We have now seen this year’s GCSE and A level results, and they inevitably led to comparisons between girls and boys. (Sorry – I am not linking to the Daily Mail, but you know what I mean.)
Over the last few years concerns have been expressed about the underperformance of boys. In April the Parliamentary Education Committee launched an inquiry, asking: Why do boys lag behind girls at all ages of education? This conclusion was based on the previous year’s results:
In 2022/23 the attainment gap at GCSE level between girls and boys tightened to its smallest difference for 14 years. But with 24.9% of girls achieving grade 7 or A compared with 19.1% of boys, there was still a significant variation of nearly 6%.
…
At A-Level and 16-18, girls do better than boys across all level-3 cohorts, however, the gender gap has decreased in comparison to previous years. This has also meant that men are less likely to progress to higher education – in 2021/22, 54% of women were in higher education by 19, compared to only 40% of men. Men are also more likely to drop out of university courses.
Research by Cambridge University backed this up, although it also showed that girls’ achievements were not carried forward into employment.
Three years ago The Guardian asked the burning question: Are girls smarter than boys? The answers given tended to provide some nuance, suggesting that the notion of a gendered brain was false and that social factors are at play.
All this gave me a strong sense of deja-vu. Throughout my life the achievements of girls have been downplayed or simply hidden, while any supposed underachievement of boys has been seen as a problem looking for a solution.
Back in 2011 I wrote this on my personal blog:
Girls are brighter than boys – but let’s try to forget that
Once again, girls have out-performed boys at GCSE. This, apparently, is a ’cause for concern.’ By whom? Well, by men, of course.
I’m sorry; that was a cheap jibe. But then like all women of my age I spent the first 30 years of my life being subjected to cheap jibes about women’s intellectual abilities.
I do have some background in all this. During my gap year, I spent 6 months working as a number cruncher for an educational research team on two significant longitudinal studies. It was quite a revelation to me when I discovered that the raw scores in IQ and other tests were standardised by gender.
Throughout primary school girls performed, on average, better than boys – in other words, the mean score was significantly higher for girls. Raw scores on these tests were then mapped for each gender on to a normal distribution with a mean of 100. So the mean score for a girl was standardised to 100, as was the mean score for a boy, even though the girl’s raw score was actually higher. This was done with the best of intentions but had the effect of masking the higher performance of girls.
The population at large genuinely didn’t know that girls scored higher than boys. The popular view was that boys were brighter.
One of the consequences of this was that a girl had to achieve a higher score than a boy in the 11+ in order to get a place in a grammar school. And that was significant at a time when most pupils left secondary modern schools at 15 with no opportunity to gain any qualifications at all.
In spite of the differential at primary school, once they got to secondary school boys tended to surge ahead and did better than girls at O levels (which were not standardised by gender) . Educational studies showed that girls continued to be brighter than boys at secondary school, but their performance at 16 did not reflect that. Oddly enough, this was never a ’cause for concern’.
Comprehensive schools were created in order to give everyone a chance of reaching their full potential, so you might have expected them to redress the imbalance. But they didn’t. Boys still outperformed girls in most subjects, except English, at 16. What was going on?
In the 1970s I taught in a mixed comprehensive in Peckham and began to understand the social pressure on girls to perform less well than their male classmates. Their performance dropped off just at the point when they wanted to attract the attention of the alpha males in their social groups.
Undoubtedly the expectations of teachers and parents had an impact too. I remembered when I was a pupil myself at a girl’s grammar school, and a number of my friends were not allowed by their parents to stay on to the sixth form because of the prevailing view that it was not worth keeping girls in education. Others were side-tracked into so-called secretarial courses in shorthand, typing and filing, or encouraged to take the traditional paths into nursing or primary school teaching, neither of which required A levels. Of the 60 girls in my year (in a grammar school, remember), only four of us went on to University. Expectations were low, and we know that children live up, or down, to the expectations that parents and teachers have of them.
When I started to complain about the underachievement of girls – which I continued to do when I was lecturing in Education at what is now Roehampton University – I was, as you might have guessed, treated dismissively.
Gradually, though, values changed, particularly in girls schools, where young women could be encouraged to achieve academically without the pressure to play dumb in front of the boys.
So, over the years girls have found confidence, raised their expectations and reached their potential. This is something to celebrate.
And yet, predictably, the pundits complain that boys are in some way being penalised or discriminated against. Some even suggest that we need to change teaching methods to ones that overtly favour boys. That is nonsense. Good teaching takes into account the personalities and learning styles of all the pupils in a class, and works with and around cultural, social and gender differences. Good teachers have expectations of individual pupils based on their knowledge of their abilities, not on their gender, race or social class.
Nothing much has changed since then.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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42 Comments
The difficulty in deciding whether girls are intrinsically smarter than boys is the number of confounding factors. The references cited illustrate some of these:
“The fact that the earliest attainment gaps between genders are based on teacher assessments – which are known to favour female students – could indicate that early differences in perception sow the seeds of different educational experiences, in turn leading to the differences seen in later external tests.”
and
“One of the big frustrations of teaching teenage boys is that you can see the potential that’s there and the thinking that’s going on, but they very often haven’t got the maturity or the social outlook to apply that steadily through their teenage years. Give boys high-stakes exams and they have something to focus on that’s relatively short-term, and they can apply themselves for that relatively short period.”
There is also the factor that the vast majority of teachers (75.7%) are women (https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/school-teacher-workforce/latest/).
In the end, academic success is only meaningful if it leads to success in later life; some of the most successful people I have known got Desmonds (2:2) in the days when the 2:1/2:2 boundary represented a median score, unlike nowadays.
Girls do better in single sex education Mary .
It’s also worth noting that a lot of boys would flourish in a more challenging environment of a select school …One thing that we know I’d that many a disadvantaged child has benefitted immensely from a Grammar school education . Sadly those parents that are wealthy enough can move to a catchment area where those outstanding schools are – it’s selection in all but name . Also faith schools continue to do well … Ultimately a stable family upbringing with a structured & disciplined home life is also so important – that’s why Asian children do so well …
@ Mary,
If anyone were to point out that there’ve been no females to match the achievements of Einstein, Darwin, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci etc you’d likely put it down to historical social factors and, of course, you’d be right.
There’s no reason to expect any significant differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes.
We should be working to bring out the best in all our young people regardless of any social factors. Economic circumstance is still the most significant one.
Rosalind Franklin (Xray crystallograpphy/DNA)
Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium in 1898.
I’d probably put it down to ignorance.
Berthe Morisot (impressionist painter)
May I gently say that many a child, across genders and levels of economic standing, has suffered psychologically in the pressure cooker of a grammar school, whether that is reflected in their exam results or later in life. There is a serious need to stop measuring scholastic success by this single mechanism designed to suit a particular kind of learner. If we get a crack at government again (Holyrood, I’m looking at you) we should demand the education brief and actually genuinely level the playing field so that different types of learners can thrive. Both the big parties are loaded with STEM-obsessed disciplinarians. A social liberal education policy with social democratic funding is entirely in the tradition of this party and cannot come fast enough.
At the comp I went to, anyone working hard in lessons was given a hard time by their peers.
It was hard enough as a girl to ignore name-calling from other girls.
It was harder still for boys to stand up to the boy bullies. And a lot easier to give in and give up trying to do well.
I suspect that hasn’t changed down the years since?
Much of this article focuses on the social pressures which inhibited girls academic performance 30, 40, 50 years ago, and is undoubtedly accurate for that era. However, more contemporary research identifies the existence of anti learning subcultures, especially among working class white boys, which are far less prevalent amongst girls.
I sense a feeling that boys underachievement isn’t important, a bit of payback for past sins against young women. Just remember that we all pay the price when young men become alienated from the society they live in at a time when there are fewer unskilled jobs to absorb their energies.
@Jenny Barnes – Not to mention Jane Austen, and the Brontes
@Mary Reid – And George Eliot (even though my reaction on finishing Middlemarch was ‘That’s a month or so of my life that I shan’t get back’)
Ada Lovelace 💻🧮
I think the first question we should ask ourselves is what is intelligence? Often when we think about intelligence we think about academic intelligence; the ability to pass exams and give presentations. However almost anything we do requires intelligence, often far removed from academic intelligence. Many years ago the media used to make fun of the footballer David Beckham, claiming he was thick. Yet he was one of the best footballers in the world, and that in itself required intelligence. A key part of the game is about making the right decisions and developing an intuition for what they are. And in that particular sense, Beckham was a genius.
All I can observe is that from what I can remember as a boy many years ago, a lot of boys preferred to use their intelligence to disrupt classes and torment the teachers, whilst the girls generally preferred to use their intelligence to learn what the teachers were trying to teach. If women are doing better academically, that could be a reason.
@Geoffrey Payne. You are right to say that there are many different types of intelligence. Generally, we define it as the ability to solve complex cognitive problems. It can be measured accurately by proper IQ tests (not the fun ones you might find in a magazine or online) and scores correlate strongly with academic success and career success. IQ is also stable through life, so we can help a person reach their potential but we can’t make them fundamentally “smarter” There is also a strong element of genetic heritability, though there is a degree of disagreement about exactly how much. Obviously environment plays a role, and measurable IQ seems to be a result of both nature and nurture. I imagine some people will be scowling at this point. This info doesn’t come from some wacky far right website, it is from peer reviewed neuroscience research and if you are interested the Uni of Edinburgh has a good section on their website.
If we don’t take David Beckham’s intellect serious I suspect it is because as a society we value the ability to split the atom more highly than the ability to split the Arsenal defence.
Thank you for a most important article!
Might a much, much greater emphasis on kindness in all forms of education and in society help?
Many year ago a good friend who was a teacher made a comment that suck with me – she said that the changes being made to course assessments away from an emphasis on final exams and more towards elements of continuous assessment using coursework and folios, would eventually result in girls overtaking boys in terms of qualifications achieved. She argued that this was because, in general, boys preferred to cram for exams at the end of a course whereas they were less willing to work consistently hard over a whole course. I’m not sure if the argument stacks up but there is no doubt that as exam assessment has been changing over the years, the relative performance of girls has improved.
These are all worthy examples:
Rosalind Franklin (Xray crystallograpphy/DNA)
Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium in 1898
Berthe Morisot (impressionist painter)
Jane Austen, and the Brontes
Ada Lovelace
I would add Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole to the list above (smarter than most doctors/surgeons of the time) as well as Katherine Johnson and the other female American mathematicians whose calculations of orbital mechanics as NASA employees were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. Then there is the Hungarian Chess grandmaster Judit Polgar one of the best players in the world—male or female—breaking the top 10 on the ratings list several times.
Has anyone else noticed the annoying habit of both newspapers and the BBC of showing smiling girls on exam results day? Also at university degree ceremonies. It is rare to see the same type of pictures of boys, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of boys who do get good grades. We should protest at this bias, which I do not believe is unconscious.
(Admiral) Grace Murray Hopper, inventor of COBOL.
(The current best-selling chipset for so-called AI is the Hopper series.)
Exam results are tangible evidence, but measure effort and motivation as well as intelligence. And so are not clear evidence for superior gender IQ (boys until last couple of decades, girls since: that wouldn’t make sense, would it?)
There are numerous methodological doubts regarding IQ tests per se.
Recent attempts to design IQ tests independent of cultural underpinnings have ended up with tests that measure performance on context-less visual and numerical puzzles and clearly grossly under-rate some people’s intelligence.
It’s worth mentioning that much intelligence precisely involves engagement with one’s cultural underpinnings.
So I regard IQ research on gender as intrinsically low quality given different definitions of intelligence and different approaches to testing.
Listing women who have excelled proves nothing one way or the other. There have clearly been many more outstanding men historically, but women until recent decades have faced very high barriers to entry into demanding professions like science, for example.
I’m a bit surprised, Mary, by your mis-characterisation of concerns about boys’ inferior performance at school.
The fact that there were widespread misogynistic attitudes to women’s IQ until recent decades doesn’t mean we should now dismiss concerns about boys/men, like one notorious Labour MP.
@Joseph Bourke: surely the notable fact about Judit Polgar, the Hungarian chess player, is how she has almost no female peers indeed. Chess at any significant level of performance is very heavily male-dominated. Why are girls not attracted by chess?
Btw top chess players are not always that outstandingly intelligent.
Mentioning her existence tells us absolutely nothing about gender IQ differences. Nor indeed do any of the other examples of outstanding women.
@Alison C
Worse still they are always the relatively “pretty” girls with haircut, clothes, complexion, posture all in accordance with the prevailing beauty standards.
I think this unmasks where “society” stands on women’s role and purpose – approximately where the evolution of neuro-biology got to around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Girls/woman that don’t meet the aesthetic standard are mostly invisible in media.
Things are improving in terms of equality, education, opportunities and expectations, but the fundamental neurological biases of the ape/chimp brain will take many years to be tamed by even the most liberal civilised culture.
Exam results
IQ
Intelligence
Success in the world of work
All of the above might be related but they are far from the same thing.
Success in school level coursework / exams is much more about performance than about true understanding, judgement and competence. Also for many papers you have to answer in the expected style / format to gain full credit. So if you are attentive in class, put some effort in at home, and are a compliant thinker, you will probably do better.
IQ tests are centred around the performance visual cortex in spotting and translating various patterns letters, numbers or geometry, with a bit of logic and few sequences thrown in.
They don’t measure anything useful like rationality, creative and critical thinking (which are surely the most useful components of Intelligence?)
I hope that I am more creative, flexible, experienced and useful than when I was first presented with an IQ test as a primary school kid, but I suspect that age, late nights, student drinking sessions and a more sedentary middle-aged life-style would have me perform much worse at something like the 11+ than I would have 30+ years ago!
@Chris Cory but if we look at “career success” as measured economically, and this where the bright school girls “suddenly go missing”, it is clear that society prefers footballers, filmstars, musicians and celebrities to research scientists and other STEM professions.
It’s also worth mentioning that the difference between average male and average female IQ – however this is measured – is very significantly less than the differences in IQ – however this is measured – within genders.
@Martin Gray
@Jack Nicholls
I’m with Jack on this one. Although co-educated girls and boys distract each other from academic studies, the longer term mental health outcomes are much much better.
I know / have known several professionals from CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) and they ALL strongly recommended NOT to send girls to grammar schools. Some even moved out of an area with comprehensive (too low expectations and standards) & grammar (too much expectations and resultant harm) so they could send their daughters to a better/happier state school.
Grammar schools seem to exist in the big conurbations, and they maintain inequalities and make life more difficult in the other schools.
@Matthew Radmore. You’re right ,”career success “ is a very loose term, and I guess I was inviting trouble using it. And you’re right that as a society we are happy to give huge financial rewards to those who entertain us.
@Chris Moore. IQ test results are a very valid measure but only if what the purport to measure, that is cognitive agility. You can’t change or widen you definition of intelligence (ie include so called emotional intelligence ) and accuse IQ tests of failing. That’s cheating !
More important question, that others above have alluded to, is whether the present exam system, with its emphasis on memory and recall, is a valid way of measuring combative ability ?
@Matthew R….Far too many comprehensive schools deliver mediocrity in abundance..
A loss of discipline & respect for teachers is all to apparent ..In that environment a considerable number of pupils would benefit significantly from a more challenging curriculum that selection gives…No amount of one size fits all rubbish can hide that ..
First of all, apologies for the many typos on previous post. It’s still very early on a Sunday morning (for some of us).
Regarding IQ and gender, and the article was about differences between the sexes, the academic consensus is that there is no overall difference in the intelligence of men and women. I’m sure no one here is going to argue that one. More controversially, some studies have show small differences and the extreme ends of the distribution curve (where there are few people, anyway) and that there are more men at the extremes. So more men over 130 (seriously smart) and more men under 85 (seriously dumb !) Before you cancel me, I said MORE, not exclusively men, and I’m only passing on the research out there (former lecturer, can’t break the habit !).
Katalin Kariko (and Drew Weissman) – 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
@Mary Fulton – “…she said that the changes being made to course assessments away from an emphasis on final exams and more towards elements of continuous assessment using coursework and folios, would eventually result in girls overtaking boys in terms of qualifications achieved. “
There should be a long history of degree-level data on this. The (better) Computing degrees since the 1970s have been coursework-driven. History (and some other humanities) being largely unstructured and requiring self-organisation to research and deliver essays and final dissertations, would also provide additional data.
@Matthew Radmore & @Chris Cory – but if we look at “career success”
We should not lightly dismiss the social environment. It wasn’t that long ago the “glass ceiling” on women’s careers was normal (along with other opportunity and career-limiting ideas of women’s place in society) to the point no one was that aware of it; apart from the bright women who ran into it. Putting her politics aside, it is educational to look at what Margaret Thatcher had to go through to become the leader of the Conservatives and PM.
Many women have “matched the achievements of Einstein, Darwin, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci etc”. But it is quite obvious that far more men have won Nobel Prizes and the like. It is equally obvious why. Prejudice against clever, able women has been, and to a large extent continues to be, a pervasive barrier against achievement by women.
I don’t think anybody really knows whether “girls are smarter than boys”. Some of the apparent differences, such as boys preferring exams and girls preferring coursework as mentioned above, do seem to be real. But even these could arise from boys / girls each conforming to social expectation and stereotype, rather than any inherent differences between “male” and “female” brains.
One such “difference” does arise, I think, in terms of pupil response to the British educational sausage machine, which relentlessly pushes children through successive tests based on learning facts and applying (without understanding) standardised mathematical procedures. Girls often tend to be “good”, knuckle down, and cram their heads as requested. Boys more often rebel or tune out. Ironically, it can be the boys who develop a better attitude in the longer term. Less cramming, and more independent thinking, is what works in life beyond school!
“@Chris Moore. IQ test results are a very valid measure but only if what the purport to measure, that is cognitive agility. You can’t change or widen you definition of intelligence (ie include so called emotional intelligence ) and accuse IQ tests of failing. That’s cheating !”
@Chris Cory: I never mentioned “emotional intelligence”. IQ tests measure efficiency at the cognitive abilities demanded by any one style of IQ test. The cognitive abilities to do modern IQ tests are extremely limited and highlight a particular type of recognition of visual and mathematical puzzles. This a small subset of the gamut of cognitive abilities. Classical IQ tests measured a couple of other cognitive abilities as well.
IQ tests are not constant and they fail comprehensively to measure some very important components of even executive intelligence.
My view remains that any research into gender differences in levels of intelligence based on IQ tests is fundamentally torpedoed by the narrowness and partiality of IQ tests.
Mary- I only saw your piece this morning. Congratulations on triggering one of the most interesting discussions I have read on LDV. It takes account of the range of complexities. You have highlighted an issue we should all focus on and discuss further.
Marie (Sklodowska) Curie was awarded The Nobel prize for Physics with her husband Pierre Curie in 1903. After her husbands death she won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1911. Their daughter Irene Joliot Curie won the Nobel prize for Chemistry with her husband Frederik Joliot Curie in 1935. Worth noting that Cambridge University refused to award women degrees until 1948.
The question raised by Mary is whether girls are more intelligent on average than men.
Some posters have named a few outstanding women as if this bears on the debate. It doesn’t.
It would be equally useful to list by name a few intellectually deficient men.
@Chris Moore
I think Mary politely and partially answered the question by referring to her analysis of school performance and IQ scores, and how as a society we have deftly hidden it to support a particular institutionalised worldview…
Hello Roland, yes, I read Mary’s article.
I was commenting on several below the article posts. Are the posters surprised there are outstanding women?
At least this starts from the correct assumption, men and women are different at a population level.
What is actually being described here is that girls mature faster than boys, something that was understood for as long as my grandmother could remember. But as I heard someone recently observe, this is true when used as a “girls are better than boys” argument but then evaporates when used to provide explanations why different approaches may work better for boys and girls if the current systems produces higher achievement for girls.
Mary may also want to check how modern IQ is tested.
@chris moore – “Are the posters surprised there are outstanding women?”
This is an interesting question, I suspect selective blindness plays a part as does cultural conditioning.
There is an interesting article here that probably touches on some of the reasons:
“An Eighty-Year Wait to Graduate: Women at Cambridge”
Going back to Mary’s original piece, I suspect the problem we have is that boys and girls develop differently and engage with education differently, hence the simple one size fits all solutions of both the single-sex schools and comprehensives aren’t particularly good at getting the best out of our children.
@Chris Moore
The question asked was are “girls smarter the boys” not smarter than men.
Average IQ doesn’t differ between men and women, but in children girls mature slightly faster so test higher in IQ up to a certain point in the teen years.
Just as outliers are irrelevant the claim being made, it also applies at snapshots in time.
@FS People: That’s a good point.
I took “girls and boys” to be figurative of females and males at all ages. Clearly, I was not alone in that, given the number of posters listing outstanding ADULT females!
The Guardian article cited follows “girls'” outperformance into university years btw.