Differential Achievement By Gender

• The data is much more easily collected for gender and achievement as it is routinely collected
• The data is much more easily collected for gender and achievement as it is routinely collected
• In terms of students getting 5 GCSES at A-C, the gap between girls and boys grew through the last decade to reach nearly 9% in 2016 in favour of girls
• Girls also consistently get more A and A grades than boys too
• Girls outperform boys at A Level too, though not quite so dramatically as at GCSE
• Boys are more likely to get A's though, while girls have been more likely to get As (the results are quite close at this point)
• 2017 was the first time in 17 years that boys outperformed girls in terms of high grades altogether (A's and As)
• This statistic might be a little misleading as girls are much more likely to sit A Levels than boys
• Boys only sat 45% of all A Levels in 2017 and only "beat" the girls in terms of A in a handful of subjects
• This is a different gender education gap, and is repeated in university entries, and would suggest that rather than boys catching up with girls post-16, more underachieving boys are taken out of these statistics altogether and are taking other qualifications instead, such as apprenticeships
• Similar reforms to GCSEs (replacing modular exams with linear ones) has not halted the girls' advantages in the system
• The gap is also present in pre-school with a Save the Children study in 2016 suggesting that boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to fall behind before school even begins
• In the 1960s, boys were much more likely to be entered for O Levels at all, although girls did start outperforming boys in the subjects they did take from the late 60s
• Right through the 1970s and 1980s boys were much more likely to stay in school post-16 and to carry on to university
• Boys particularly outperformed girls in science subjects and mathematics
• In the 1950s and 1960s, many people believed that the reason why boys outperformed girls at school were biological: boys' brains were better designed for rational thought and girls were too emotional to perform very well in education
• There is plenty of biological and psychological evidence now to show that such explanations were nonsense, and of course the consistent way girls outperform boys in education makes that point very clearly
• One reason often presented for why girls are now outperforming boys throughout school in most subjects and at most levels

  Because of the changes in the status and role of women in society
• Historically, most girls expected to leave school, put married and become a housewife, with a husband who went to work
• Only a minority of girls would expect to have a career and therefore it is hardly surprising that for a long time boys outperformed girls in education
• Although there has not been a complete change-there is still a gender pay gap, women still do more housework than men, women are still more likely to stop work or go part-time to bring up children-most girls do now expect to work and there are of course many female role models who have gained very good qualifications and gone on to perform important roles
• The most important out-of-school factor

  Greater equality for women in society has made educational achievement more worthwhile for girls and there has been a corresponding boost in girls' achievement
• The original "Just Like A Girl" was about girl's priorities in the early 1970s, and how it impacted on school and education
• Sharpe found that early gender socialisation meant that girls attached relatively little importance to education
• By the 90s, Sharpe found that there had been a "gender quake". Girls' priorities had more-or-less reversed. Career came before love or marriage. These girls were more confident, more ambitious, committed to gender equality and were more assertive too
• The reasons for the change in attitudes are put down, at least in part, to changes in the law that were occurring when the first research was conducted
• The feminist movement clearly played a significant part in bringing about the changes in the roles and status of women in society
• Closely-related factors that contributed to the change in the role and status of women

  • The feminist movement changing attitudes regarding women's role in society
  • The change in the nature of work for women
  • The change in family life and family structure and the move towards more "symmetrical families"
  • Change in media representations of women and girls
• The absence of traditional male employment has led to lack of certainty about what, particularly working-class boys might do in the future
• New Right sociologists, like Charles Murray, suggest that the presence of welfare benefits has led to boys being happy to leave school without qualifications, with no aspirations beyond being unemployed
• Reasons suggested by sociologists for why girls used to underperform in school

  • Teachers' low expectations of girls
  • Resources such as textbooks and reading schemes reinforcing gender stereotypes
  • Boys' dominance of the classroom and monopolising the teachers' attention
  • School encouraging deference and passivity from girls (and assertiveness and competitiveness from boys)
  • Girls being concerned that intelligence was an unattractive characteristic from the perspective of boys (intelligence not being seen as a feminine trait)
  • School careers guidance pushing girls towards low-paid or domestic roles
  • Gender division of subjects reinforcing gender stereotypes (such as girls studying home economic while the boys do metalwork)
• The new gender gap in educational achievement is not due to boys performing less well than they did in the past, it is because girls have improved faster than boys have (at least in terms of examination results)
• Because girls mature faster than boys physically, it has been suggested that they might do so intellectually too
• There is also evidence that even during the early years, girls have stronger linguistic abilities than boys, which suggests and might be innate
• Feminisation of education


  The predominance of female teachers in the profession<|>Aspects of education, for example reading, are associated with a female role because mothers and (female) teachers are (predominantly) the people who read to children<|>Educational achievement is increasingly measured against skills where girls excel more than boys, and this point was made particularly about the high levels of coursework in GCSE and, later, A Level
• GIST stands for Girls Into Science and Technology and was a project in the early 1980s to try and address gender differences in subject choice and encourage more girls to choose sciences at school
• The arrival of the National Curriculum means that all students must study the sciences, for example, so the sorts of gender divisions into gendered subjects happens much less and much later in education today
• The introduction of school performance league tables might have led to schools focusing on improving girls' achievement as it was previously risking bringing down their position in the league table
• Girls can be labelled as the ideal pupil, while boys might be labelled as more likely to be trouble
• The majority of interactions between teachers and girls are educational, many of the interactions between teachers and boys are more about discipline or crowd control