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Gender and Education for All
THE LEAP TO EQUALITY |
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| Box 3.16. Why do girls consistently outperform boys in the United Kingdom? | |
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Girls’ relatively better performance in examinations at age 16 has been a recent phenomenon in the United Kingdom, achieved over the last decade. During the l960s, boys outperformed girls by about 5%; for the next fifteen years, boys and girls were performing at almost equivalent levels. However, from about 1987 only about eighty boys to every hundred girls achieved five high-grade passes at 16+. Thus, after the mid-l980s, girls turned the tide of credentialism, in their favour.
This new pattern of achievement has become evident even from very young ages. Those studies that have tracked boys’ and girls’ progress through primary and secondary schools indicate that girls make better progress than boys in reading, mathematics, and verbal and non-verbal reasoning. Data collected from national assessments at the age of 7 demonstrate that girls have a better start at reading than boys and that their lead in English is maintained at ages 11 and 14 (Arnot et al., 1998). Thus a sizeable gap between boys and girls in reading and English is sustained throughout compulsory schooling. By 2000, approximately 15% more girls than boys obtained high grades in English examinations at age 16 (UK Government, 2000). The fact that boys have not reduced this female ‘advantage’ in language-related subjects is one of the principal reasons why they have lost ground relative to girls in terms of their overall school qualifications.
| | The UK Department for Education and Skills, which has developed a website addressing the problem of boys’ underachievement, attributes the problem to the following characteristics:
- Girls put greater emphasis on collaboration, talk and sharing;
- At each age girls have greater maturity and more effective learning strategies;
- (Some) boys disregard authority, academic work and formal achievement;
- There are differences in students’ attitudes to work, and in their goals and aspirations, which are linked to the wider social context of changing labour markets, and male employment prospects;
-There are different gender interactions between pupils and teachers in the classroom, particularly as perceived by (some) boys;
- Laddish behaviour, bravado and noise, as boys seek to define their masculinity, have a negative influence;
- Male peer-group pressure weakens an academic work ethic;
-Boys make efforts to avoid failure; but a ‘can’t do/can’t win’ insecurity leads to a ‘won’t try/won’t play’ culture.
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Source: Arnot and Phipps (2003).
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