Why Girls Do Better at School, But Not Later On

In his ‘Theory of Gender Deficit at Oxbridge’ (Oxford Magazine No. 120) Dr. McCrum suggests that the current male dominance of the finals lists, particularly in Class I, ‘can be taken to be prima facie evidence of a gender differential in teaching, institutional culture, or assessment’. But, although these may all have a part to play in what is a real phenomenon, it is possible that biological differences may be important as well, and these will be more difficult to deal with.

It is well known that girls do better than boys in the GCSE, and that although the best boys begin to catch up at ‘A’ Level, in most subjects the girls are more than holding their own there as well. This is probably because teenage girls are better behaved at school, and work more conscientiously, and their IQ scores are often higher. Around puberty boys are notoriously rowdy and disobedient, the girls being much more teachable. In the past the threat of the cane, freely used with little fuss, was effective in checking boys’ idleness and fairly harmless naughtiness, quite apart from more serious misbehaviour. But that is no longer so, and nowadays the worst threat is that you can be either temporarily suspended or permanently expelled from school. There are said to be over 60,000 suspensions from State schools in Britain each year, nearly all of them boys. This is educationally unsatisfactory, and many of those involved are probably only too glad to get out of school anyway.

There seems to be a real biological difference here. Puberty in boys is a year or two later than for girls, who are often sexually mature before sixteen, and more or less socially mature soon afterwards. Up to their early teens boys are much the same size as the girls, but they then start to grow bigger and stronger, and their characters change. They become less sure of themselves, and tend to show off to the others to boost their own self-confidence. This they may do in athletic sports, but all too often by aggressive defiance of authority. That doesn’t help with their school work, and may lead to trouble with the police.

Young women are fully grown by eighteen and physically ready for motherhood, but men go on increasing in size and strength until at least twenty-five, and in most societies it has been only then that they were able to marry and start their families. The same is so with many other animals, where the males are larger and stronger than the females, and much more aggressive, Puberty in male gorillas, for example, is at around eleven, not long after the females who at that age are similar in size. But the females then stop growing and soon get pregnant, while the young males go on growing until they are at least eighteen, and twice the size of the females. It is only then that they are strong and fierce enough to compete for their harems, so it is for social rather than physiological reasons that breeding is delayed for six years and more after they become potentially fertile.

Humans are the same, and probably also in mental development. Girls at seventeen-plus are usually sexually and socially ahead of the boys, and often have better school records. When interviewed for university admission they not only look better but they really are better, and are rightly given preference, But once at university the best men start to forge ahead, and in most subjects they get nearly twice as many Firsts in proportion with their numbers. They also have more Thirds and Fails, most of the women being in class II (1) and II (2). So, although there isn’t much difference between the sexes in average performance, there are more men right at the top.

And later on men get most of the best jobs. This isn’t so much because the women start to ease off, though with family responsibilities many of them do, as that the men tend to be more ambitious and enterprising, and willing to take risks. This is at least as important as intelligence for success in life. But they are also more aggressive and violent, which is why there are more than ten times as many men as women in prison. These differences between the sexes are primarily biological and due to the male hormones.

So the reason why girls do better at school is that they mature earlier, both physically and mentally, and are not burdened with the boys’ testicular hormones. These are of less than no help to school work, but they are important for success, especially later on in life, when it is not brains the ladies lack, but balls.

C. B. Goodhart