Why Do Girls Do Better At School?
In most developed countries, girls do better than boys at school. There’s a ton of evidence for this - see here, here, or here. This hasn’t always been the case - girls’ grades have been getting a lot better over time. Even in subjects where boys are often thought of as performing better than girls (like maths), I think the evidence generally suggests that girls actually outperform boys at school, but the effect size is smaller than for other subjects. That’s the finding from Voyer and Voyer’s meta-analysis, in which they note that:
“A small but significant female advantage (mean d = 0.225, 95% CI [0.201, 0.249]) was demonstrated for the overall sample of effect sizes. Noteworthy findings were that the female advantage was largest for language courses (mean d = 0.374, 95% CI [0.316, 0.432]) and smallest for math courses (mean d = 0.069, 95% CI [0.014, 0.124]).”
It’s true that there are some studies that suggest that boys do better in maths, but they seem to be ou…
