Imagine you are sitting your year 12 exam. Girls sit at the tables with pink-coloured test papers, while boys sit at the tables with the blue test papers. It may sound ridiculous, but this is exactly what is being proposed by the president of the (British) Adam Smith Institute, Dr Madsen Pirie.
Pirie's arguments have received considerable coverage in the Australian press. This is just the latest in a series of arguments by academics and the establishment media attempting to prove that affirmative action programs in schools have disadvantaged boys.
The development of these programs in the 1970s, under the pressure of a strong feminist movement, has contributed to significant improvements in the marks that female students achieve in most subjects at year 12 level.
Despite the fact that boys still have good year 12 results, the reactionary attacks of some academics and the media has led to a national inquiry into boys education, which will report later this year. Girls' education has never been the subject of such an inquiry.
Dr Pirie argues men and women learn in fundamentally different ways. He says that boys are risk-takers and therefore prefer cramming for exams that test empirical knowledge while girls prefer continuous assessment where they can explain ideas and give "personal responses". He also argues that boys are better at seeing the "big picture" while girls have a better grasp on detail because they are methodical.
Pirie comes to the conclusion that the move towards continuous assessment over the last two decades has discriminated against boys, and boosted the marks of girls. This is a problem, he says, because "If we select the methodical over the risk takers ... will Britain still be capable of meeting the challenges the world throws its way? While the country might be more peaceable ... will it still be as inventive and creative? Will it still produce penicillin and hovercraft?" He proposes that male and female students be steered into different methods of assessment.
The idea that boys are "big-picture" risk takers, while girls relate to emotions and bury themselves in detail regurgitates sexist stereotypes. Assessing girls on their knowledge of detail with frequent assignments, while assessing boys on their "big picture" ideas in an exam will make study more difficult for girls than boys. It is reminiscent of the days when girls were barred from studying science and maths based subjects because their brains were "more suited" to humanities.
Far from being a "crisis" in boys' education, they still have access to options at school that girls.
One of the reasons that female students do better on the whole at school than boys is because very few young women take trade-based vocational subjects. Sexism has ruled out apprenticeships as a viable option for most young women. Girls are thus more likely than boys to enrol in academic subjects.
But higher marks in schools do not translate into a better position in the work force for women. Women are still concentrated in particular occupations, and earn considerably less money than men.
In the teaching service in NSW, for example, women make up 75% of primary teachers, but men are 75% of school principals and senior managers. Although female law students in NSW universities do better than male students, on average women lawyers' starting salaries are $5000 a year less than men's, and they are more likely to be unemployed.
Men who have not finished high school earn 30% more on average than women who have not.
Rather than attempting to make things harder for girls at school, we need to fight for gender equality of opportunity in all professions. This is how we can translate gains in schooling for women into real differences in women's lives.
BY JAQUIE MOON
[Jaquie Moon is a member of the socialist youth organisation Resistance.]