International Journal of Language & Linguistics

Portfolio Performance Aptitude of Korean University Male and Female Students Compared
Andy H. T. Chung, Graham Harding, Randy Johnston, Joonhong Kim, Koot van Wyk

Abstract
Gender studies resurfaced during the 1949 push-drive for feminism, the opposition to it among some females after 1949, and the new development of trans-sexual permissiveness in the legal systems of the UN, also Germany, and other countries, since 2007, but this phenomenon was already prevalent in the early history of mankind. This research stands under that umbrella, forcibly so. Female and Male performances were compared in scores for their portfolios over a period of three-and-a-half years at a countryside campus in Sangju of Kyungpook National University in South Korea. A total of 3,912 students’ scores were compared from four ESL teachers from the United States, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Each teacher’s grading system may vary but it should be a balancing act between equity and/or equality focus as ideal. It is for long known in the west that there is a gender gap in which females underperformed to males since early childhood education. This was the case until very late in the 1980’s. The productivity puzzle was studied from various angles. Then in the 1990’s a switch came with females outperforming males. The divorce-rate went up, the Spice-Girls had their imaging role to play in the TV-media leading to more female participation but U. Sandstrom and M. Hallsten (2008) found in their research that sexism was not a factor for the gap in labor market. The gender gap remains for the female working, with more questions than answers, but in this research in a student-university context, the reversal of the prevailing gender gap is found for probable outside factors. A sudden drop in male performance in the first semester of 2012 could be explained to have been the change of the regime in the adjacent country for South Korea with a leader of nearly the age of the students and this romanticism and hope for changes in the adjacent country, but with the resuming of the military objectives of his father and grandfather between the two semesters of 2012, the old paradigm stultified the progress of dreams disintegrating [reviving the male shadow of mandatory military service] and may have led to males performing better in the second semester of 2012, though females are still higher than males. The restructuring of the Departments of Sangju Campus for KNU in 2013 presumably led to an improvement in male performance. That year also saw the building of commercial areas across the front gate and may have contributed to females performing much better than males in the second semester of 2013. The exceedingly high performance of females over males in the second semester of 2013 may be linked to the election of Park Geun-Hye, South Korea’s first female president, on the 25th of February 2013. Her ascend as a successful statesperson could have given females at KNU Sangju Campus the increase of performance to 5.095% for the second semester as compared to 3.52% higher than males in the second semester of 2012 and 3.6% higher for the second semester of 2014. A national disaster of a ship (Sewol-ho) sinking with hundreds of students in April of 2014 may have led to an increase in male performance in the first semester of 2014 and a slight female improvement in the second semester of 2014. A further restructuring in Department distribution for 2015 may have led to a slight slipping back of males in their performance as compared to females for the first semester. Despite attempts to explain the proliferations of the scores between males and females, there is always the aspect of human unpredictability involved.

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