Irish Times Poll: Are girls more intelligent than boys?

Sleipnir

Since when is the leaving cert a measure of intelligence?

Exams measure you're ability to do exams, they are not how we separate the intelligent from the not-so intelligent.

This kind of crap really annoys me and the Irish Times should know better.

grimloch

Since when is the leaving cert a measure of intelligence?

Well it isn't really.

To be honest I'm surprised at the Irish times. They do know better.

Sounds like something the tabloids would cook up.

thejovialhost

The L.C. is just one big memory test.

Basq

Hasn't that oh-so-hilarious slogan "Boys Are Stupid... Throw Rocks At Them" taught us nothing?!

tribulus

girls do seem to be more motivated or focused for exams iv'e found. However any girls i knew that did very well in their leaving cert did nothing else outside of school - no sports, past times etc. basically just school school school- maybe that's a trend in general between boys/girls and a possible factor for better exam grades... then again they might just be smarter

grimloch

tribulus wrote:

girls do seem to be more motivated or focused for exams iv'e found. However any girls i knew that did very well in their leaving cert did nothing else outside of school - no sports, past times etc. basically just school school school- maybe that's a trend in general between boys/girls and a possible factor for better exam grades... then again they might just be smarter

It seems that for all the wisdom of Irish Times they fail to see than "smarter" and "work harder" are not one and the same.

dublinguy2004

grimloch wrote:

It seems that for all the wisdom of Irish Times they fail to see than "smarter" and "work harder" are not one and the same.

Boys earn more than girls. There's way more jobs for the boys than girls who are more likely to go off on maternity leave. Once girls have decided to have babies, that's it. Productivity and drive goes out the window and all they care about is their kids.

Cabaal

dublinguy2004 wrote:

Boys earn more than girls. There's way more jobs for the boys than girls who are more likely to go off on maternity leave. Once girls have decided to have babies, that's it. Productivity and drive goes out the window and all they care about is their kids.

Ah in fairness you can not paint all girls with the same brush!,
By your logic women + baby = does not care about her career anymore

You have alot to learn matey....
:rolleyes:

nobodythere

No, this is untrue. Girls are more vulnerable and susceptable to external pressures that dictate the importance of the exams. Guys know better than girls that it's just not that fúcking important.

*Angel*

tribulus wrote:

girls do seem to be more motivated or focused for exams iv'e found. However any girls i knew that did very well in their leaving cert did nothing else outside of school - no sports, past times etc. basically just school school school- maybe that's a trend in general between boys/girls and a possible factor for better exam grades... then again they might just be smarter

Hah I know loads of guys who never did sport after school, you can't just say it's the girls... I'm hurt by this! I did hockey and I did pretty good.

Unfortunately it's true that careers can be harder to succeed in for women due to maternity leave. Life's a bitch, end of.

the smiley one

*Ahem* In MY year the girls far out-performed the boys...and most of the girls who got the top marks were really involved with stuff like drama, sport, music, debating etc. during 6th year. There were a few who gave up their whole life for the year...but there were also the boys who did that, and just didn't get the results.

I'm sensing bitterness....

michaelanthony

A Woman's job is to have children.

tribulus

i just meant that in my own experience - not indicative of everyone elses - i found that the girls i knew who scored high focused entirely on the leaving cert and nothing else, where guys i knew that also did well still played football/rugby etc. and did their usual stuff.

angeldelight

I think it's just to do with the difference in maturity at age 17/18. Going on when I did my LC (2004), right up to the end of the school year when the teachers were doing revision with us, not giving us homework but getting us to do exam questions and see what problems we came up with, the guys just thought yay no homework and went out and played football. The majority of the girls realised that past exam questions were going to be very very helpful and did revise, ask the teachers questions etc. That's just one example but there were others, e.g. the guys thinking it was hilarious to fail the mocks etc having competitions to see who got the lowest...

the smiley one

I'm just going to ignore the spam....

Well as I said the girls did really well in my school. LIke, for example 3 of us in our year got 590 points.I did the normal work I usually do (work for class tests and then CRAM!!!) and I captained the debating team, played piano and swam throughout the year. The other two girls, granted, did a lot more study than I did but also excersised regularly, and one of them is an amazing singer who kept up all her music classes, gigs and stuff. Another friend of mine got 560 and did the school play, her gold medal speech and drama exam, piano, cello, and swam throughout the year. Oh and did I mention she got 560.
You (not personally) cannot just make sweeping statements and then back it up with utter ****e like "well all girls are swots"....cuz its utter ****e

tribulus

the smiley one wrote:

I'm just going to ignore the spam....

Well as I said the girls did really well in my school. LIke, for example 3 of us in our year got 590 points.I did the normal work I usually do (work for class tests and then CRAM!!!) and I captained the debating team, played piano and swam throughout the year. The other two girls, granted, did a lot more study than I did but also excersised regularly, and one of them is an amazing singer who kept up all her music classes, gigs and stuff. Another friend of mine got 560 and did the school play, her gold medal speech and drama exam, piano, cello, and swam throughout the year. Oh and did I mention she got 560.
You (not personally) cannot just make sweeping statements and then back it up with utter ****e like "well all girls are swots"....cuz its utter ****e

this was your experience of it, as was mine above. There are so many factors that can influence people during exam times, that it would be very hard to quantify even for one particular year, whether boys are smarter than girls or vica-versa.

newgrange

The style of questions (and answers required) in the Irish exam system suits how girls like to answer questions. Simple as that. Set a test girls will do better on, and they will do better on it. It's not a great mystery.

The State Examinations Commission are aware of this and are currently looking at ways to counteract the bias.

There are also the social factors. Boys want to do well, but often do not want to be seen as 'swots', though at the very high end of achievement this is not as much a problem. There will be research published shortly (by the NCCA) covering a cohort of students in their move from primary to secondary school, and as they move up through second-level that expands on these points.

It's not a matter of 'smarter' than, but then, the examinations system does not measure how smart anyone is.

dudara

I think that there is no doubt that teenage females are better at applying themselves to tasks like the leaving cert than their male counterparts.

However, this has nothing to do with intelligence. The Leaving Cert is a system that rewards hard work and dedication and women are good at that. I think I read somewhere once that once people get to college, this imbalance is pretty much levelled out. It would be interesting if anyone could prove or disprove this for me.

abercrombie

personally i see the leaving certificate as like a competition..or an ongoing match!! all these students in ireland are competing for their place on a specific course and the higher the points they can get, the more likely they will beat their fellow competetors!! For the students who REALLY want their course...they know that they have to out-do everyone else and they know what they have to do to make that happen!

the smiley one

tribulus wrote:

this was your experience of it, as was mine above. There are so many factors that can influence people during exam times, that it would be very hard to quantify even for one particular year, whether boys are smarter than girls or vica-versa.

I totally agree. I also don't think that the LC is a measure of intelligence at all, but intelligence does help.... :rolleyes:. I don't think a definitive conclusion can be reached logically on this topic; however I would agree with someone who said (I think) about girls being more mature than boys at that age, therefore girls find it easier to apply themselves.

Basically the Times needed to fill column space.

EamonnKeane

I think it's just to do with the difference in maturity at age 17/18. Going on when I did my LC (2004), right up to the end of the school year when the teachers were doing revision with us, not giving us homework but getting us to do exam questions and see what problems we came up with, the guys just thought yay no homework and went out and played football.

So apparently just wanting to enjoy an evening free of work is "immature"?

No, this is untrue. Girls are more vulnerable and susceptable to external pressures that dictate the importance of the exams. Guys know better than girls that it's just not that fúcking important.

Yes, because in our society a woman does no wrong. She is not responsible for her actions. A pregnant 12-year-old was made to have sex by peer pressure and the media. A bulimic shoves her fingers down her gullet three times a day because of glossy magazines. A East European hooker was forced into the job by evil men who exploit her, it has nothing to do with her being able to make €200 an hour turning tricks for Irishmen compared to €40 back in Latvia.

But opinions like these are everywhere. A woman who cheats on her husband does it because he doesn't pay her attention. A man who cheats on his wife is an evil sex-crazed pig. A young man who leaves his girlfriend when she is pregnant is the Devil incarnate. A young woman who abandons her baby at a bus stop or gives him/her up for adoption is doing it because she is too young to cope and everyone understands. Ads depicting naked/scantily clad women are degrading, but ads with naked men aren't, even that skin cream ad that finishes with a man kneeling down and kissing a pregnant women's stomach.

However, this has nothing to do with intelligence. The Leaving Cert is a system that rewards hard work and dedication and women are good at that.

Dear Lord! And men aren't? I suppose it's a difference in learning abilities: tests have shown men learn best through "active" learning (doing things, making things, experimentation etc.) whereas women do better through "passive" learning (e.g. the standard classroom situation)

Boys earn more than girls. There's way more jobs for the boys than girls who are more likely to go off on maternity leave. Once girls have decided to have babies, that's it. Productivity and drive goes out the window and all they care about is their kids.

This is another baffling common opinion: namely, that girls do better than lads in the LC because they're smarter, but when men do better career-wise than women it's because of sexism. When there are more male TDs than female, it's becasue of sexism, not because, say, there are more male candidates and more male party members? Or that for a million years men have generally taken leadership in "external" matters (e.g. dealings with other tribes/kingdoms/countries) whereas women take the leadership in "internal" matters (e.g. the home)
As for "Productivity and drive [go] out the window and all [new mothers] care about is their kids", first off, let me say show me a person who cares about their career more than their kids and I'll shoot them. Also, paternity leave has been introduced for new fathers who want to spend time with their new kids.

Lastly, the common assumption that girls beat boys at everything except construction, engineering and tech drawing. This just isn't true. Although the papers say that something like 80% of girls who took Higher Level maths got a C3 or better, compared to 78% of boys, this obscures the fact that 4 times as many boys that girls take Higher Level maths. The same gose for biology, physics, chemistry etc. Higher percentage of girls get C3 or better, but far more boys take it. This just confirms what mental exams have shown: men, in general tend to be better than women at logical subjects (science, maths, business) whereas women, in general tend to be better than men at artistic and linguistic subjects (English, Irish, foreign languages, art).

personally i see the leaving certificate as like a competition..or an ongoing match!! all these students in ireland are competing for their place on a specific course and the higher the points they can get, the more likely they will beat their fellow competetors!! For the students who REALLY want their course...they know that they have to out-do everyone else and they know what they have to do to make that happen!

Unfortunately that is what it is: our doctors, teachers, lawyers, nurses, engineers, businesspeople, etc. of the future are chosen via a ridiculous competition that has very little relevance to their chosen field and will teach them virtually no useful skills. It disturbs me that you seem so pleased by this.

angeldelight

EamonnKeane wrote:

So apparently just wanting to enjoy an evening free of work is "immature"?

No not at all. Doing it every night in the 3 months leading up to the Leaving Cert indicates to me anyway that they lack a certain amount of cop on. I'm not suggesting every girl in my classes went home and studied every night but we certainly did more work than the guys and the results showed it.

Yes I agree with you that more guys take Physics. In my higher level Physics class there were 4 girls and 23 guys. The girls got an A1 and 3 A2s between us. Of the 23 guys two got an A2 and three failed. The rest were in between. We had an excellent teacher who came in early, went home late, corrected as much extra work as we wanted, explained things so they were crystal clear yet the guys were too immature to bother asking her about stuff they weren't sure of cause they might have to stay behind for an extra 10 minutes after school and miss out on going out for as long with friends. This isn't just me suggesting why, I asked some of them at different times and that was the type of response I was getting.


And on another note, how is a guy kissing a pregnant woman's stomach degrading? May not be your cup of tea but it's hardly comparable to some of the other things you mentioned!!

abercrombie

basically this thread has turned into a battle of the sexes...next you'll be going on about who's stronger and going into the whole body and mental thing!!!

EamonnKeanne is right ya no...it is disturbing to know that Ireland's future leaders, doctors, teachers, lawyers, nurses, engineers, businesspeople etc are chosen based on their results on an exam with no relevance to their field whatsoever!! Exams only show you how well you get on in exams and cope with the pressure! They tell nothing about your IQ or if u faint at the sight of blood (medicine) or if you can argue a point (law) or if you have patience (teacher) or a way with kids!

AARRRGH

In Ireland, girls do better in school, guys do better in university.

It's just about priorities/focus etc. It has nothing to do with "intelligence".

Kate_17

How is the LC "just a memory test"? Granted, there's a lot of memorising but you need to be intelligent at the end of the day to get into the top bracket of marks. People can memorise loads but to get a high points course you need intelligence too. I think labelling it a "memory test" and nothing more is in fact quite insulting to intelligent people who worked hard.

AARRRGH

Kate_17 wrote:

How is the LC "just a memory test"? Granted, there's a lot of memorising but you need to be intelligent at the end of the day to get into the top bracket of marks. People can memorise loads but to get a high points course you need intelligence too. I think labelling it a "memory test" and nothing more is in fact quite insulting to intelligent people who worked hard.

Not true. I have done -

Leaving Cert
Computer Science Degree
Math Degree
...and now I'm about to set up a business.

Leaving Cert IS just a memory test.
Computer Science required some brain.
Maths required a lot of brain.
Running a business requires a lot lot of brain.

Really, the Leaving Cert is the slug of brain activity.

JC 2K3

No offense to any girls but has anyone noticed that generally girls tend to be less individual than guys. Not that all guys are amazingly individual or anything but because of all this testosterone etc rushing around our bodies we have an urge to compete, to win, to be different and only follow what we believe to be true. This drive is far less than girls, who tend to accept the fact that the only way they're going to do well in life is to study hard and do well in the leaving. Guys on the other hand are more likely to take risks and less likely to feel guilty about having fun when they should be studying etc. The truth is that a lot of the time guys at this age are convinced that they are always right, while girls are more accepting of other people's opinions. Of course everyone is different, but talking in extremes, guys are more driven to be themselves during their teenage years and if they want to study they will, if they don't they won't force themselves to, girls on the other hand have less of an individual drive to do things and because so much emphasis is put on the leaving they think that they have to do well in the leaving and will on average study more than guys.

hmm I waffled on a bit above, if it's confusing think of it this way, basically, because of the hormones in guys bodies during puberty, which can last until they're 18 and beyond they have more of an urge to compete, if a teacher says "You have to study and do well in your leaving" a guy is more likely to think, "You can't tell me what to do, I'll study if I want" whilst a girl would probably think, "Ok, the teacher is older and more knowledgeable than me, I have to take their advice". Guys are more immature? You could describe it that way I guess, but that really is tarring every guy with the same brush, some guys have the drive to compete and win, but are intelligent enough to know that if they listen to their teachers and study hard they will come out on top

It all evens out in college when hormones settle down though.

the smiley one

JC 2K3 wrote:

... because of all this testosterone etc rushing around our bodies we have an urge to compete, to win...

Hold on a second. Both Abercrombie and EamonnKeane have put forward the fact that the LC is just one big competition....so you are telling me that this "urge" to win and compete by-passes the LC...?

JC 2K3 wrote:

This drive is far less than girls, who tend to accept the fact that the only way they're going to do well in life is to study hard and do well in the leaving.

That's an incredibly sweeping and misguided statement. I know plenty of extremely competitive girls (including me!), and also you are portraying girls as stupid, short-sighted beings who have no common sense. come on!!!

JC 2K3 wrote:

The truth is that a lot of the time guys at this age are convinced that they are always right, while girls are more accepting of other people's opinions.

And that's not immaturity on the guys part?

JC 2K3 wrote:

Of course everyone is different, but talking in extremes, guys are more driven to be themselves during their teenage years and if they want to study they will, if they don't they won't force themselves to, girls on the other hand have less of an individual drive to do things and because so much emphasis is put on the leaving they think that they have to do well in the leaving and will on average study more than guys.

now that, is a load of bollocks. You are basically just making excuses for lazy guys and chastising driven girls who know what they have to do to get the course that they want in college.

JC 2K3 wrote:

hmm I waffled on a bit above, if it's confusing think of it this way, basically, because of the hormones in guys bodies during puberty, which can last until they're 18 and beyond they have more of an urge to compete, if a teacher says "You have to study and do well in your leaving" a guy is more likely to think, "You can't tell me what to do, I'll study if I want" whilst a girl would probably think, "Ok, the teacher is older and more knowledgeable than me, I have to take their advice". Guys are more immature? You could describe it that way I guess, but that really is tarring every guy with the same brush, some guys have the drive to compete and win, but are intelligent enough to know that if they listen to their teachers and study hard they will come out on top

again with the competing...
Also you are implying that by not applying themsleves to study or whatever they are asserting their manliness and "competing". With what exactly?

thejovialhost

Kate_17 wrote:

How is the LC "just a memory test"? Granted, there's a lot of memorising but you need to be intelligent at the end of the day to get into the top bracket of marks. People can memorise loads but to get a high points course you need intelligence too. I think labelling it a "memory test" and nothing more is in fact quite insulting to intelligent people who worked hard.

Its no insult just cold hard fact.its regurgitation of things you will nerer use again, INTELLIGENT people realise its all about memory and apply themselves that why they do better
Intelligence infact has nothing to do with it-you could have the best mind in the world but if you dont answer what they want you...FAIL. Stupid system i know-it awards those who can slog away mindlessly for hours not thinking about the material merly reproducing the textbook

SparkyLarks

No there not.

Girls do better in the leving cert but the leaving cert is more suited to girls.
That said the leaving cert is a crap system of examining understanding knowledge.

The LC examins what you can remember, not what you understand.

How do you measure intelligance, yes understanding fermat's last theorm takes intelligance but writing a song takes another form of intellignace, being able to catch a rugby ball and run a pace through a bunch of defenders takes another form of intelligance.

The most worring aspect of the article is how tredialy the media is to say, look girls are better than boys( when every rational person knows that the two sexes are diferent and neither can be delclared better).

The media now seams to be constantly pushing an idea that women are better than men. that men are stupid. and noone is complaining about this.

Imagine the outrage if the atricle read. Boys are more intelligant than girls.

chickens

I read the article with interest in the irish times and I noticed a similar one in the irish independant, one thing that shocked me greatly was the response to the news that girls had done better. Where I had expected congratulations or simple talk for need to fill up space there was critism not of the boy but of the exam. Now this may be my view but ireland is a well educated, forward country, the leaving cert has worked well for this, and I don't see why that fact that igrls do better is a problem.

No-one is born knowing, so it must be that girls simple have manage to learn the material. As for the maturity argument, I find it often easy to spot the different attitude even on this forum, a different attitude wil always have a different outcome, it is my understanding that boys will eventually mature to the stage where they shall study. would it not be than that they could take the exam and be fine? if that was the case then it is hardly the exams fault, more the hormones. would it be fair to make the exam harded for the girls? to change one of the best education systems in the world?

I think that this is a silly argument, it is unfortunate that the boys do worse, but I think that is all it is. it is often stated that the exam is one of the best so to change i seems pointless, and I doubt that many bys would enjoy or agree to an extra 2 years in school waiting to mature.

I must say I was suprised by this article and by the reaction, I think it is very strange.

segadreamcast

This thread stinks of amateur senior debating and, worse still, amateur melodrama in some parts - give it a rest.

:Keith:

If you want my opinion, articles like this are only put in newspapers to stir up debate and it's doing so. The title of the article may be phrased incorrectly in relation to the context of the article and I think it can be viewed in numerous ways for example, it's raising the fact that statistically that girls are outclassing boys academically in the leaving cert. which is incorrectly seen as a test of intellect by alot of people.

Shrimp

dublindude wrote:

In Ireland, girls do better in school, guys do better in university.

It's just about priorities/focus etc. It has nothing to do with "intelligence".

that prolly goes back to a few generations ago, the way women (most fo them) would not go to college, but stay at home etc.. and guys would go on to Uni

fly_agaric

Some people have said that things level out at university. Of course, that assumes that the boys can actually get through the gates. AFAIK, the male/female ratio in Irish universities has been falling for a while. I think its ~ 40/60 in TCD. Engineering/Physics/Computing are the exceptions to the rule and there are constant complaints about that.
Take law for example...
Even this report by Ivana Bacik on Women in Law can't hide the facts behind the rhetoric about "old boys clubs" etc.

http://www.tcd.ie/Law/WomeninLaw.html

"It was found that two-thirds of all full-time undergraduate enrolments in Law at university nationally (66%) are now female."

The situation in teaching is well known too (another one the media like to bang on about).

edit.. I'm no so sure that things change in university either. Just generalising ridiculously from limited personal experience, the women still seem to be the ones with their heads screwed on who go to lectures and tutorials and study hard. The fellahs, well

defiantshrimp

Basically girls mature a lot faster than guys do and have that moment of epiphany that says to them that “damn, I better work at this if I want to go to university” much earlier than guys. That is not to say that all guys are less mature than girls during teenage years but that is the general trend. I had the (dis)pleasure of going to a boys school for the past 6 years and the immaturity of some of my classmates right up to the day we graduated before the leaving cert was shocking. I couldn’t find anything similar in any of the girls schools I had friends in.

I’m not sure if girls could be called smarter than guys but since a big part of any achievement is plain effort and motivation it is easy to see why they do better than guys in general. I know the statistics from IQ tests show that boys tend to have both more exceptionally brilliant and poor individuals in mathematical ability than girls who tend to have less variation, but the average ability is the same. There is just a greater standard deviation with guys. So you’d expect there to be more exceptional male mathematical minds than females but also more males than females with very poor mathematical ability. But beyond that I don’t know much. IMO guys are more overtly competitive (again in general) than girls but from my experience they don’t tend to compete on academics. In fact there seems to be this kind of idea that the less study one does the cooler you are among certain social groups. But that is really just immaturity.

Kate_17

LC DOES involve intelligence... people can work very hard and memorise everything but not get the top points, as I have seen this year - is this not proof? In groups like science subjects, there is perhaps a lot more memorising than there should be. But what about languages? Maths and Applied Maths, where you test your applications? Practical subjects, like Construction, Art or Music for example, where you show your abilities practically and also evaluate? Orals? ETC. Every subject has learning and applications. Hell, if it was all about memorising the results would be a lot better than they are. You need that bit of intelligence to go the full way.

DingChavez

I could have eaisly got top marks when I did the LC, if I worked months at it. But I couldn't be arsed as my first choice only needed 320 points. Does that make me unintelligent? I wasn't a bit stressed doing the leaving cert. Some people get way too worked up. It's not the end of the world..... it'll be there next year if you don't get enough points.

Kate_17

Ding, I am not saying that people who don't work or don't get 9A1's or whatever are unintelligent, I am saying that for high-points courses in particular, memorising alone won't work, you also need intelligence. You are right in what you say though, the LC is what you make of it yourself and whether you work or not is your own choice, as long as you'll be happy with what you get.

the smiley one

Kate_17 wrote:

LC DOES involve intelligence... people can work very hard and memorise everything but not get the top points, as I have seen this year - is this not proof? In groups like science subjects, there is perhaps a lot more memorising than there should be. But what about languages? Maths and Applied Maths, where you test your applications? Practical subjects, like Construction, Art or Music for example, where you show your abilities practically and also evaluate? Orals? ETC. Every subject has learning and applications. Hell, if it was all about memorising the results would be a lot better than they are. You need that bit of intelligence to go the full way.

hmmm...I dunno, a lot of hard work really can go a long way imo. Maths and Applied maths can be mastered by doing every past/sample/mock paper available. People who aren't naturally talented at art, music, construction studies etc. tend not to go for those type of subjects. Also a large part of orals can be learnt off- scary but true.
I think the secret lies in how much effort it takes for you to memorise the stuff.....that's where the intelligence comes in.

nobodythere

EamonnKeane wrote:

Yes, because in our society a woman does no wrong. She is not responsible for her actions. A pregnant 12-year-old was made to have sex by peer pressure and the media. A bulimic shoves her fingers down her gullet three times a day because of glossy magazines. A East European hooker was forced into the job by evil men who exploit her, it has nothing to do with her being able to make €200 an hour turning tricks for Irishmen compared to €40 back in Latvia.

This is not what I was saying at all. I actually don't see how you got that from my comment. I mean the teachers tell us all just how big a deal the LC is at the start of the year and girls tend to take it more to heart. First the MedHeads flip out and go into overdrive, and the rest of them go "OH **** THE LEAVING CERT THE LEAVVVVVING CERT!!!!". The importance of the exam appears to be dictated more by how important their fellow students think it is. This is just my personal experience - I do not know one girl who has not cried because of the leaving cert.

In my experience, more lads handle it rationally and do the reasoning independantly - i.e. when the MedHeads were flipping out I was thinking "right Arts is 400 - that's a C1 on average per subject - no need to flip". We kind of know it's not the end of the world.

I am not saying that this applies to everyone but it's a contributing factor to why girls do better. It's also true that they're more "mature", if by that you mean their ability to consider the long-term consequences over the immediate ones are generally better than lads.

D-Generate

Going off on a tangent here in relation to males and females attending university. It has already been said that there is now a greater attendance of females in university than males in all but the science faculties. However recently there has been a massive drive in promotion of positive discrimination in favour of women in these faculties.

As a case study we will examine UCC who have the ever popular (for females) "Women in Science" project. This involves organising trips and tours of the engineering and science faculties by UCC staff. This invitation is offered to all the female schools and the females in mixed schools in the Cork region. It has been applauded for being very informative and for increasing the numbers of females in these areas over the past couple of years but is it really that fair? Boys schools such as my own and perhaps worse so, boys in mixed schools, were not offered such opportunities to get to know what a course will entail other than reading the CAO handbook. The Guidance Counsellor in my school went well out of her way in organising such tours for our benefit but many schools do not have teachers with the same amount of dedications so what happens to them?
Do they get guided tours of faculties where women outnumber men by a substantial margin? Commerce for Men? Men in Medicine perhaps? Fortunately this is not the case because if they were to do so I (aswell as feminist pressure groups) would consider it sexit. Surely the characters in the Engineering faculty who pride themselves in being so logical consider this blatent discrimination against males to be inequality to the nth degree? Just because it is in favour of females does not make it fair.

Now back to the Leaving Cert. I think as we can see from the many studies in to how males and females brains work that men have a leaning towards so called Logic and Spatial subjects where as women prove much better at Creativity and Languages and subjects involving heavy absorption of reading matierial. But is the old Leaving Cert fair in accounting for these discrepincies? It is pretty obvious that it is not. Maths based subjects which for many males will be their strongest asset only accounts for two subjects, namely Mathematics and Applied Mathematics.
The latter is unavailable in many schools and it is generally only males schools that offer it. As has already been mentioned, 3 times more males take honours maths than females so there is another substantial fact showing how Maths appeals more to the male brain.
Another popular male subject is Physics. This subject proved to have very low numbers of females taking it with the old course but with the introduction of the new syllabus they took much of the maths sections off the course and increased the theory and in corrospondence wiht this female numbers rose sharply in it.
Chemistry too had a course change to make it more accesable to females and again much maths was taken off the course and replaced by theory. It is the second most popular science in general.
The most popular science is Biology, it is also the clear leader in most popular science by females. This is a heavily based theory subject with much learning and little to no maths.
The only other really number based subject other than teh ones mentioned above is Accounting and as anyone who can attest to taking the exam this year there was very little to none calculator work and incredible amounts of theory questions in comparrisson to other years.

It is hardly fair on males to take away their advantage in maths and logic based courses when there is already a disproportionate amount of theory and language based subjects. At the moment there are only 2 proper maths subjects but there are over 9 languages. To further punish males by diluting the maths part of subjects is highly sexist and just not contributing to a fair system.
I took all the available maths based subjects in my school that i could. Maths, Applied Maths, Chemistry and Physics. In each of these subjects I received an A1 but i was punished heavily by the languages. I was awarded a B3 in English and a C1 in German.
Am I thick because i'm poor in languages? I don't really think so, I and the general male brain just have an intelligence that is not fairly awarded in the current system of theory over logic and with the current trend it looks like we won't ever be.