27 Comments

• Jennie 11th Feb '14 - 12:12pm

  is this issue not another “the patriarchy hurts men too” problem? Men/boys don’t HAVE to perform as well as women to succeed so why would they bother?

• Eddie Sammon 11th Feb '14 - 12:30pm

  I’m not particularly fussed about it, I just want extreme feminists to be fair to them.

• Alexander Matthews 11th Feb '14 - 12:53pm

  @Jennie, I often agree with what you write, but I think that comment is disingenuous at best.

  The statistics clearly show that the boys who are currently suffering from this problem are ‘well-connected’ middle males, but working (mostly white) males, often from more rural communities and smaller towns.

  Unless you are saying a working class male from a small, dying rural town is going to better connected and have an easier life than a well-connected, middle class lady who went to a top public school in the middle of London, I think can clearly tell that your point simply does not stand.

  No one here is arguing that the issue of sexism against women is not a problem; what they are trying to say is that we should not just concentrate on that issue at the expense of another growing problem.

  The real reason for this is that the traditional employment prospects for white, working class males have mostly dried up – and as such, many of them find themselves disconnected from society. The careers and way of life that their family had basically followed for the last 100 years has over the last 30 to 20 years rapidly disappeared.

  Many now simply do not know where to go next – or what to do.

  Much research into this issue has been conducted by sociologists and psychologists, who have found it is a mix of:

  – boys generally maturing slower than girls;

  – a rapid expansion in the amount of admin and clerical work (traditionally undertaken by women) leading to many young girls still feeling they have realistic employment prospects, whereas the jobs traditionally undertaken by males have disappeared;

  – many part-time retail employers often prefer to hire young females, thus giving them more experience of work and responsibility earlier, as well as the basic confidence boost one gets from being employed;

  These basic aspects of the issue run deep and create a whole host of other problems for young working class males.

  I agree that work to promote gender equality and ethnic diversity should continue with the same zeal it always has – if not more – but the issue of ensuring that such work benefits the working class, as well, is one we should not forget, even if those individuals are white and male.

• George Potter 11th Feb '14 - 12:57pm

  I like the “in non-science subjects” bit. Excluding almost half of all the fields of human knowledge is rather substantial as it happens.

  I’m an engineer and in my first year there were maybe 8 women in a class of almost 100. Yes, women dominate certain subjects but men dominate other subjects.

  The correct thing to do then is to ask “what can we do to end gender disparities between subjects?” rather than saying “what can we do about a specific problem harming men in this cherry picked selection of cases while ignoring specific problems harming women?”

• paul barker 11th Feb '14 - 1:20pm

  Isnt this all based on the assumption that men should do as well as women ? Perhaps women are just naturally more academic ?

• paula keaveney 11th Feb '14 - 1:22pm

  George raises a very valid point. I teach Public Relations in a media department in a North West University. Our gender ratio among the students is generally 1 man to 7 women. The animation course (same department) has the ratio the other way round. There are clearly women who’d be great animators and men who would do brilliantly at PR. But each has an image which reinforces gender stereotypes. The issue is how to present these type of professions as ones which are equally doable by women and men.

  Interestingly, the men who have taken part in the PR course have not suffered from the “standing back shyly” approach when it comes to work experience (that Kiron mentions) .

• Jennie 11th Feb '14 - 1:43pm

  @Alexander: Sorry, the referring to people as “males” and “females” as though you are not one of them really bugs me, which might have made my initial comment more brusque than strictly necessary.

  When you talk about the relative advantages and disadvantages of working class men vs middle class women you are in fact talking about intersectionality: no one individual is ONLY one attribute. For instance, I am female AND bi AND poly AND northern AND low income but also expensively educated AND cis AND high IQ AND able-bodied etc etc. There’s no point in playing oppression Olympics in those circumstances; yes, lower-income people have disadvantages, but men have advantages, and these things interact with each other such that it’s not simply a matter of adding weights to each side of a balance to get a total oppression score for each person so you can rank them.

  The fact remains that in toto women outperforming men in pretty much every area still does not equate to women gaining more whole life economic success, and framing this as a problem of male underperformance spectacularly misses the point.

  Every individual needs to be treated as an individual, in all areas of life, including education. Then male underperformance will be cured because each boy will be able to access appropriate educational resources for him as an individual; but also the systematic discrimination against women which means that despite consistently outperforming men they are not valued as highly will also be cured. Then, I suspect, we’ll both be happy.

• Joe Otten 11th Feb '14 - 1:57pm

  What Jennie said.

  But also I don’t think the arguments about “image that reinforces gender stereotypes” are sufficient to explain, for example female dominance at entry to medicine and male dominance at entry to the rest of science. Not long ago men dominated both. It seems to me that a lot of young people with similar interests and aptitudes are making different choices, in a manner correlated to their own gender identity. That might be a problem, but how can we be sure? In terms of career structure and security, medicine is surely a more rational choice than science. Do we need somehow to teach boys to be a bit more rational?

• Gareth Aubrey 11th Feb '14 - 2:28pm

  Science may be half of human knowledge, but (sadly and not tackled nearly enough) it doesn’t represent remotely half of UK jobs and UK incomes. (This is why I stopped being a physicist and started being a lawyer…)

  Kiron’s fundamental observation is correct and often ignored; where once we had professions that pumped socially homogenous men in at the bottom and socially homogenous men out at the top, we are increasingly pumping socially homogenous women in at the bottom. Yes, we still have real problems with getting those women up to the top (law firms recruiting me would often report having 2:1 female:male solicitors, but 2:1 male:female partners) but how that demographic will progress in the future is certainly an important factor.

• Kiron Reid 11th Feb '14 - 3:00pm

  My apologies for a round up but everyone raises interesting and thought provoking points. Here the first couple of batches of comments I’ve read and there’ve been a few more while I’ve been thinking about what you have all been writing.

  @Jennie, I think the issue is encouraging everyone to reach their full potential.
  @ Eddie. I think fairness is a key. Hopefully we all agree on that.
  I know most about entrants (from all kinds of backgrounds at a range of Universities) @Alexander gives more detailed background on the broader problem. I don’t think it is the clear class issue that is portrayed but clearly the problem is worse for people labelled or self-identifying as ‘working class’ (some a self fulfilling pessimism).
  @George, I think (I may well be wrong) that there are now far more arts and social science students and therefore that exacerbates the problem. I think the issue is about encouraging achievement in a broad sense, rather than just gender disparities between subjects. I mistakenly used short hand ‘non-science’ – I did include medicine and related subjects, but yes basically excluded engineering, chemistry, physics. Was a majority of your intake from the UK or Europe? At most Universities I know now the intake is overwhelmingly Asian and therefore the same issues for ‘home’ males can be repeated in terms of not achieving as highly.
  @Paul, very interesting point. I wonder what research tells us. I guess it varies but many I know certainly are.
  @Paula. I’m sure none of Paula’s students would miss opportunities on work experience, especially given your contacts on PR that you pull in to give very good advice (backing your own up), Paula.

• Kiron Reid 11th Feb '14 - 3:14pm

  @Jennie “Sorry, the referring to people as “males” and “females” as though you are not one of them”. I’m not sure whether this means I should have declared a bias being male, or simply that you are decrying the dividing people into male and female. Your latter points focus on individuals and that is a good ideal. There are also though areas where women have advantages – as you say there are many characteristics and it is not all a ‘women disadvantaged’ calculus.

  @Jennie I was not ignoring “women [not] gaining whole life economic success” “and framing this as a problem of male underperformance”. As others have said, the concern is to try and deal with a modern problem early on, while still maintaining the focus on breaking the glass ceiling which has certainly been a lot slower than I expected when I graduated in the early ‘90s. The stats Gareth mentions are better than I would have thought (though I know some firms which are predominantly female partners, albeit the best example I can think of is a leading family law firm which itself invites stereotypes – though they’re the firm I advise people to use myself because they are very good).
  @Joe. I think we probably need more women in science, just as we need more women in peacemaking and more scientists (and philosophers) in Parliament.
  @Gareth. I’d forgotten or missed that you were yet another younger Lib Dem who was now a lawyer. I think having a Llandaff physicist councillor would be great – you could advise on the anomalies in Doctor Who and Torchwood locations.

• Alex Baldwin 11th Feb '14 - 5:36pm

  @Joe:
  “In terms of career structure and security, medicine is surely a more rational choice than science. Do we need somehow to teach boys to be a bit more rational?”

  One big difference between medicine and scientific research (if that’s what you mean) as careers is that it is seen to be much easier to take a career break from a medical career to raise children and then go back to it (you will still be a medical doctor and qualified to work as one), whereas that is more difficult in research because that career relies on maintaining a constant output of work. I know several women who have taken clinical rather than academic career paths because they want to be able to take time out to have a family. Whether that is based on what they *want* to do (i.e. would they rather be working with the Dad at home… when I’ve asked that question they’ve said “no”), and whether it reflects reality (I know successful scientists who took time out for family) are two other questions.

  @Jennie:
  Though I agree with you that the interactions between these different factors are going to be non-linear (and so can’t be partitioned out after the fact), I think that the intersectionality idea as it is typically used tends to ignore the variance in experience even within these categories. There are still going to be significant differences between your life experiences and those of the next low-income expensively-educated northern high-IQ able-bodied poly bi ciswoman. Sure, you could keep adding in sufficient additional factors to account for this leftover variance, but in that case I imagine you’d end up just treating people as individuals. Where the statistics (I haven’t checked these for this article) do reveal population differences along a particular axis though it’s worth considering what it is about the education system as it is at the moment that might be letting boys down and whether there is some sort of help that they might benefit from. The best assessment of whether you’ve identified the cause is to try a potential solution and see whether it helps.

• Roland 11th Feb '14 - 8:53pm

  I think there are two issues here, firstly the role played by our education system and secondly the social dimension.

  My understanding is that our approach to teaching in recent decades has changed to use approaches that tend to favour girls rather than boys learning styles. To me this raises the question about our approaches to teaching, not that we shouldn’t use techniques that get the best out of boys and girls but how we can best use such techniques in the typical mixed comprehensive school. This should help to ensure that universities get the opportunity to actually pick the best and brightest.

  The second problem is more problematic, basically we have certain social groups facing the ‘unknown’, namely their future is different to their parents and their community gives them little real contact with this new world and hence what they could aspire to. I suspect that the best approach to dealing with this is encourage greater mixing of socio-economic groups and hence encourage social networking between these groups. Hence for example we don’t want large estates of low cost/council/social housing but more mixed development where people are likely to share fences and drives.

  So yes I agree with Kiron that we need to address male under performance, but suspect that at the same time we will enhance female performance and opportunity.

• Alex Baldwin 11th Feb '14 - 9:34pm

  @Roland: “To me this raises the question about our approaches to teaching, not that we shouldn’t use techniques that get the best out of boys and girls but how we can best use such techniques in the typical mixed comprehensive school.”

  I think this is an important point. To tie it back to what @Jennie was saying about treating people as individuals, I can easily see it being the case that rather than there being preferred categorically male vs. female learning styles there may instead be a style that works for 80% of boys vs. a style that works for 80% of girls (assuming a simple dichotomy) with the remainder of each sex preferring the “other’s” learning style. At the limit, there could be a case where there may be an argument for a different kind of streaming than I have heard of being used before (by preferred learning style rather than by ability).

  My personal experience is of having gone to a (very successful) selective boys’ grammar school. I guess it could be possible that one of the reasons why they do so well is that they only have to tailor their teaching style to the preferences of a single gender. (I understand that its not so fashionable these days to think that the kids who pass exams to get into those schools are any smarter than the ones who don’t. =P)

• Alex Baldwin 11th Feb '14 - 9:47pm

  Here is the closest thing I can find to a randomised trial for single-sex versus mixed schooling:
  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1

  It uses data from the Seoul school system, which has a quirk where students are randomly assigned to single-sex or mixed schools (this controls for effects of the students’ backgrounds). Even after controlling for effects of the schools themselves they do find that students do better academically (in test scores and in terms of college attendance) if they go to a single-sex school.

  I am not advocating for an abolition of mixed schools in the UK (even if these results were decisive there are other important roles that schooling should play) but if there is a single-sex advantage then it must be worth looking at why that could be.

• Roland 12th Feb '14 - 11:38am

  @Alex
  Thanks for the ‘trial’ lead. It has always been commented upon that single sex schools tended to do better than mixed, but as you indicate that might be more to do with intake.

  >there are other important roles that schooling should play
  Agree here, whilst I went to a mixed grammar/comprehensive, because of the particular group of students my mother taught, I was particularly aware that the local girl’s school had the highest level of teenage pregnancy in the area at the time…

• Andrew Colman 12th Feb '14 - 11:47am

  I am getting confused by this one day we read about how girls are failing due to pink toys for example, now a few days later I am reading about how boys are failing!

• GF 12th Feb '14 - 12:32pm

  There are undoubtedly many factors causing male underperformance. One I would like to see tackled was the subject, albeit indirectly, of a programme I saw nearly 25 years ago following the contrasting approach taken with 4 year olds in Kindergarten in several European countries. The UK class was prosperous middle class in one of the leafier outer suburbs of SW London.

  In one scene from the UK class a little boy called John had been asked to write his name. He had got most of a very wobbly “J” done and then collapsed in tears. An educational psychologist explained that he was one of the youngest in the class and also, as a boy, was also less advanced than a girl of the same age – so doubly disadvantaged. She went on to say that although he knew his name and could spell it, he was not physiologically capably of completing the task as he had not yet developed the fine motor control necessary. She said that what he should be doing was fun colouring to gain the motor control for later writing.

  So what he learnt that day was that school is a horrible place, one of ritual humiliation and failure and best avoided.

  The psychologist pointed out that this led to a testable hypothesis. If correct, boys would go on to significantly underperform girls in later education because, as faster developers, girls would, on average, be less impacted by too soon formal teaching. QED!

  The contrast was provided by a school in a dirt-poor working class district of Budapest (then newly liberated from communist rule). There they played a conga game. To start the children sat round the room and the teacher started a
  conga while calling a child’s name spelt phonetically: “Ju Oh Hu Nnn”. When the first child got it he/she shouted out the name followed a split second later by all the others catching on and John joined the conga. And so on until all were involved.

  The kids faces were shining and happy and they clearly had a ball. They learnt how to spell each others’ names but, more importantly, that school was fun and worthwhile, a positive experience.

  And to cap it all, comparisons of their progress showed that those working class kids experiencing a participative, fun approach massively outperformed the middle class children from the leafy London suburb.

• Helen Tedcastle 12th Feb '14 - 2:03pm

  @ Roland: ” My understanding is that our approach to teaching in recent decades has changed to use approaches that tend to favour girls rather than boys learning styles. To me this raises the question about our approaches to teaching, not that we shouldn’t use techniques that get the best out of boys and girls but how we can best use such techniques in the typical mixed comprehensive school.”

  The approach to teaching has changed in the last decade in this way. Teachers are now more aware than ever of varieties of teaching styles and effects on learning. The three-fold auditory, visual, kinesthetic styles are well-known and well- practised. However, there is a limit to how many teaching styles can be employed in any one lesson or group of lessons, depending on the subject.

  The GCSE format has favoured girls in that there are coursework elements which favour consistent work-application and the module system also favours the way girls work. This has all just been abolished by Gove.

  Perhaps the return to linear exams, abolition of coursework and emphasis on facts rather than understanding, pushed by Gove, will help boys. It encourages cramming and the high stakes of the exams bring an element of risk, even winging it for the most confident, which can’t be done with coursework.

  This return to the old style could well be at the expense of girls and to the advantage of boys. Afterall, it was not that long ago that politicians were lamenting the underachievement of girls.

• Kiron Reid 12th Feb '14 - 3:11pm

  I read the interesting comments and debate from Alex and Roland last night, and more today. Both focus on the education system. I don’t think it is the ‘fault’ of educationalists, and I’m sure most here – unlike the left and right – don’t want to hold teachers generally responsible for all educational failure (as opposed to pupils, students, parents, families, society all having responsibility). I think Alex makes a good point though that trying potential solutions is a good start.

  I think Roland makes two really strong points: “we have certain social groups facing the ‘unknown’,” and that we need “to encourage greater mixing of socio-economic groups”. Again my knowledge is about Universities, people on here know a lot more about schools. Unlike new lecturers I didn’t learn about learning styles and it is something that I only came round to appreciating the importance of much later on. (Helen’s insight is helpful on that). Alex makes the points I hear often in the press and on Radio 4 about single sex schools performing better, particularly for girls. I went to a respected single sex boys’ school which was very good academically but probably not a great grounding for life. (Andrew, I agree it’s a bit like the media – tea is good for you one week, tea is bad for you the next week etc., but think there is less focus on this aspect).

  GF, I’ve heard plenty of similar stories about very young pupils being put down by teachers – mostly from the past fortunately. I always hope it wasn’t deliberate, why would you do the job if you’re going to be mean to children (without meaning deliberate and institutionalised abuse).

  Helen, I agree very much with Gove’s emphasis on academic rigour. This is entirely based on my experience in dealing with University undergrads every year for many years who came in with almost (not always) invariably increasing grades and almost (not always) invariably decreasing ability to cope with first year University. But I’m also convinced that a mix of assessments methods is both better and fairer, and I don’t understand how Gove and the Tories can’t see that. As it happens I was personally better at the types of assessment that are said to favour boys. How we cope with coursework for the ‘everything is on the internet’ belief and Wikipedia age I don’t know but abolishing it is not a good idea. It’ll be ironic if schools and Universities end up doing the opposite as has happened in the past.

  As an aside I used to rate the Wikipedia law content as decent 2.2 at best; now I think it is mostly 2.1 but that isn’t going to get a student a good grade for their own work or answer the question set.

  PS I know I shouldn’t comment on every point (like a bad meeting chair) but I am finding the debate valuable and want to say so. I’ll keep out more after this.

• GF 12th Feb '14 - 3:37pm

  Kiron – Trying to be reasonably brief led me to leave out part of the story. It very definitely was NOT a case of the teacher putting intentionally down a young child as it apparently came across to you. Rather, both the educational psychologist and headmistress (both very impressive individuals incidentally) were agreed that this was wrong and damaging to the children, some more than others, and were very distressed by that. The problem was that they were REQUIRED to do it this way by dictat from some predecessor of Gove (I forget who) telling them how to do their job with little reference to their professionalism as teachers. They were both clear that, were they to do things differently as they wanted to, they would soon have Ofsted (or whatever it was then called) down on them like a ton of bricks.

• Helen Tedcastle 12th Feb '14 - 6:53pm

  @ Kiron: I suppose this shows that the power of propaganda, good news management and endless repetition of mantras, really does work: ” Helen, I agree very much with Gove’s emphasis on academic rigour. This is entirely based on my experience in dealing with University undergrads every year for many years who came in with almost (not always) invariably increasing grades and almost (not always) invariably decreasing ability to cope with first year University.”

  In what sense is imposing an old model on schools, downgrading some subjects at random (Politics, Economics, RS, Music) ignoring good practice and repeating the word rigour, something to be welcomed – unless ‘doing or saying something’ is always good? Certainly if one goes behind the mantras, Gove has abolished many vocational courses and his attempt to shoehorn two humanities into the core curriculum, at the expense of Music and the Arts as well as Religious Studies (an academic not a vocational subject), is not sufficient to qualify as ‘rigour.’ If you mean he has turned the clock back thirty years to the linear exam and replaced the teaching of World History with largely British History, taught in chronological order (one damn thing after another as some Historians complain), then again, I would question it. In terms of boys and girls performance, the abolition of all forms of coursework except Geography field trips, is a retrograde move. It is possible to ensure that coursework is not simply a download of wikipedia. An alert teacher knows their students and checks drafts of work regularly, so lifts from the internet are quite easy to spot. That is the area I would have concentrated on – in-service training on producing good coursework – not it’s abolition at the stroke of a pen and a press release. As university students have to write coursework essays and even dissertations, this move in schools is even more regressive by Gove.

  On the question of undergraduates. I am aware that universities complained of the apparent inability of first year students to cope with the demands of first year study. Gove is returning to the linear exam days but as a former sixth form tutor, the end of Year 12 AS level was actually useful as a benchmark for teachers and students. It helped students with their eventual UCAS applications (choice of degree and institution) and choices of A2 subjects.

  The problem came with the 2004 Blair Government allowing exam boards to set module exams in January of Year 12. The sheer number of modules led to an over-emphasis on tests and insufficient testing of depth. This could have been rectified easily without ripping up the entire system. It would have been much simpler to return to the pre-2004 model. Also, it would have allayed the fears of universities who I do not recall complaining about students before 2004.

  As teachers, we were proud of the level of preparation we gave students and we did not have any complaints from students that they couldn’t cope at university. I suppose university feeling has become more acute since the introduction by the Blair Government of top-up fees – which has gradually shifted university teaching towards concentrating heavily on undergraduate teaching and ‘student experience.’ I know there is a proliferation of academic skills centres in university, so there clearly is a problem with the modular system but this does not justify a return to the old A Level of thirty years ago.

  So I put the blame fairly and squarely on the 2004 changes to three modules a year. The AS is a good idea at the end of year 12 (Cambridge University is very angry with Gove for abolishing it) but as usual Gove comes in and abolishes the whole system.

  Also, in the recent review of A level ‘rigour’ , university-led, the only A level which was deemed in need of boosting was Mathematics. All other A levels were deemed ‘rigorous’ enough for university entry – including the non-EBacc or ‘facilitating subjects’ A levels. This rather exposes the other straw man touted by Gove that subjects aren’t rigorous enough and that teachers were effectively ‘with-holding knowledge’ from students.

  As there was a problem with some students with certain combinations of A levels applying for inappropriate courses, again, this could be rectified by having good, informed careers guidance in year 11. But what was one of the first things Gove did on becoming Secretary of State? Abolish the school careers service, Connexions.

  So I am always cautious when politicians grab the headlines and create straw men in order to impose their own ideology, because no one is against high standards and expectations. However, a few thousand professional practitioners are definitely not happy with draconian solutions generated by interns in think-tanks founded by the sitting Secretary of State.

• Stuart Mitchell 12th Feb '14 - 7:27pm

  @George Potter
  “The correct thing to do then is to ask ‘what can we do to end gender disparities between subjects?'”

  Why would we wish to? Equality should not mean homogeneity. I don’t see the problem with certain subjects or professions appealing predominantly to one particular gender, any more than there’s a problem with boys and girls liking different toys and colours (going back to a particularly bizarre thread from the other day). A much more real problem would be the issue of female-dominated professions paying lower salaries simply because they are female-dominated – that’s the kind of thing we should be stamping out instead of attempting to socially engineer a situation whereby men and women are indistinguishable.

• Kiron Reid 12th Feb '14 - 10:23pm

  @Helen I agree with your last para. and that basically Michael Gove appears to be throwing the baby out with the bath water for ideological reasons. In that respect the Coalition Government have repeated many mistakes of the Labour Government; though both early on (in different policy areas) appeared committed to evidence based policies. I didn’t know of the specific changes in 2004 – I was always astounded that University staff were never briefed on changes in A-Levels and HE that would affect them. The Tory idea of Unis vetting A-Levels was daft – lecturers wanted prepared undergraduates, not to be setting A-levels. I’ve been trying to think of when I first started to complain of falling standards and think it was probably mostly post-2004.

• Helen Tedcastle 12th Feb '14 - 10:57pm

  @ Kiron: On the 2004 changes. Lecturers weren’t the only ones not consulted on the changes to a wholly modular system. However, and I notice you didn’t comment on this, the AS level was quite a useful innovation and did not lead to teaching to the test on the scale of the mid-year modules and endless retakes. I’m trying hard to recall the evidence that the DfE used to axe the entire system AS/A2 and to prioritise a core of ‘facilitating subjects’ over other subjects (did not occur prior to 2004 and universities were not complaining then). The only evidence put forward was a one-off survey of admissions tutors of the subjects they preferred and a YouGov poll published in the Sun newspaper, which asked a random sample of parents which subjects they thought were most important. Music didn’t register at all in that poll.

  Is this good evidence-based policy-making?

  I’m quite pleased that Cambridge University has ignored Gove and pursued their own list of useful subjects for each degree course – far broader and allows students to pursue their own interests as well as meet the standard Cambridge require.

• Kiron Reid 12th Feb '14 - 11:36pm

  @Helen: I think we’ve gone off on a (very important) tangent but personally yes I thought the taking A and AS-levels was good. That later improvement under Labour of students taking a broader range of subjects. I and colleagues were very wary of resits to improve grades and of apparently easier subjects being taken, but the improved range did seem to broaden minds which is good.

• Helen Tedcastle 13th Feb '14 - 10:54am

  @ Kiron: Thanks for your comment. It’s quite an important tangent that we’ve gone along but it’s relevant to the overall debate on the greater numbers of people going to university, particularly women in the arts/social sciences and humanities. With the changes being made, there is bound to be an effect on performance. As for so-called ‘easier’ subjects being taken – that was found not to be the case by the university-led review last year (except in maths). What is the case however, is the patchy advice being given to students on combination of subjects to do, which are appropriate to their degree subject choice. So it is inappropriate for someone doing Photography A level with maths and Geography to apply for medicine and so on. Anyway, time will tell whether Gove’s ‘reforms’ affect the numbers of women and men choosing to study at university. Thanks for responding.