哈佛研究:男女移民差距大

A new Harvard study shows that immigrant boys and girls fare very differently in the outside world.

哈佛大学一项新的研究结果表明，移民中男孩和女孩在外面世界的发展差别很大。

When it comes to schooling, the Herrera boys are no match for the Herrera girls. Last week, four years after she arrived from Honduras, Martha, 20, graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. She managed decent grades while working 36 hours a week at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Her sister, Marlin, 22, attends a local community college and will soon be a certified nurse assistant. The brothers are a different story. Oscar, 17, was expelled two years ago from Fairfax for carrying a knife and later dropped out of a different school. The youngest, Jonathan, 15, is now in a juvenile boot camp after running into trouble with the law. "The boys get sidetracked more," says the kids' mother, Suyapa Landaverde. "The girls are more confident."

谈到学业问题，身穿赫蕾拉美仑美奂时装的男孩根本无法与穿同样时装的女孩相比。上周，也就是从洪都拉斯来到美国四年之后，20岁的马撒从洛杉矶的费尔法克斯高中毕业。尽管每周都要在肯德基快餐店工作36个小时，但是她还是取得了相当好的成绩。她的姐姐马林今年22岁，在当地的一所社区大学读书，不久就将成为一名有资格证书的助理护士。她兄弟们的情况就完全不一样了。17岁的奥斯卡两年前因为携带小刀被费尔法克斯学校开除，后又从另一所学校辍学。最小的乔纳森今年15岁，惹上官司后现在在青少年新兵训练营。“这些男孩子多不走正道，”孩子们的母亲苏雅帕•兰达沃尔德说，“而女孩子却越发自信了。”

This is no aberration. Immigrant girls consistently outperform boys, according to the preliminary findings of a just-completed, five-year study of immigrant children—the largest of its kind, including Latino, Chinese and Haitian kids—by Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Though that trend holds for U.S.-born kids as well, the reasons for the discrepancy among immigrants are different. The study found that immigrant girls are more adept at straddling cultures than boys. "The girls are able to retain some of the protective features of [their native] culture" because they're kept closer to the hearth, says Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, "while they maximize their acquisition of skills in the new culture" by helping their parents navigate it.

这非常合乎常规。根据哈佛大学教育学研究生院的马赛罗和卡罗拉•苏瑞兹-欧罗科刚刚完成了一项历时五年的初步研究结果——这项研究是同类研究中规模最大的，研究对象为移民子女，其中包括拉丁美洲人、中国人和海地人，移民女孩子的表现一贯比男孩子出色。虽然这种趋势在美国出生的孩子中也存在，但是在移民中产生这种差异的原因却是不相同的。研究发现，移民女孩子比男孩子更善于包容不同的文化。马赛罗•苏瑞兹-欧罗科说，“女孩子能保留本民族文化里的一些保护性特点”，因为女孩子跟家庭的关系更加紧密，所以在帮助父母跨越这一新文化的过程中，“她们最大限度地获取了新文化的技能”。