Emer Smyth delivered this presentation at the David Hume Institute in April 2017.

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Gender and education:
Why do girls “do better” than boys?
DATE
April 2017
AUTHOR
Emer Smyth
VENUE
David Hume Institute,
Edinburgh

2. Outline
 Background
 What is the situation in Scotland? New analyses by
Linda Croxford and Cathy Howieson
 Explanations for gender differences:
 Nature or nurture?
 Broader societal change
 The educational system: tracking; assessment
 School organisation and culture; gender mix
 Out of school learning
 Male/female or males and females?
 Implications for policy and practice

3. Background
 Shift in policy discussion away from female
‘disadvantage’ towards a concern with male
‘underachievement’
 Reversal in gender gap in educational attainment
in recent decades in most Western countries
 Gender gap in grades
 But gender differences persist in field of study;
feminisation of medicine and law but persistent
gaps in STEM and craft fields

4. Background (2)
 Fact or ‘moral panic’?
The ‘failing boys’ discourse draws on specific
measures of girls’ superior educational
achievements as compared to boys, to support
claims that girls have reached unparalleled levels of
success and feminist interventions into schooling
have been met, and may have gone ‘too far’, so
that girls’ achievements are continuously
positioned as won at the expense of boys (Ringrose,
2007).

5. Achieving expected Curriculum for
Excellence level in reading 2015/16
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
P1 P4 P7 S3 (3rd
level)
S3 (4th
level)
% Males
Females

6. Staying on rates in publicly funded
schools 2015/16
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
S5 S6
% Males
Females

7. SCQF 6 Courses 2015/6: % female
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Art and
design
Childcare Computing
science
Engineering Physics
%

8. Post-school destinations
 Among school leavers, 42% of females and 32% of
males went on to higher education
 But persistent differences in field of study: women
make up 16% of those studying engineering and 15%
of those studying computer science, 84% of those
studying education (all UK HE); 93% of those
studying care, 84% hairdressing, 7% construction
(Scottish FE)
 Average graduate salaries are lower for women than
men (all UK)

9. Nature?
 Growth in attention to neuroscience as
explanation for gender differences in abilities
 But fail to recognise the complex interaction
between genes, hormones and the
environment; ‘plasticity’ of brains
 Gender differences in test scores are larger
among older students
 Do not explain differences over time or
between countries

10. Nurture?
 Socialisation into ‘appropriate’ gendered roles
from infancy
 Adult-child interaction differs by gender and
children learn to categorise people by gender
from an early age
 Research shows that very young children have
highly stereotyped views of occupations
(Helwig, 1998; Miller and Budd, 1999)

11. Broader societal change
 Broader changes in women’s political and labour force
participation can create a new set of influences to form
children’s views of ‘appropriate’ behaviour
 A number of studies relate trends in the education gap to
growing employment opportunities for women, thus
increasing the ‘value’ of education (DiPrete and
Buchmann, 2013; Becker, 2014)
 But in some countries such as Ireland, female
educational expansion preceded employment growth
 For men, the decline of traditional craft/industrial jobs is
seen by some as contributing to school disengagement
(Mac an Ghaill, 1994)

12. The educational system: tracking
 Where choices are made earlier, they tend to
be more gendered (Buchmann and Charles,
1995)
 Thus gender segregation in education and in
the labour market is greater in highly tracked
systems where students are separated into
vocational tracks at an early age

13. The educational system: assessment
 Girls are found to do better on sustained, open-
ended tasks while boys focus on episodic, factual
detail. As a result, boys tend to do better on
multiple-choice question while girls do slightly better
when assessment is based on coursework
(Sukhnandan et al., 2000; Elwood, 1999).
 The examination and assessment system tends to
demand the type of writing skills (for example,
narrative and descriptive) that girls are generally
good at (Elwood, 2005).

14. Assessment (2)
 Some commentators trace the crucial tipping-
point in the gender gap to the dramatic
change brought about by the introduction of
coursework as a basis for assessment in the
GCSEs in England (Gorard, 2004; Machin and
McNally, 2006)
 However, other countries have seen a similar
trend in gender differences without a change
in assessment approaches

15. Do schools matter?
 Debate over whether the gender gap varies across
schools
 Some studies find that the difference in performance
between male and female students varies
significantly across schools (Nuttall et al., 1989;
Thomas et al., 1997)
 Others suggest that, while there may be some
variation across schools, there are hardly any
secondary schools where boys make more progress
than their female counterparts (Gray et al., 2004)

16. Schools matter for subject choice
 Schools with otherwise similar characteristics can vary
significantly in their provision of particular subjects and
in how these subjects are made available to different
ability groups and to girls and boys (see, for example, Lee
and Smith, 1993; Oakes, 1990).
 Schools can also influence course take-up indirectly
through subject packaging for optional subjects (for
example, by asking students to select between ‘male’
and ‘female’ subjects) and more subtle encouragement
of the take-up of particular types of subjects (Kitchen,
1999 Gillborn, 1990; Nash et al., 1984).

17. Subject choice (2): Irish research
 Provision influenced by (perceptions of) the needs of the student
population – variation by gender and social background
 Timing and packaging of subject choice, e.g. Metalwork v. Home
Economics
 Subjects viewed as ‘male’ or ‘female’:
Because lads work with their hands more whereas we prefer more
business, accounting and that.
They probably want to be like engineers or something because that’s
more of a man’s job.
Girls are not interested in working with the machinery and everything.
Girls would rather do something that they could use for the future.
[We] don't want to get our hands dirty.
Break a nail or something. (Female students)
Sure isn’t it [Home Economics] all about pregnancy and everything as well,
boys would be no good at that, I'd say. (Male students)

18. Classroom interaction
 Feminist accounts from the 1970s and early 1980s focused on the
domination of classroom interaction by boys as a contributory factor in
female educational disadvantage (Spender, 1982)
 Boys are seen as contributing more to interaction (for example, by ‘calling
out’ answers) and receiving more feedback from teachers on their
contributions (Askew and Ross, 1988; Kelly, 1988; Howe, 1997). Boys tend
to dominate in ‘hands-on’ activities, such as laboratory work and
computer sessions, and in the playground (Francis, 2004).
 But boys are more disruptive in the classroom and experience more
negative interaction with teachers as a result of their misbehaviour
(Francis, 2000; Warrington and Younger, 2000). Differences in social and
behavioural skills between boys and girls are evident from school entry
(DiPrete, Jennings, 2012).
 However, interaction patterns have remained largely unchanged over a
period when significant changes in the gender gap in achievement took
place.

19. Teacher expectations
 Initially, researchers highlighted lower expectations
for girls on the part of teachers (Spender, 1982;
Stanworth, 1981).
 More recently, however, teachers have been found
to be more likely to identify male students as
underachievers.
 Teachers construct underachievement differentially
by gender, emphasising lack of confidence among
girls but poor behaviour and motivation among boys
(Jones and Myhill, 2004).

20. ‘Laddishness’
 Most prominent explanation offered in English and
Scottish research
 Boys identify with a masculine identity based on non-
school activities, such as sport (Mac an Ghaill, 1994;
Francis, 2000)
 Differential peer reactions: boys - image of reluctant
involvement or disengagement to avoid being made fun
of (Younger and Warrington, 1996; Tinklin et al., 2001)
 But it is not clear that the phenomenon is the same in
other contexts
 Little attention to exam-related stress and anxiety
among girls

21. Schools can channel laddishness
 Legewie and DiPrete (2012) – study in Berlin
schools
 Boys are more responsive to the school
culture than girls
 Schools can create a learning-oriented
environment which promotes academic
competition as an aspect of masculinity
 But the bad news! They measure learning
orientation in terms of the social mix of the
school

22. Gender and school engagement:
good girls and bad boys?
 A ‘good student’ is a compliant one.
 Boys are more likely to be reprimanded by teachers
and receive more severe sanctions (like detention or
suspension), even taking account of their level of
misbehaviour
 Disengagement more prevalent among boys,
especially working-class boys; cycle of ‘acting out’
and being reprimanded
 Girls spend more time on homework and study, with
a bigger gender gap at the end of upper secondary
education

23. School gender mix
 Long-running debate on the merits of single-sex and
coeducational schooling
 Impact is hard to assess in systems where single-sex
schools are highly selective
 Ireland and Australia have larger single-sex sectors;
Irish research shows no differences comparing like
with like (Hannan et al., 1996); Australian findings
more variable
 Introduction of single-sex classes as a way to
promote gender equity in US and Australia

24. Teacher gender
 Feminisation of the teaching profession across
developed countries
 Some commentators attribute the gender
differential in attainment to the feminisation
of teaching, especially at primary level
(Delamont, 1999), and the consequent lack of
male role models for boys (Bleach, 1998).
 Lack of empirical evidence but existing studies
show no effect (Ehrenberg et al., 1995; Helbig,
2010; Neugebauer et al., 2010)

25. Out of school learning
 Increasing attention to the structured nature of
children’s activities outside school
 Lareau’s notion of ‘concerted cultivation’
 Out of school activities vary significantly by social
class and even more markedly by gender
 Reading for pleasure and taking part in music, drama
or dance classes help to boost cognitive skills,
enhance attitudes to school and reduce socio-
emotional difficulties (Smyth, 2016)

26. Frequency of reading for pleasure
every day (9 year olds)
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Prof./managerial Non-manual/skilled Semi/unskilled Non-employed
%
Boys Girls
Growing Up in Ireland Study

27. Structured cultural activities outside
school (9 year olds)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Prof./managerial Non-manual/skilled Semi/unskilled Non-employed
% Boys
Girls
Growing Up in Ireland Study

28. Male and female or males and
females?
 Gender interacts with other forms of
inequality: social class and social mix of the
school
 ‘Girls’ and ‘boys’ are not homogenous groups:
Binaries such as male: female, boy: girl often
prevents us from seeing the full range of
diversity and differentiation existing within
one gender as well as between categories of
male and female (Reay, 2001).

29. Heterogeneity (continued)
 Certain groups of boys perform poorly rather than all
boys, indicating the need to move beyond oppositional
categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ (Cortis and Neumarch,
2000)
 Some argue that policy attention to ‘failing boys’ is
somewhat misdirected, given that the scale of gender
differences in performance is much less than differences
in terms of other social factors such as class and ethnicity
(Gillborn and Mirza, 2000; Connolly, 2006)
 Differing findings on whether the gender gap is bigger for
some classes or ethnic groups

30. Increasing time spent on homework
and study
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
2nd year JC year 5th year LC year
%
MC boys
MC girls
WC boys
WC girls
Post-Primary Longitudinal Study

31. Implications for policy and practice
 No evidence to support ‘boy-friendly’ pedagogies
(Younger et al., 2005); risk of a zero-sum trade-off
 Improving teaching and school climate will have
positive effects for both boys and girls (Lingard et al.,
2004)
 Poorest outcomes for working-class boys so gender
and social equity must be seen as interrelated

32. Implications (2)
 Variety of teaching methods with active
involvement from students
 Less rigid forms of ability grouping
 Teacher expectations
 Positive school climate; move away from more
punitive forms of discipline
 Approach to subject choice which recognises
risks of gender stereotyping
 Provision of out of school learning opportunities

33. Conclusions
 Shift in gender gap in educational attainment in Western
countries
 But gender differences persist in field of study and in the
labour market
 Risk of not asking which boys and which girls are
experiencing educational difficulties
 We have not been very good at explaining change; some
tendency towards post-hoc explanations:
Gendered classroom expectations and performances of
girls have been translated from “failure” to “victory”
without any actual change in behaviours. (Skelton, 2010)