Does free education make sense in a globalised world?

[antaeus]

but what about the countries for which it do not balance out, those which are net exporters?

I wonder if we're heading to a god of the gaps style argument...

Those countries should probably look at why they're net exporters of highly skilled people... Why they're not attractive to their smartest people. I think this is a broader issue for those countries than just education so I don't think making their education systems fully user paid would address the issue. In fact, it may ever exacerbate it.

[NosPortatArma]

I wonder if we're heading to a god of the gaps style argument...

Those countries should probably look at why they're net exporters of highly skilled people... Why they're not attractive to their smartest people. I think this is a broader issue for those countries than just education so I don't think making their education systems fully user paid would address the issue. In fact, it may ever exacerbate it.

as had been said, brain drain is part of the problem or poor countries. and, im not arguing for a full user paid system, only for people who emigrate. how would such a system exacerbate the problem?

[ByzantinePowerGame]

If you want to avoid a shortage of doctors then society should severely curtail the amount of women allowed into medical schools.

Women displace men in medical school, every woman admitted into a medical school means one less seat available for a man, and a majority of women doctors [at least in Britain] leave the practice of medicine in less than 10 years, which means the NHS is left reeling because scarce resources are spent on somebody who is only going to stay in the career for 5-10 years, at the expense of somebody [i.e. a man] who typically would practice medicine until retiring in his early 60s.

Society doesn't need immigrants to address the shortage of doctors and other highly skilled workers. Stop the mis-allocation of scarce resources within the society. There are plenty of men who want to go to medical school but they are often crowded out due to admissions policies that favor women.

[Akrotatos]

@ ByzantinePowerGame

This is ridiculous. Even if what you are saying is true, the answer would be to create incentives to keep practicing not preventing women from medicine.

[ByzantinePowerGame]

@ ByzantinePowerGame

This is ridiculous. Even if what you are saying is true, the answer would be to create incentives to keep practicing not preventing women from medicine.

They want to leave because they find the nature of the career to be too demanding, many scale back to part-time, and many don't even want to stay on part-time.

Unless you throw patient care under the bus and gut the quality of care that is going to be provided, that is to say changing the very nature of medicine, there is nothing to be done for it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...s-9587247.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/wom...-timebomb.html

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/754...ospital-battle

https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...en-be-doctors/

[antaeus]

as had been said, brain drain is part of the problem or poor countries. and, im not arguing for a full user paid system, only for people who emigrate. how would such a system exacerbate the problem?

People don't leave because they are educated. They leave for opportunity. In poor countries they leave because of the opportunity to earn more money, and remits from those emigrants form sizeable chunks of their home country's GDP (more than a quarter in some cases!). Saddle those emigrants with debt limits their ability to remit money back, which in turn would damage the economy.

[Akrotatos]

They want to leave because they find the nature of the career to be too demanding, many scale back to part-time, and many don't even want to stay on part-time.

Unless you throw patient care under the bus and gut the quality of care that is going to be provided, that is to say changing the very nature of medicine, there is nothing to be done for it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...s-9587247.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/wom...-timebomb.html

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/754...ospital-battle

https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...en-be-doctors/

Making medical schools completely free (tuition, accommodation etc) obut forcing the doctors to repay those expenses by not leaving until a X amount of years should do the trick. Works like a charm for military schools in Greece.

I thought of this in like 10 seconds. Better minds with more time on their hands could find something better than excluding or restricting access to women in medicine.

[Dante Von Hespburg]

They want to leave because they find the nature of the career to be too demanding, many scale back to part-time, and many don't even want to stay on part-time.

Unless you throw patient care under the bus and gut the quality of care that is going to be provided, that is to say changing the very nature of medicine, there is nothing to be done for it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...s-9587247.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/wom...-timebomb.html

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/754...ospital-battle

https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...en-be-doctors/

The issue here is your example of the NHS is a poor one to put the idea forward- Women doctors are one of the least issues with the NHS retention crisis- the key one is Conservative policy, under-funding, back-door privatization and Jeremy Hunt forcing ever worse working conditions and rewards for doing the same role, but for longer hours. British NHS doctors and nurses are some of the most poorly treated in Europe, thus they flee asap to the private sector and abroad and why recently there has been ad decline in young students taking up medical courses (with places going into clearing for the first time a few years ago).

This indeed is partly the argument of why free education is a must in a digital economy- you NEED that flexibility in a volatile labour market (made worse by increasing levels of automation across the board for both blue and white collar workers ala BoE report on the issue) for people of all ages to drop out and retrain so as to avoid trapping a large segement of the population in a state of 'out of work'- this is course will only deal with some of the issues, but its why in the UK both Tories and Labour are in their own ways trying to make education more accessible (though only Labour offer an actual long-term solution- the Tories rely on wages getting out of the current state of stagnation and actually up their 'proper' levels).

[ByzantinePowerGame]

Making medical schools completely free (tuition, accommodation etc) obut forcing the doctors to repay those expenses by not leaving until a X amount of years should do the trick. Works like a charm for military schools in Greece.

I thought of this in like 10 seconds. Better minds with more time on their hands could find something better than excluding or restricting access to women in medicine.

Forcing them to repay the expenses would probably just result in a lot of people being miserable, many people would leave and try [struggle] to repay with income from other jobs, some might even become poor and wind up as public charges.

Some might just default or emigrate.

My point was- There are plenty of men who want to go to medical school but they are often crowded out due to admissions policies that favor women.


What I am essentially saying is that the policy of favoring women for admission into medical school should be ended. Women should not be subjected to legal exclusion or some sort of ban, the mere removal of unwarranted favoritism/preferential admission of women will go a long way to correct the problem.

[Akrotatos]

What I am essentially saying is that the policy of favoring women for admission into medical school should be ended. Women should not be subjected to legal exclusion or some sort of ban, the mere removal of unwarranted favoritism/preferential admission of women will go a long way to correct the problem.

We are really going OT here but where it the proof for this? I assume people enter medical schools based on merit? At least that's they way its done in my country.

[Ludicus]

a majority of women doctors [at least in Britain] leave the practice of medicine in less than 10 years,

Not here.
Also, quality matters:patients of female physicians have substantially lower mortality and readmission rates across all medical conditions.Female internists provide higher-quality care for hospitalized patients. Sadly, women physicians are paid less than male physicians.
--

What I am essentially saying is that the policy of favoring women for admission into medical school should be ended

Citation needed.

a majority of women doctors [at least in Britain] leave the practice of medicine in less than 10 years,

Not here.
Also, quality matters:patients of female physicians have substantially lower mortality and readmission rates across all medical conditions.Female internists provide higher-quality care for hospitalized patients. Sadly, women physicians are paid less than male physicians.
--

What I am essentially saying is that the policy of favoring women for admission into medical school should be ended

Citation needed.

-----
In the US, there are currently 313,874 female doctors vs 608,685 male doctors.
Physician Workforce Composition Projections in the US,

Year 2018
Female Physicians 38%
Male Physicians 62%

Year 2040
Female: 44%
Male 56%

[Maiar93]

I feel like OP doesn't really understand globalization and its effects. Globalization is a neoliberal standardizing phenomena; it has very little to do with how much you ought to educate your population, if anything the effect is additive: globalization forces nations to educate more people in order to keep up. I would've liked to see an argument for the claim that free education is nonsensical or makes little sense in a globalized world, including a wider discussion of globalization and its effects and how free education ties into all this.

[ByzantinePowerGame]

Sadly, women physicians are paid less than male physicians.

That's how it should be. Considering that a substantial percentage of female doctors are only part-time doctors, they do not acquire as much experience or expertise as their full-time male colleagues. They also tend to concentrate overwhelmingly in pediatrics and general/family medicine, instead of specializing [where the big $$$$ comes in].




In the UK women applicants to medical school are accepted at a rate that is disproportionately higher than their percentage of applicants. This means that if 50% of applicants are women, more than 50% of accepted applicants will be women, despite their lower qualifications.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196729/

In the USA men outperform women on the MCAT by about 10% in points, and have a slightly higher GPA [on average about 0.05 to 0.1 higher] than women, but women are accepted at rates higher than men at most medical schools.



Canada-

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...00056-0073.pdf

In Newfoundland 15.6% of male applicants were made an offer, compared with 26.7% of female applicants, this despite the fact that men tend to have superior GPA and superior entrance exam scores in all nations, provinces, and states that were studied.




People who promote the pernicious and demonstrably false idea that "women are paid less for the same work that men do" also tend to claim "corporations are crooked, corrupt, greedy, and evil, they only care about money."

If you can show a typical CEO that he can save 30% on labor costs, and get the same results, by firing all the men and hiring only women, he would do it immediately. Who wouldn't want to save 30% on labor costs and get the same results? The problem is that you won't get the same results.

[Ludicus]

Considering that a substantial percentage of female doctors are only part-time doctors,

I'm talking about full jobs. Female doctors earn much less than men in same job, in some countries. (in my country there are no differences)

In the US, for example, Female doctors in U.S. earn much less than men in same job

The things that surprised us were two things: First, the sheer magnitude of the gender gap. And second, that we weren't able to find a single metro area or specialty where women made more than men," said study lead author Chris Whaley, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health.
The results were controlled for location, medical specialty, hours worked and when the doctor graduated to reflect experience. Only full-time doctors were surveyed.

Such income gaps often are dismissed because men gravitate to higher paying fields such as neurosurgery or thoracic surgery while women tend toward lesser paying fields such as pediatrics...But even in pediatric emergency medicine, the study found a significant pay gap.

In the UK women applicants to medical school are accepted at a rate that is disproportionately higher than their percentage of applicants. This means that if 50% of applicants are women, more than 50% of accepted applicants will be women, despite their lower qualifications.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196729/

Where it says..."despite their lower qualifications" - citation needed.

-----

.
In the USA men outperform women on the MCAT by about 10% in points, and have a slightly higher GPA [on average about 0.05 to 0.1 higher] than women, but women are accepted at rates higher than men at most medical schools

Read this,
Gender Differences in Academic Qualifications and Medical School

This study posed the following questions: (1) do women and men differ in their overall medical school performance? (2) are there significant differences in the preadmission academic qualifications of female and male medical students? (3) are gender differences in pre admission qualifications a factor in medical school performance?

......The performance of female and male students at NYCOM was equal on the medical school performance measures of cumulative medical school GPA, clinical subject examinations, and COMLEX Level 2-CE examination scores. There was no gender difference in COMLEX Level 1 examination scores when controlling for total MCATs. Women had higher mean clinical clerkship evaluations than men in each class.

The performance of women in the clinical years was found to be equal to that of men, and higher than men in the case of clinical clerkship evaluations. The ratings for the clerkship evaluations are somewhat subjective. The rating sheets for attitude / professionalism and clinical skills include items such as cooperation, patient communication, and receptivity to feedback. These are areas in which women may excel. Women have been reported to have greater abilities to actively listen and create better relationships with patients than men.7

It can be postulated that the women’s higher clinical evaluation grades found in this study may reflect their better abilities in the areas of cooperation, patient communication, interviewing, and counseling.
This is one of only a few studies that have reported gender comparisons of both preclinical and clinical performance of medical students...

More- Read a systematic review,

Factors associated with success in medical school: systematic review

A consistent finding in the literature is that women tend to perform better than men in their medical training w1,w10,w27,w85,w91 and are more likely to attain an honours degree.w2
Women also tend to perform better in clinical assessments. w86,w87

Two studies suggested that men slightly outperformed women on early assessments (for example, National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) part I) but that these differences disappeared later (NBME part II).w85,w86

However, these differences were small and reached significance only when the sample sizes were large. This raises the question of the practical relevance of these sexdifferences. For example, a significant difference was reported between men and women in NBME part II paediatrics scores, with men scoring 82.13 and women 82.70.w86

----
More- you conveniently missed the fact that women tend to perform better in clinical assessments,
Correlation, Causation, and Gender Differences in Patient Outcomes

February 2017
Comparison of Hospital Mortality and Readmission Rates for Medicare Patients Treated by Male vs Female Physicians
Yusuke Tsugawa, MD, MPH, PhD1,2; Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD3,4,5; Jose F. Figueroa, MD, MPH1,2; et alE. John Orav, PhD2,6; Daniel M. Blumenthal, MD, MBA7; Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH1,2,8
Author Affiliations
JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(2):206-213. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.7875
Abstract

Importance
Studies have found differences in practice patterns between male and female physicians, with female physicians more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines and evidence-based practice. However, whether patient outcomes differ between male and female physicians is largely unknown.


Objective To determine whether mortality and readmission rates differ between patients treated by male or female physicians.


Design, Setting, and Participants

We analyzed a 20% random sample of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries 65 years or older hospitalized with a medical condition and treated by general internists from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2014. We examined the association between physician sex and 30-day mortality and readmission rates, adjusted for patient and physician characteristics and hospital fixed effects (effectively comparing female and male physicians within the same hospital). As a sensitivity analysis, we examined only physicians focusing on hospital care (hospitalists), among whom patients are plausibly quasi-randomized to physicians based on the physician’s specific work schedules. We also investigated whether differences in patient outcomes varied by specific condition or by underlying severity of illness.


Main Outcomes and Measures Patients’ 30-day mortality and readmission rates.


Results A total of 1 583 028 hospitalizations were used for analyses of 30-day mortality (mean [SD] patient age, 80.2 [8.5] years; 621 412 men and 961 616 women) and 1 540 797 were used for analyses of readmission (mean [SD] patient age, 80.1 [8.5] years; 602 115 men and 938 682 women).

Patients treated by female physicians had lower 30-day mortality (adjusted mortality, 11.07% vs 11.49%; adjusted risk difference, –0.43%; 95% CI, –0.57% to –0.28%; P < .001; number needed to treat to prevent 1 death, 233) and lower 30-day readmissions (adjusted readmissions, 15.02% vs 15.57%; adjusted risk difference, –0.55%; 95% CI, –0.71% to –0.39%; P < .001; number needed to treat to prevent 1 readmission, 182) than patients cared for by male physicians, after accounting for potential confounders. Our findings were unaffected when restricting analyses to patients treated by hospitalists. Differences persisted across 8 common medical conditions and across patients’ severity of illness.


Conclusions and Relevance Elderly hospitalized patients treated by female internists have lower mortality and readmissions compared with those cared for by male internists. These findings suggest that the differences in practice patterns between male and female physicians, as suggested in previous studies, may have important clinical implications for patient outcomes

----
Even the Forbes know it well,
Women Are Still Paid Less Than Men - Even In The Same Job - Forbes

The fact is that companies are paying women less than men. And whether they are aware of this is or not still brings business consequences.

A report recently published by the IMF found that female presence on the board actually enhanced profitability. The study’s authors found that:

The analysis reveals that firms with a larger share of women in senior positions have higher return on assets. Adding one more woman in senior management or on the corporate board, while keeping the size of the board unchanged, is associated with an 8–13 basis points higher return on assets.”

The positive benefits of female participation is most pronounced in the services and hi-tech industry. In these highly innovative enterprises, the benefits of diverse thinking is crucial to success. Having a management team from a range of backgrounds adds the creativity within decision-making and guides the company towards the best outcome.


In failing to encourage this diversity, companies are reducing their potential to enjoy the benefits of a balanced leadership team that enhances profitability. The first place this starts is paying women the same wages as men for doing similarwork.


Hiding behind excuses such as raising-children or women’s supposed lack of self-promotion are inadequate for businesses that want to be successful. Offering women the same salaries are men will help increase female representation at the senior levels and therefore improve the profitability of the entire company.

I hope you have learned something today: women not inferior to men.

[ByzantinePowerGame]

https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-d...er-than-women/


In regards to an IQ of 140 or higher, there are 14x more men with such an IQ than women.

In regards to an IQ of 120 to 140, there are about 7x more men which such an IQ than women.


Of course the other end of the distribution is also the same... There are about 14x more men with an IQ below 70 than there are women.

The intelligence distribution for men is nowhere near as evenly distributed for women. It is highly skewed at the tails.


If you pluck 100 random women and 100 random men off the street, there is a good chance all of the women will be clustered around the national average for IQ, you won't have more than 1-2 around 130-140, you probably won't have any above 140, and you won't have more than 1 or 2 below 80, and probably none below 70.

For the men you would probably have 5-6 below 80, 5-10 below 70, 5-10 around 120-130, and 7-8 at 140 or higher, and the rest around average.

Dr Paul Irwing: ‘There Are Twice As Many Men As Women With An IQ Of 120-Plus’

Independent (UK), Nov. 30, 2006

Dr Paul Irwing is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University. He claims that men are more intelligent than women.

All the research I’ve done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

I don’t know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...d-are-all-men/

Male and female mean IQs are about equal below the age of 15 but males have a higher mean IQ from age 15 on. The effect of sex differences in IQ is largest at the high extreme of intelligence. Since many of the more prestigious roles in society are associated with high IQ, the lack of female representation in these roles may be partially due to fewer females being competitive at the highest levels.

Women tend to cluster around the mean IQ score: that is, women are most likely to have IQs of between 90 and 110. Men, on the other hand, often reach greater heights in intelligence tests – but they also represent the worst performers too. That’s why there are vanishingly few sublime female geniuses in, say, music or philosophy, but it also explains why prisons are full of male knuckledraggers.


http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015...tter-at-chess/


http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx




https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinag.../#3795f7518b4e


According to the 2015 American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, among full-time employees, men worked 8.2 hours compared to women working 7.8 hours. This might not seem like much, but it adds up.



And if you compare employed men and women (regardless of part-time work), employed men work an average of 42 minutes more per day than employed women. 42 minutes might not seem like much, but that is an extra 3.5 hours a week or 14 hours a month. I know I could get a lot more done with an extra day and a half a month of work.

[NosPortatArma]

People don't leave because they are educated. They leave for opportunity. In poor countries they leave because of the opportunity to earn more money, and remits from those emigrants form sizeable chunks of their home country's GDP (more than a quarter in some cases!). Saddle those emigrants with debt limits their ability to remit money back, which in turn would damage the economy.

and they usually have more opportunity if they are educated. As people are saying in this thread, the UK gets many of their doctors from immigration, but don't you think doctors aren't also needed in the countries they come from? of course they probably leave because wages are higher in the UK, an opportunity they get by virtue of their education.

as for remittances, yes that is indeed a benefit from exporting labour, but it is not guaranteed. What if, for example, the emigrant comes from a rich family which has no need to remittances, but he has gotten a state-funded education? What if an entire family basically moves abroad? that's just a clear loss for the state. And if it's a poor country, it's a loss which they can't really afford in my view. I don't see why it's wrong to take measures to guarantee a return on investment for the state, because as i've said money matters for poor countries, and this is only going to get more pronounces as globalisation increases. if they send remitances, fine, but what if they don't? Just let them free ride on the backs of their poor former countrymen?

I feel like OP doesn't really understand globalization and its effects. Globalization is a neoliberal standardizing phenomena; it has very little to do with how much you ought to educate your population, if anything the effect is additive: globalization forces nations to educate more people in order to keep up. I would've liked to see an argument for the claim that free education is nonsensical or makes little sense in a globalized world, including a wider discussion of globalization and its effects and how free education ties into all this.

well, there was an argument in the OP. basically that people can get an expensive education for free, but then leave without paying it back. that's what the thread is about. That, and women in medicine apparently.

[antaeus]

as for remittances, yes that is indeed a benefit from exporting labour, but it is not guaranteed. What if, for example, the emigrant comes from a rich family which has no need to remittances, but he has gotten a state-funded education? What if an entire family basically moves abroad? that's just a clear loss for the state. And if it's a poor country, it's a loss which they can't really afford in my view. I don't see why it's wrong to take measures to guarantee a return on investment for the state, because as i've said money matters for poor countries, and this is only going to get more pronounces as globalisation increases. if they send remitances, fine, but what if they don't? Just let them free ride on the backs of their poor former countrymen?.

I understand the points you raise, and they are fair concerns, I just don't think they play out in reality... Scan through the list of remittances as a percentage of GDP... You'll find that the majority of poor countries on that list, no matter where you draw the poor line... can't afford to threaten remittances. That is reason enough to not mess with the status quo by chaining those people to their homeland through bonding or debt. Their education goes further (as does their earning potential) when they go abroad, so it makes sense to enable them to continue remittances as easily as possible without red tape. It's foreign money invested directly into the local economy that has no strings attached - not tied to aid or political favour. A smarter move than messing with education would be to seek ways of leveraging that remitted money by facilitating it's reinvestment.

Sure it's a loss if an entire family moves abroad, or an emigrant severs ties with their homeland and sends no money back, but does this occasional situation warrant risking say 16.6% of GDP (El Salvador), or 25% (Haiti)??

Obviously there's never a single solution for education, and in some circumstances user pays systems may work. But in my experience, and from what I've seen in practice, they burden the newly educated to the point where it impacts severely on their ability to grow careers and build wealth. It saddles the majority of early 20 somethings with the equivalent of a small mortgage before they have even developed the earning ability to pay it back and that's just in developed countries. Everyone in a society benefits from having a better educated, less indebted populace.

[Ludicus]

https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-d...er-than-women/
In regards to an IQ of 140 or higher..

------
Read and learn,more on the subject,
Gender, ethnicity and graduate status, and junior doctors' self-reported ...
Gender

Recent research overwhelmingly concludes that women outperform men in academic and clinical assessments at medical school.9–11 Thus, there is little reason to suppose that female students leave medical school less prepared than men for work.

------
Priorities and Gender Pay Gap | Journal of Hospital Medicine
A matter of priorities? Exploring the persistent gender pay gap in hospital medicine
J. Hosp. Med. 2015 August;10(8):486-490

Pay inequity for women relative to men continues to be pervasive in medicine, including among early‐career physicians, researchers, and various specialists.[6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] The earnings gap seems to persist for physicians, even as federal efforts such as the Fair Pay Act of 2013 and the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2014 aim to end wage discrimination.[11, 14] Differences in specialty, part‐time status, and practice type do not mitigate the disparity.[8, 10, 15] Additional explanations have been proposed to explain the variability, including gender differences in negotiating skills, lack of opportunities to join networks of influence within organizations, and implicit or explicit bias and discrimination.[12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]

[sumskilz]

https://qz.com/441905/men-are-both-d...er-than-women/


In regards to an IQ of 140 or higher, there are 14x more men with such an IQ than women.

In regards to an IQ of 120 to 140, there are about 7x more men which such an IQ than women.


Of course the other end of the distribution is also the same... There are about 14x more men with an IQ below 70 than there are women.

The intelligence distribution for men is nowhere near as evenly distributed for women. It is highly skewed at the tails.


If you pluck 100 random women and 100 random men off the street, there is a good chance all of the women will be clustered around the national average for IQ, you won't have more than 1-2 around 130-140, you probably won't have any above 140, and you won't have more than 1 or 2 below 80, and probably none below 70.

For the men you would probably have 5-6 below 80, 5-10 below 70, 5-10 around 120-130, and 7-8 at 140 or higher, and the rest around average.

Dr Paul Irwing: ‘There Are Twice As Many Men As Women With An IQ Of 120-Plus’

Independent (UK), Nov. 30, 2006

Dr Paul Irwing is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University. He claims that men are more intelligent than women.

All the research I’ve done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

I don’t know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data.

The most significant factor has to be X-linked genes. If a female inherits a particularly advantageous or disadvantageous allele on the X chromosome, the odds are that effect will be mitigated by her having inherited a more typical variant on her other X which will balance her out. For better or worse, males are stuck with only the one version they inherited from their mother. This phenomenon results in males having a wider and flatter bell curve for X-linked traits.

X-linked genes and mental functioning

Genetic and epigenetic factors underlying sex differences in the regulation of gene expression in the brain

EDIT: Also...

Greater intrasex phenotype variability in males than in females is a fundamental aspect of the gender differences in humans

[TerryLewis]

"The common good" (or "the greater good" in this case) reminds me of the concept from an Italian perspective of the EU education in Rita Locatelli's Reframing higher education as a global common good.
More on this topic:
Qualities of Education in a Globalised World
Vision for the New Global Teacher: Reflections from a Comparative Education Perspective
Both publications belong to Diane Brook Napier.