Is the male sex the weaker sex?

An article in the Reader's Digest has some interesting things to say about the relative mental abilities of boys and girls.  The author of the article, Anna Murline, reports that scientists are exploring very real biological differences that may make boys "more impulsive and less efficient classroom learners -- in sum, the weaker sex, a role typically associated with women".

According to Murline, the vulnerabilities of boys should be traced back to the womb.  By the time a baby boy enters the world, he trails the average girl developmentally.  Males, she says, quoting research evidence, have a lower proportion of grey matter than women, which may mean that female brains have certain advantages in processing information.  She quotes Michael Gurian, co-author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently, who asserts that the female brain is the easier brain to teach. 

This is by no means a revelation.  Year after year, in the CBSE and the SSC examinations, girls fare better than boys.  I have heard people say that, unlike boys, girls are so unoriginal and uncreative that they can painstakingly mug up an entire book and reproduce it in an examination, and that since our examinations are content-based and memory-oriented, it is not surprising that girls outscore boys.

But ask any school teacher, and he or she will tell you that this is not the case.  In general, girls' classroom work involving mental abilities is qualitatively better than those of boys.  By and large, boys don't seem to be so motivated as girls, and they have difficulty concentrating.  I am aware that it is politically incorrect on the part of a teacher to talk about these differences; what prompted me to do so was the Reader's Digest article referred to above.

Raising Boys, a book written by Steve Biddulph, a psychologist, makes an insightful study of this phenomenon.  According to Biddulph, boys have slower brain development than girls and so they find it difficult to do the things expected of them at that stage.  Until about the age of 17, they don't catch up with girls.  His finding that boys are "just on a different learning time-table" appears to strengthen the belief in Western educational circles that many boys should start school a year later than girls.