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gender gap



This morning, during my lovely commute on I-40, this sentence caught my
attention: "educated men know more than educated women."  And then this
one: "college educated women know only slightly more than high school
educated men".  This was on NPR, and it was Andrew Kohut speaking.  He did
a study that revealed that while women and men are equally interested in
news, men know more about news.  Some of his conclusions as to why women
know less are that women read newspapers less and that they use "hard news
sources" less (such as cnn, etc.)  He also noted that news about politics
is usually populated with sports analogies, which turns women off.

The biggest thing for me out of this study was the implication, at first,  
that if men and women were to listen to the same news, the men would
retain the information and the women wouldn't.  But, at the end when Kohut
remarked that women just don't use the same news sources, my feathers
became slightly less ruffled.

Summary from npr's web site:
Gender Gap Study -- Host Madeleine Brand talks with Andy Kohut, director
of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington,
D.C, about a study on the informational gender gap. The study asked men
and women news pop quiz questions over the years...such as "What country
recently acquired a former British Colony?" "Do we have troops in
Haiti?" "Does the weather move from west-to-east or east-to- west?" In
most cases, men got more right answers than women. Kohut says on a large
range of issues men seem to be better informed...although women tend to
know more about education, health, and cultural subjects.