In Canada we see girls outperform boys dramatically on teacher-assigned grades, but only very slightly on standardized tests; it's important to understand if the difference arises from the students or from the teachers.
When we started 1st semester, there were about 120 students of which about 30 were men (well... boys, really:)
The competition for entry was fierce, there were 17 people for every opening. In Polish education system we had point system which allowed selecting students, even having maximum points did not guarantee entry. You can be sure that every one of 120 students had equivalent of straight As on all subjects and the same for their exams, plus additional points for competitions, etc. They probably were best in their schools.
After 5 years only 20 students were left of which 15 were men.
I had distinct impression that the guys who went there went there because they loved math. We would talk to each other about math, meet to discuss interesting information, trivia, etc.
Gals, on the other hand, I had distinct impression that the went for math because they did good at previous school. They would meet with other students, but in my observation much more rarely and the talk would be exclusively about current assignment. They got max grades in everything at their previous school and they just happened to choose math as something they had good grades. They had no particular interest so they just chose one of the topics they thought they are good at. They were not interested to spend future with math, to teach math or work in research. Those girls worked harder than guys but this was just work for work sake. They had no love for math and it is pretty difficult to stick to a demanding topic like that if you are not really interested in it.
The tragedy of this is nobody told them what they had in their previous school wasn't really math and they were not interested enough to realize that memorizing formulas or "solving" problems by memorizing solutions and substituting numbers is not math.
As somebody who was doing quite well (I may have been asked by prof to do one or two lectures in their absence), I met with a lot of people who were desperately seeking help to understand the material. Guess what, almost all of them were women who were incredulous they always "did good at school" and don't understand why they are not anymore.
That's it, my subjective opinion on the matter. I was one of the guys who dropped after 3rd semester and went to work in IT.
The girls they d send you the last day of vacation a plea to send them the response to some basic assignment. It's hard now to take seriously my company trying to make us diversify the workforce. We either get no one or once we got a girl who look half interested she leaves after a year because she doesnt find it so fun, the daily code grind. We have to do fake interviews with our female friends to pass the rule "each male hire must be preceded by an attempted female hire".
And God I wish they d persist,the girls, because I d love to see something different at work. And I sure hope my daughter will see the joy of talking to and making algorithmic machines, but I guess it's on me
I (as a man) also didn't like to spend most of my time in male-only environments, so the solution for me was remote working and having a girlfriend who is also remote working.
Poland here and I can agree on that.
Additionally it felt like boys put a slightly more effort into caring about what to do right after school (high) - 1st job, but I cannot prove it, it's just more or less random thought
Maybe it kinda affected grades?
I recall reading material attributing this to differences in biological development during teenage years which are relevant not only to sexual characteristics but for general body&mind&behavior changes and gender/hormones influence not only the type of changes but also their timing - so adolescent girls are not exactly equivalent in development to adolescent boys of the same year/grade; asserting that they are slightly more "psychologically mature" (or more adult-imitating/conforming behavior?) which affects study performance in adolescent years, and the boys 'catch up' a bit later. However, I'm not certain if this material I read has a solid evidence basis or is driven by speculative stereotyping.
The difference could very well be biological (although some would call that "structural sexism" as well).
But it would be interesting to test.
There is no evidence that proves that girls do better than boys.
Here from PISA [1]
Also APA [2]
It's the same story across cultures, after kindergarten, most girls accelerate past most boys in languages. Boys are generally a little bit ahead of girls in math.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342344680_Examining...
[2] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/09/girls-read-w...
>Whether a student passes or fails is dependent on a combination of two assessments; >a report from their junior high school marked out of 300 points >and a written test covering Japanese, math, English, science and social studies and scored out of 700.
The report is worth up to 300 points which is about 10x the typical differentials mentioned in article. Going by the condensed explanation in article, is created by the junior high teacher(s?) of the pupil. I suspect a scoring inflation, quite possibly gender-selective - specifically to prop up pupils the teachers perceive as worthy moving onward.