is about to leave. Principal Rapson is aware of that gender imbalance and realises he has an important appointment to make.

FACT FILE

* 56.8 per cent of tertiary students are women.

* 59 per cent of degree or diploma students are women.

* 53.1 per cent of postgraduate university students are women.

* Women make up 63 per cent of students studying for degrees and 42 per cent who are studying for doctorates.

* Young women are more likely than young men to be studying and are more likely to have a post-school qualification.

* 19 per cent of women aged 20 to 29 had a degree or higher qualification, compared with 14 per cent of men. Overall, however, a higher proportion of men (34 per cent) than women (31 per cent) had a post-school qualification.

* The most common field of post-school study for women is health (22 per cent). Engineering and related technology are the least common (2 per cent).

* Women are more likely than men to have studied part time.

* It takes a woman 28 years to pay back the money she borrowed to study for a bachelor's degree, while for a man it takes 14 years, the NZ Students Association calculates.

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