[Greg F]

What about Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, and Abraham Lincoln? I've read this stuff often about girls being better with language but it has never made sense to me after I compare the hypothesis to the reality of literature and public speaking.

[Sherman Logan]

The traditional viewpoint is that women are on average better than men verbally. Or at least higher in quantity.

Why males have so greatly outperformed females over the centuries in quality is a very good question. I don’t have any facile answers.

Some of it, without doubt, has especially in the past been due to prejudice. But it seems unlikely that all of the differential can be assigned to this factor.

If women are upset about this differential, the cure is for them to sit down and write great literature. Not to stand up mediocre women writers of yesterday and today and claim that their works were really great literature ignored only because they were women.

[metmom]

This is a *in general* kind of thing. Just like in general men are taller than women, in general men have more immediate physical strength than women, in general women have greater endurance than men, in general women have a higher pain tolerance than men, in general girls are more verbal at an early age than boys.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions. If women had the education and opportunity to be in positions of being able to write and speak as men have had for the centuries, you might find women producing comparable works.

[xtinct]

Not to mention Hemingway, Frost, and currently Grisham, Patterson, Parker --> highly entertaining.

My boys were in elementary, middle, high school in the 80s and 90s... Blessedly, they were not only in the gifted/talented programs but their school in OK was the learning lab where all the specialists in math, reading, science, etc. were teaching and planning the curriculum for the entire state.

A friend's son was in a school where 3 teachers in his formative years did NOT like boys. It took a village to help that child catch up to my sons.

All 3 are engineers now.

I find articles like the one we posted to annoying because I'm tired of teachers making excuses for not teaching certain children.

I went through school in Boston. The elementary school I attended can only be described as international. But the nuns had a take no prisoners attitude. Each and every child in that school got into an exam school when they graduated from the 8th grade. And, remarkably, they all spoke, read, and wrote English as if they'd been born here. I know this is true. There were 7 kids in my family -- parents spoke, read, and wrote French. We were only allowed to communicate in English at home as ORDERED by the nuns.