If you want to make a game of ’30 Seconds’ more competitive, or add a slightly barbed edge to ‘Trivial Pursuit’, pit men and women against one another.

The argument of who is more intelligent isn’t exactly new, but a study, titled The Martha Effect: The compounding female advantage in South African higher education, might just have answered that one for us.

Carried out by Dr Nic Spaull and Hendrik van Broekhuizen, and published in the Stellenbosch Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics and the Bureau for Economic Research at Stellenbosch University, here’s a look at the findings.

Drum roll please and over to IOL:

Spaull said that on average girls do better than boys and said he hoped the study would prompt us to ask why females seem to be doing better at school and university, but worse in the labour market.

“They learn to read much quicker than boys do, which is true of pretty much all middle- and high-income countries. In South Africa girls also perform better in mathematics.”

Spaull and Van Broekhuizen, of the research group on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP) in the university’s Department of Economics said they looked at large nationally representative survey from 2011 and 2015…

He said the most interesting part of the study was to see how large and systematic the female advantage was.

“We found strong evidence of a large female advantage that continues to grow at each hurdle of the higher education process. To be specific, relative to their male counterparts we find that there were 27% more females who qualified for university, 34% more who enrolled in university, 56% more who complete any undergraduate qualification and 66% more who attain a bachelor’s degree. This despite there being roughly equal numbers of boys and girls at the start of school.”

Care to mansplain those stats, anyone?

There was one area where boys had the upper hand, though, doing better in matric mathematics and science than their female counterparts.

Oh, the other area where men enjoy an advantage is also worth probing:

“Females are paid 15% to 17% less than men for the exact same work… The most surprising thing about the study was the females were always and everywhere 20% less likely to drop out of university, even in male-dominated fields such as engineering and computer science where they are severely under-represented.”

Preach.

Pretty, pretty interesting hey…

[source:iol]