Sex Differences
Leaving the degrees of intelligence, we turn to a distinction which is of an entirely different type—the difference between boys and girls.
It is difficult to disentangle this problem from a mass of social considerations which attach to it. Women and girls have grown up under a social system that has assumed on their part fundamentally different tastes and interests from those of men and boys. The social system has sometimes expressed itself in terms which imply inferiority of women as compared with men. It is natural, therefore, that at a period when women and girls are taking a new place in the social scheme, there should be at first a good deal of attention given to the demonstration that women are not inferior to men. The simplest demonstration can, of course, be given by putting girls into the same classes with boys and requiring of them the same intellectual tasks. For some years past the experiment has been under way. Girls have shown themselves not only quite as competent intellectually as boys but in some respects superior.
During the period of experimentation, however, there has persisted a difference in tastes and interests; and the demand for a special training for girls was never louder than to-day when the proof that girls are quite as competent as boys seems to be incontrovertible.
The reasons for this demand are connected in part with the later practical uses to which girls expect to put their training and in part with the fact that girls give attention to certain groups of facts which boys neglect, while boys, on the other hand, have their special spheres of interest.
For example, boys are always brought up to interest themselves in mechanical appliances. When a boy comes to study natural science, therefore, it is easily possible to introduce the subject by examples of a mechanical type. Parents do not give girls mechanical toys, society assumes that girls will not engage in occupations which call for a knowledge of machinery, consequently they do not readily take up courses in physics which begin with mechanics.
The present situation, then, is something like this: girls are proved to be equal to boys in school ability, but continue with the full sanction of society to have tastes and interests different from those of boys.