First, just to set things in context. Russo promised me that riches would flow my way if I started a blog, and yet whyboysfail lacks even a single sponsor. The one organization I was certain held the interests of young men near and dear to its heart, Anheuser-Busch, has been distracted by that unnerving takeover bid from the brazen Brazilians. Too bad, here’s how cool A-B’s franchise stuff would look on my blog. (Private note to InBev; Regardless of my Missouri roots, should you depose Fourth, seize control and opt to favor my blog over the Super Bowl, we can do bidness.)

So, that means hanging onto the day job, which means a delayed response to Eduwonkette’s challenge to my earlier post that girls are kicking butt when it comes to GPA. That may be true, Eduwonkette says, but that’s always been the case. Nothing’s changed!

Well, Eduwonkette has a point. I went to the most authoritative source possible, the 40 years of data kept by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which has been surveying incoming freshmen for 40 years. The big news of their trend, of course, is grade inflation, but their gender breakdown shows women have long held a grade advantage. See it in full technicolor here.

I’ll save you some eye squint. What looks like a fairly even gap over that time period isn’t. Wrote HERI’s number cruncher to me: In 1966 there were 3.7% more girls with A/A+ than boys (9.2-5.5). In 2007 there are 6.5% more girls with A/A- than boys.

Is that a big-enough increase to account for what high school principals (example here) and college admissons officers say is a lopsided (and growing) grade gap? I have no idea. Seems a little on the small side, but I know from interviews (I once interviewed all the valedictorians at an Oregon high school, who were all girls, and then talked to a couple of guys who came close) that all it takes is one B-plus to throw you off.

All this brings me back to my previous recommendation for Eduwonkette: Road Trip! I’ll draw up a TripTik to get her out of the office when school starts, starting with a tour of Oregon high schools loaded with all-female valedictorians. Best part of the trip is it will wind through Oregon wine country, where the pinot gris can’t be beat.

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