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。

Consider the kids' experiences in school. The study found that boys face more peer pressure to adopt American youth culture—the dress, the slang, the disdain for education. They're disciplined more often and, as a result, develop more adversarial relationships with teachers—and the wider society. They may also face more debilitating prejudices. One teacher interviewed for the study said that the "cultural awareness training" she received as part of her continuing education included depictions of Latino boys as "aggressive" and "really macho" and of the girls as "pure sweetness."

我们再来考虑孩子们在学校的经历。研究发现，与女孩子相比，男孩子在接受美国年轻人文化——衣着、俚语以及对教育的蔑视等——方面面临更多的来自同龄人的压力。他们会受到更多的惩戒，因此，他们跟老师以及外界社会更容易发展成一种敌对关系。他们还可能会面对更多的使人意志衰弱的偏见。研究中接受采访的一位老师说，她所接受的继续教育中的文化意识培训部分把拉丁美洲男孩描述成好斗的、真正大男子主义的的人，而对女孩子的描述是清纯可人。

Gender shapes immigrant kids' experiences outside school as well. Often hailing from traditional cultures, the girls face greater domestic obligations. They also frequently act as "cultural ambassadors," translating for parents and mediating between them and the outside world, says Carola Suarez-Orozco. An unintended consequence: "The girls get foisted into a responsible role more than the boys do." Take Christina Im, 18, a junior at Fairfax who arrived from South Korea four years ago. She ranks ninth in a class of 400 students and still finds time to fix dinner for the family and work on Saturdays at her mother's clothing shop. Her brother? "He plays computer games," says Im.

性别也决定了移民孩子的课余生活经历。由于女孩子常常处在传统文化的氛围之中，她们要对家庭承担更多的责任。卡罗拉•苏瑞兹-欧罗科说，她们常常担当文化大使的角色，为她们的父母作作翻译，帮助他们与外部世界沟通。这产生了一种意想不到的结果：与男孩子相比，女孩子不得不承担起更多的责任。我们以克里斯蒂娜伊•殷为例。她今年18岁，四年前从韩国来到这里，现在是费尔法克斯中学三年级学生。在全班400名学生中，她排名第九位，但她还能抽出时间给她的家人做正餐，每周六还要在她妈妈的服装店里帮忙。她弟弟干什么呢？殷说，他在打游戏。

The Harvard study bears a cautionary note: If large numbers of immigrant boys continue to be alienated academically—and to be clear, plenty perform phenomenally—they risk sinking irretrievably into an economic underclass. Oscar Herrera, Martha's dropout brother, may be realizing that. "I'm thinking of returning to school," he recently told his mother. He ought to look to his sisters for guidance.

哈佛大学的研究带着一种警示性口气：如果大量的移民男孩子在学业上继续荒废下去—说得清楚些，有很多人荒废得令人难以置信—他们将冒将来在经济上不可挽回地陷入底层社会的危险。马撒辍学的弟弟奥斯卡•赫雷拉可能已经认识到了这一点。他最近告诉他的母亲说，我在考虑重新回到学校去。他应该向他的姐姐们求教指导意见。