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Friday, December 15, 2017

When classrooms become a boys’ club

Walk into a Whitman classroom, and most students will appear similar. Students sit at identical desks, use identical Chromebooks and complete identical worksheets. But ask them a question, and a disparity will emerge: the students raising their hands are overwhelmingly male.
Since elementary school, I’ve observed this imbalance, but peers assured me the disparity was all in my head. So, last month, I finally set out to confirm my perception empirically. For one day, I tallied the number of female versus male participants in four of my classes, including AP Calculus BC and AP Comparative Politics, where participation is both frequent and voluntary.
The results were startling: overall, boys participated 3.1 times more than girls, even though the total ratio of boys to girls is essentially equal...

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