Unseen but Heard

I really want to say that males and females were given all equal opportunities at school, but at the same time I do not believe that is true, though I cannot bring up any specific examples of overt discrimination. However, when thinking back to who were in which classes I do notice some disturbing trends. My high school class was made up of about 231 males and about 183 females. I took two AP and two honors courses over my junior and senior year and notice that in each class boys were outnumbered at least 2 to 1 by girls. In my 24 student American Government 1 Honors class, only 4, including myself, were males. Likewise in my next American Government AP course, of the 27 students, only 5 were boys. The same trends followed in my English and Spanish classes. However, in everyone of my CP (intermediate courses) boys outnumbered girls by the same type of majority seen in the more difficult courses. And when observing the lower level classes, classes taken by people who were just forced to go to high school, I believe there was only one girl out some fifty students. Of the eight high school drop outs at my school, only one was a girl. The elective courses, however, which had little bearing on academics, was evenly mixed. So while I cannot think of any instance where girls were given preferential treatment publically, looking at these numbers seems to suggest a great amount of unseen favortism. I am not one for conspiracy theories, though. It could just be that the girls in my school worked much harder than the boys and applied themself a great deal more to their school work. It has been shown by modern studies that this is often the case, so it could very well settle the issue. But on the other hand, most colleges are made up of generally 52 percent female and 48 percent male. These proportions are way off from my high school's dispersion among the more difficult class and I can't get over the fact that boys were outnumbered 5 to 1 in some examples, especially when females are the minority of the class. If there was a school that was made up of 231 African American students and 183 white students, yet only one or two African American students were in every AP class of 20, surely someone would declare the school racist, no matter what justifications arose. It just seems that perhaps trying to give girls an equal opportunity in the class room, which they should have, has come at the expense of boys as well.