The gender attainment gap at schools in the UK has endured for years. The percentage of boys scoring an A or above at GCSE level (the main exams for children aged around 16 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland) has lagged behind girls by more than 5 per cent every year since data was first published in 2001. The gap widened every year for a decade until 2018, when the girls’ lead slightly narrowed — though it was still a significant 6.5 percentage points. Boys who come from disadvantaged backgrounds face even greater challenges, and white boys from deprived backgrounds have particular difficulty. In 2015, only 9 per cent of them progressed right through the education system to university — a lower rate of higher-education participation than any other ethnicity/gender pairing, and three times lower than the national average of 28 per cent. We might expect that boys’ performance deficit would be reproduced two years later at A-level but in fact the gap was reversed in 2017, and for the past two years boys have slightly outperformed girls in terms of the share of their entries awarded the top grades at A-level (the exams taken around age 17 to 18).
One major reason is that more boys than girls drop out of school at age 16, and it tends to be the academically weaker students who leave. Thus, from the same cohort of 16-year-olds, the boys who go on to sit A-levels gain ground on their female peers in terms of their average academic ability. Researchers believe that boys’ maturity in terms of brain development is also catching up to that of girls’ from about this age.
Another contentious factor in boys regaining ground could be the change in assessment format of some subjects over the past two years, which has seen coursework phased out, leaving everything to a set of final exams. An FT analysis found that between 2016 and 2017 — the period during which A-level formats were changed, and boys overtook girls — boys’ results improved by wider margins than girls’ did in all but one of the reformed subjects, while in the unchanged subjects the two sexes fared more similarly.
Higher education Looking beyond school to higher education, female students now far outnumber males. In 2017 UK universities awarded places to 136,000 UK-domiciled female applicants and just 105,000 males. Application success rates have consistently been roughly equal across both genders, so the main reason for women outnumbering men among first-year students is that fewer men apply. This in itself can be traced back to men dropping out of the system between ages 16 and 18. Going into the school year in which pupils turn 16, boys outnumbered girls by five per cent across all English schools in 2015, but girls entered GCSEs at a higher rate, meaning the number of boys and girls who sat at least 5 GCSEs that summer was roughly equal. As well as being more likely to enter GCSEs, girls then went on to achieve higher grades. From the same male-heavy year group, girls outnumbered boys by 15 per cent among those who achieved at least five good GCSE results in 2015. One year later, 74 per cent of 17 year old boys in England were in full-time education, compared with 80 per cent of girls. Another year on, in summer 2017, 27 per cent more girls than boys sat A-levels in England, and 29 per cent more girls than boys applied to university across the UK as a whole.
Young British women first became more likely than men to attend university in the early 1990s, coinciding with the expansion of higher education in the UK. Since going ahead, women’s lead in higher education participation has steadily widened, from around three percentage points in 2000 to 12 points in 2017.