LAST JULY 21, I wrote about the growing disparity between Filipino males and females in schooling. Across all levels?elementary, secondary and tertiary?enrolment rates are higher for females than for males.
Shortly after the column was published, Jose Ramon Albert of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) sent me a report that they recently published (Policy Notes, December 2009) about this problem. Authored by Clarissa David, Jose Ramon Albert and Sheryl Lyn Carreon-Monterola, the report?s title poses a rhetorical question: ?In pursuit of sex parity: are girls becoming more educated than boys??
I thought I?d write again about this issue because the PIDS report presents more data showing not just the lower enrolments and higher dropout rates of boys, but also the problem of under-performance for the boys who are in school.
Under-performance
Reviewing statistics from various school years (1996-1997, 1999-2000, 2002-2003, 2005-2006 and 2008-2009), the researchers found that at the secondary level, the repetition rate for males was three times that of females. Failure rates of boys were about double that of females.
Put another way, the boys who don?t drop out still take longer to graduate. The PIDS report observes: ?In school year 2008-2009, the typical male primary school graduate took 6.86 years compared to 6.74 for girls (to finish elementary school). The gap becomes larger in high school, where in the same school year, a boy takes an average of 6.21 years to graduate while a girl takes 5.28 years.? (Those figures tell us that there are serious problems with our educational system, i.e., why such high averages, even for girls, to finish four years of high school?)
There are more statistics to deflate male egos. Using 2006-2007 national averages from the government?s National Achievement Test (NAT), administered to Grade 6 students as well as 2nd and 4th year high school students, the PIDS researchers found that ?girls outscore boys in every single subject included in the NAT, with the most dramatic differences evident in English and Filipino. Clear differences are also observed in Science.?
The PIDs researchers also looked at results of the 2003 Trends International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). We?ve fared badly in this international study but our poor scores are made even more dismal by disparities in the scores between boys and girls.
The international overall average for science tests conducted among Grade 6 students was 471 for girls and 477 for boys. Note that boys? scores were actually higher than those of girls. For the Philippines, the overall average score for science was 380 for girls and 374 for boys, a reversal in the gender disparity. The differences were higher for particular tests, the worst being for life sciences (395 for girls and 377 for boys) and environmental sciences (410 for girls and 394 for boys).
The PIDS report offers several possible explanations for the gender disparity, some of which I also proposed in my July 21 column. PIDS clusters its explanations around ?family or household factors,? ?school environment? and ?social expectations.?
I wanted to take up the matter of social expectations and how they interact with the family. In other countries the social expectation is that girls will become homemakers, and so formal education may not be considered important. In the Philippines, there is a twist to these expectations: boys are expected to work, and this expectation comes up early in a boy?s life among poorer families. When there?s a budget crunch, the boys are easier to pull out, or allowed to drop out if they don?t seem interested in their classes.
The Philippines does have social expectations for a girl to become a homemaker, but this translates into a lack of job opportunities for younger girls, except as domestic helpers. For families that hope for some social mobility, girls? formal education actually becomes an investment because after the daughters graduate, there are more job opportunities for them, particularly as overseas workers.
Exporting girls
I can?t help but speculate that the overseas market may have been the major factor in transforming social expectations. The 2008 National Demographic Health Survey (NDHS), whose statistics first alerted me to the seriousness of the gender disparities in education, suggest when males became disadvantaged with formal schooling. Broken down by age groups, we find that for those aged over 55, males had more education than females but only by 0.1 or 0.2 years. There is a strange twist to the statistics for those aged 55 to 59, where males had a median of 7.4 years education compared to only 5.9 years for females.
With the age groups between 35 and 55, females start to have an edge over males, but the difference is only 0.1 or 0.2 years. It?s only for those aged 20-24 years, 25-29 years and 30 to 34 years, where the disparity grows, females having 0.3 more years of education than males.
We see that girls? years of education overtakes that of boys starting with those born after 1973 (i.e., aged 35 and below at the time of the NDHS survey, conducted in 2008). The government began its labor exporting in the 1970s and this has picked up through the years, with more and more Filipino families looking at education as a way to leave the Philippines and work overseas. This overseas market, initially more male (blue collar workers going to the Middle East), has since shifted to favor females (teachers, domestic workers, caregivers throughout the world).
Returning to the PIDS report, the researchers do highlight the importance of school environments, mainly to motivate boys to stay in school. As I pointed out in my column, it?s possible that our gender role definitions work against boys retaining an interest in school.
I wanted to emphasize how important culture is in shaping the way we motivate students. Several years back I read a study showing how American schools tend to favor boys over girls, with one striking example. When a boy interrupts a classmate to ask a question, American teachers tend to praise him, ?Now that was a very good question,? but if a girl does that, the teacher would sometimes reprimand her, ?We should learn to wait our turn.?
But that?s the American setting, where independence and assertiveness are valued for both boys and girls, but more so for the males. In the Philippines, social expectations are different, schools still emphasize conformity, obedience and docility, which have greater congruence with the way girls are raised at home. Teachers end up favoring girls, and may end up putting down an assertive or inquisitive boy, who is perceived as being rebellious or disrespectful.
We need more qualitative studies, observing school behavior, for example, to explain the gender disparities. I definitely intend to write more about this issue, and encourage readers to send in their own experiences and comments.
The PIDS report can be downloaded at: http://dirp4. pids.gov.ph/ris/pn/pidspn0905.pdf
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Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph
