Not all experienced instructors would agree with the myth about women making better students than men.
Background: I'm in my 12th or 13th year as a professional defensive handgun instructor, and have taught classes all over the country under the "Cornered Cat" banner. You can see my training resume on my website under 'about the author'; it shows around a thousand hours of training as a student. I've also spent at least ten times that much time assisting in other people's classes over the years, because I enjoy coaching and really enjoy learning from other instructors' teaching styles. It's safe to say that I've taught a lot of people to shoot and I've watched many people learning to shoot under the instruction of others.
Here's what I think about women making better students than men:
It is not true.
This is what is true: truly new students make much faster and more impressive progress than allegedly “new” students who aren’t new to firearms at all. People who have spent a lifetime developing bad habits will need some time to erase those bad habits before they can learn good ones. This is true for both men and women. People who start with a blank slate, having never handled a firearm before, usually make very rapid or even dramatic progress under the tutelage of a competent instructor. This, also, is true for both men and women.
When we compare apples to apples—brand new shooters to other brand new shooters; novice shooters with existing bad habits to other novice shooters with existing bad habits—we see almost no difference at all between men and women in firearms classes. It is only when we conflate the two, and compare the truly novice female to the badly-taught or untaught male that we see the dramatic, measurable difference in skillsets between male and female “new” students.
Not only is the saying not true in a skillset sense, it is also not true in a “good student” sense. I have worked with both men and women who are good students, and with both men and women who are poor students. If I wanted to make a sex-based rule about this, I would say that women who have a bad attitude about learning to shoot do tend to do a slightly better job hiding that fact from the instructor than similarly-resistant male students do—and that’s about it. But pleasant outward behavior does not mean these resistant students are getting what they need.
Anyway, having spent time teaching both women-only classes and co-ed classes, it appalls me that so many people so readily dismiss their male students as being unwilling or unable to learn to shoot. It's been my experience that willing men make excellent students -- and can usually shoot just as well as women from the very beginning.
pax