[Poss and Soss]

Reading a thread here there are many instances where there are significantly more boys than girls in kinder /preschool / FYOS classes. This seems to be the experience amongst my friends with older kids too.

Why is this? Are heaps of girls sent to single sex schools and boys aren't? Or are there more male children? Why this imbalance or is there just a perceived imbalance?

[sparassidae]

I have sent four children to FYOS in 3 different schools in 3 different parts of Sydney and have never noticed this sort of imbalance. Obviously occasionally you may get a cohort with an imbalance, but it wouldn't be every year.

[Lucretia Borgia]

Not sure, maybe ( a big maybe) more boys than girls are kept back, you know if their birthday falls close to the cut off etc, so with girls you are getting the statistical average (ie 51-49) however the boys numbers are a bit out, because you are getting the boys born in the year, plus those who were kept back? (I have absolutely no evidence to back this up...always dangerous on EB!)

[KLF84]

Not sure but when my DSS was in his FYOS there was 11 boys and 25 girls

[Bek+3]

If you look at the BoS (which I was last night for a uni assignment) you will see that more males are born then females.

I will get the stats, BRB!!

[countrymel]

*dons flame retardent skivvy*

Is it that we are more likely to notice when there are more boys than girls but not the other way around?
They can tend toward slightly more rambunctiousness!


My nephews have the opposite problem - my sister knows that there were more baby boys than girls in the district when hers were born, she had noticed it in her baby group and asked the CHN who backed it up (the scientific 'must have been something in the water' answer!)

But nephew one at least has many, many more girls in his class than boys (not sure about #2)

That in part is because the private boys school nearby puts the fear of god into potential parents and has spread the 'knowledge' around that really the ONLY way to get accepted into their high school is by being a continuing student from the primary... not true - but very lucrative for them!

[WibbleWobble]

Maybe it is due to the type of school or their philosophy?

At DD's kinder there are only about 4 or 5 boys in the class. The kinder is one that doesn't encourage rough and tumble sort of play, so maybe parents of boys would prefer they went elsewhere.

On the other hand my nephew went to Steiner and the class was made up of more boys than girls.

[LynnyP]

Wehre we live there are lots of relatively close single sex independent girls schools. There has been some research that shows girls do better in a single sex school. My daughter goes to an independent school with boys and girls but the boys and girls are taught in single sex classrooms until year 9 when they start having electives together and are largely in mixed classes in Years 11 and 12. The sexes are balanced in the junior school and then there are more boys than girls in the senior school due to the increased number of choices.

[Bek+3]

If you look at the BoS (which I was last night for a uni assignment) you will see that more males are born then females.

I will get the stats, BRB!!

Bugger, I can't find it now. It was a really cool looking graph. I did see that there are 105.5 males born to every 100 females but I wanted to link you the graph plus see how many thousand extra boys that equaled to each year. The graph showed that more males die from accident and disease and the numbers equal up by about 20 then from around 40 there are more females then males and that trend continues until old age and death.




EFS

This post has been edited by Bek+3: 31/08/2012, 12:54 PM

[bolo]

When dd was born, there was about 9 girls to 16 boys in the combined
Mothers/ante natal groups I was part of. She started school last year, I
Was expecting many more boys, but the split was (about) 80 girls to 40 boys.
Twice as many girls!! Not complaining, but I do wonder where all the boys are.