Explaining the Gender Gap in Education

Last Updated on August 30, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Girls have outperformed boys at almost every level of English education since the late 1980s, but the gap is now narrowing fast — and at A-level top grades it has reversed. There are five main social factors outside school which explain why girls pulled ahead:

1. changes in women’s employment
2. changes in the family
3. girls’ changing ambitions
4. the impact of feminism
5. differential socialisation of boys and girls

This post covers what the gender gap actually looks like in the most recent statistics, how it has changed since the 1980s, and the out-of-school explanations sociologists use to account for it. It is one of the main topics within the sociology of education module for A-level sociology.

IMAGE: Explaining the gender gap in education mind map for A-level sociology

What the gender gap in education looks like in 2026

The gender gap is smaller than most textbooks suggest, and it is closing.

At GCSE, the Department for Education’s Key Stage 4 performance statistics for 2024/25 show girls ahead of boys on every headline measure, but by less than at any point in the recent series:

• The gap in the percentage achieving grade 5 or above in both English and maths was 3.1 percentage points, down from 4.7 points in 2023/24 and 6.6 points in 2018/19.
• The average Attainment 8 gap was 4.0 points, down from 4.5 in 2023/24 and 5.5 in 2018/19.
• The gap in full EBacc entry was 7.8 percentage points, down from 8 points in 2023/24 and 11.6 points in 2018/19.

The narrowing between 2024 and 2025 was not driven by boys improving. Girls’ attainment on the English and maths measure fell by 1.3 percentage points while boys’ rose by 0.3. That distinction matters: a gap can close because the group behind catches up, or because the group ahead falls back, and these are sociologically very different things.

[IMAGE: bar chart showing the GCSE gender gap in grade 5+ English and maths, 2018/19 to 2024/25]

At A-level the picture has changed more dramatically. In the summer 2026 results published by the Joint Council for Qualifications, 28.9% of boys’ entries were awarded A or A*, compared to 28.0% of girls’ entries — the second consecutive year in which boys have taken a larger share of the top grades. At A* specifically, 10.2% of male entries against 9.1% of female entries.

HOWEVER, this does not mean boys are now outperforming girls at A-level generally. Girls still had the higher overall pass rate (97.9% against 97.1%), and girls still made up around 54% of all entries. The DfE’s 16-18 results for 2024/25 show female students still ahead on average point score per entry, but by only 0.9 points — and since ten points equals one grade, that is a difference of under a tenth of a grade.

The reversal at the top grades is largely a subject-entry effect rather than an ability effect. Boys are concentrated in maths, further maths and economics, which award a high proportion of A and A* grades, and boys outnumber girls in A-level maths by roughly two to one. Fewer lower-attaining boys sit A-levels at all, which flatters the male average. Subject choice is covered properly in my post on gender and subject choice — and this is a good example of why sociologists treat subject choice and achievement as connected rather than separate questions.

One further finding is worth knowing because it cuts against the whole narrative. Among tech level students in 2024/25, the attainment gap ran in favour of male students, by 0.5 points, for the second year running. On the vocational route, the gender gap does not exist in the direction students expect.

Girls are still much more likely to go to university

The largest gender gap in English education is not in grades at all. It is in progression.

DfE figures for pupils reaching age 19 in 2023/24 show that 52.5% of female pupils had entered higher education by 19, against 39.5% of males — a gap of 13 percentage points. Female pupils were also more likely to reach a high-tariff university, at 14.7% against 11.0%. (These are the most recent figures published as a male/female split; the 2024/25 release restructured this section into an online dashboard, and gives an overall age-19 participation rate of 44.7%.)

So the gap in what students achieve is closing, while the gap in what students do next remains wide. Any answer that treats “the gender gap” as a single thing will struggle to explain that.

How the gap emerged: the reversal since the 1980s

Boys used to do better than girls, and the switch happened at an identifiable moment.

Until the late 1980s boys outperformed girls at 16, particularly in the subjects that mattered most for entry to grammar schools and the professions. Girls overtook boys within a few years of two changes arriving together: the introduction of GCSEs in 1988, which replaced O-levels and CSEs with a single examination, and the introduction of coursework as a substantial part of assessment under the 1988 Education Reform Act.

Whether coursework caused the reversal is one of the classic disputes in this topic. The timing is striking, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for an in-school explanation. HOWEVER, coursework has since been almost entirely removed from GCSEs and A-levels — and girls did not fall back when it went. If coursework had been the cause, the reversal should have reversed.

The more defensible position is that the reversal coincided with a much longer shift in women’s position in British society, and that the exam reforms accelerated something already under way. That is what the out-of-school explanations below are trying to capture.

Changes in women’s employment

The proportion of men and women in paid work is now much closer than it was fifty years ago. According to the House of Commons Library briefing Women and the UK economy, drawing on the ONS Labour Force Survey, the female employment rate was 72.4% in October to December 2025 and the male rate 77.6%. In the early 1970s the male rate was over 90% and the female rate under 60%.

Over the same period the service sector has grown and manufacturing has shrunk. Women are heavily concentrated in the sectors that expanded: 77% of jobs in health and social work and 71% of jobs in education are held by women. Education became more obviously relevant to girls, because there were now careers at the end of it that had not existed for their grandmothers.

The mirror image is the decline in traditional working-class men’s work. The factory jobs that the lads Paul Willis studied in the 1970s expected to walk into have largely gone. Where a boy could once leave school with nothing and still earn a decent wage, that route closed — and some sociologists argue this produced a crisis of masculinity, a loss of a clear and achievable adult male identity, which feeds back into disengagement from school.

Two pieces of research support the employment explanation directly. Bertocchi and Bozzano (2019) reviewed the international literature and concluded that the improvement in female educational achievement from the 1980s to the 2000s can be explained by rising post-school expectations for women and the increasing likelihood that they could enter high-income occupations. Pekkarinen (2012) framed it as a question of returns: since the 1980s girls have seen increasing returns on their investment in education, while boys’ returns have fallen relative to theirs.

There is also a structural point about what England offers boys who do not want a degree. Only around 4% of over-25s in England hold a higher vocational qualification, against over 20% in Germany — a comparison frequently made in the skills-policy debate. Boys are far more likely than girls to take vocational routes, and England offers fewer high-status ones.

Changes in the family

Family life has changed in ways that make a career a normal expectation for women rather than an unusual one.

People marry later, typically in their thirties rather than their twenties, and dual-earner households are now the norm. Divorce rates and rates of relationship breakdown are high, and most lone-parent households are headed by women. In all of those situations it is desirable, and often necessary, for a woman to have her own income. A girl growing up now is far more likely than a girl growing up in 1970 to see paid work as something she will need for her whole adult life, not something she does before marriage.

The counterpart is that men’s role within the family has become less clearly defined. If the breadwinner role is no longer exclusively male and no longer secure, then the identity attached to it becomes uncertain — which is the family-based version of the crisis of masculinity argument.

Sue Sharpe: girls’ changing ambitions

The single best-known study in this topic is Sue Sharpe’s, and it is worth knowing properly because it is a genuine before-and-after comparison rather than a snapshot.

Sharpe interviewed working-class girls in London schools for Just Like a Girl, published in 1976. When she asked what mattered to them and what they expected from their futures, they gave answers organised around love, marriage, husbands and children, with jobs coming some way down the list. Careers were something you did until you married, and a girl who prioritised one risked being seen as unfeminine.

Sharpe repeated the research in the early 1990s and published a revised edition in 1994. The order had inverted. Girls now put having a job and being able to support themselves first, and talked about marriage and children as things that would happen later, if at all. They were also markedly more aware of the risk of depending financially on a man.

What makes Sharpe useful in an exam is that she is evidence of a change in attitudes, tracked by the same researcher using the same method roughly twenty years apart. Most of the other evidence in this topic is either a snapshot or a statistical trend. Sharpe lets you argue that girls’ own ambitions changed, not just their circumstances.

The obvious limitation is age. The second study is now over thirty years old and describes girls who are today in their forties. It is evidence about how the gap opened, not about why it persists — and a strong answer says so.

The impact of feminism

Feminism campaigned for equal rights and opportunities for women in education, in the workplace and in law, and feminist sociologists argue that most of the changes described above are consequences of that campaigning rather than things that happened on their own. The Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 opened jobs and pay that had been formally closed. Feminist pressure on schools, government and publishers reduced the most overt forms of gender stereotyping in the curriculum.

The broader claim is about expectations. If girls now assume they can become doctors, lawyers and engineers, that assumption had to be built, and feminists argue they built it.

Differential socialisation

Boys and girls are treated differently from birth, and some sociologists argue that the differences advantage girls once they reach school.

Fiona Norman (1988) found that most parents thought the appropriate socialisation for a girl involved handling her gently and encouraging quiet, relatively passive activities. Parents are also more likely to read with girls than with boys. The same gender stereotypes mean ‘typical boys’ are expected to need to run around and let off steam, and parents are more likely to be dismissive when boys get into trouble at school, treating it as boys being boys.

The consequence is that girls arrive at school already practised at the things school rewards — sitting still, listening, reading, working quietly — while boys arrive practised at things school punishes. Aucejo and James (2016) found that verbal skills mattered more than maths skills in gaining a university place, and girls have significantly better verbal skills on average.

Ann Oakley’s distinction between manipulation, canalisation, verbal appellations and different activities is the standard framework here, and it belongs to the wider topic of gender socialisation in schools, which covers how school itself continues the process the family began.

Personal-level factors

Alongside the social factors, a body of research points to individual-level differences which interact with them. Cavaglia, Machin, McNally and Ruiz-Valenzuela (2020) reviewed this evidence for English education.

Terrier (2020) found that teacher bias plays a part in why girls do better than boys. The OECD (2015) identified students’ attitudes to learning, their behaviour in school, their use of leisure time and their self-confidence as the most important drivers of the gap. Buchmann et al. (2008) found that boys are more likely than girls to experience reading disabilities, antisocial behaviour, attention deficit disorders, dyslexia and speech difficulties, and there is evidence that adolescent girls score higher on measures of non-cognitive skills such as attentiveness, organisation and self-discipline.

Bertrand and Pan (2013) traced boys’ behavioural problems back to home background, finding that boys’ behaviour is more strongly influenced by their parents than girls’ behaviour is. Lundberg (2017) complicates this: boys and girls react to problems at home and school differently, with boys more likely to develop behavioural problems and girls more likely to develop anxiety and depression. That difference in reaction may matter less than the difference in response — schools react far more negatively to a boy behaving badly than to a girl being quietly miserable.

There is also a threshold effect. Boys are more likely than girls to miss a grade 4 in GCSE English, and Machin et al. (2020) found that even marginally failing to get a good grade sharply reduces the chance of staying in education and raises the chance of becoming NEET. Finally, GCSEs are sat at 16, when boys are going through puberty and girls have largely finished — a timing point that costs nothing to make and is often worth a mark.

Innate ability does not explain the gap

Spelke (2005) reviewed the evidence on sex differences in cognitive ability and concluded that they do not explain the gender gap in education. Whatever small average differences exist are nowhere near large enough to account for a gap of this size — which is precisely why sociological explanations are needed.

Evaluating the out-of-school explanations

Description gets AO1 marks. The evaluation below is where AO3 marks are.

The crisis of masculinity only explains part of the pattern. The decline of manufacturing affected working-class men. But middle-class girls outperform middle-class boys too, and those boys never associated masculinity with factory work.

McDowell’s research on white working-class young men in Sheffield and Cambridge found that boys with low achievement had traditionally laddish identities but were not aggressive and were not put off by so-called feminised work. He described them as reliable workers making the most of limited opportunities — which undercuts the idea that a crisis of masculinity produces aggressive, anti-work male identities.

Willis’s lads rejected school when secure jobs still existed. Learning to Labour was published in 1977, before deindustrialisation, and the lads were rejecting education even though they could walk into work. Male disengagement from school predates the loss of the jobs, so the loss of the jobs cannot be the whole explanation.

The impact of feminism is hard to isolate. Changes in the labour market that improved women’s opportunities may have been driven by technological and economic change that would have happened anyway. Feminism and economic restructuring occurred together, and separating their effects is genuinely difficult.

Socialisation does not explain the timing. If differential gender socialisation caused girls to overtake boys, why did it happen in the late 1980s rather than in 1950? Gender socialisation has if anything become more gender-neutral over the period in which girls pulled ahead, which is the wrong direction for the argument.

And the gap is now closing. Any explanation built to account for a large and growing female advantage has to explain a GCSE gap that has fallen by more than half since 2018/19 and an A-level top-grade gap that has reversed. If the underlying social causes — women’s employment, family change, feminism — have not gone into reverse, then something else is doing the work.

In-school factors: the other half of the answer

Almost every exam question on this topic expects both halves, and distinguishing between them is one of the key analytical skills in this part of the specification.

The in-school explanations are teacher labelling (Swann and Graddol; Abraham), laddish anti-school subcultures and pro-school female subcultures (Willis; Sewell; Jackson; Frosh and Phoenix), the feminisation of teaching, the introduction of coursework, and boys’ overconfidence. I cover all of these in full in Explaining Gender Inequality in Education — In School Factors.

A separate strand asks how pupils construct and perform gender in school — Archer on hyper-heterosexual feminine identities, Francis on classroom interaction, Lees on the sexual double standard. That is covered in gender identity and education.

Class and ethnicity: the gender gap is the smallest of the three

This is the most useful evaluation point in the topic, and the one students most often miss.

At GCSE in 2024/25 the gender gap on the English and maths measure was 3.1 percentage points. The disadvantage gap on the same measure was 27.3 percentage points — nearly nine times larger. Class is far more powerful than gender as a predictor of achievement, and always has been.

Ethnicity matters more too. Progression to higher education by age 19 in 2023/24 ran at 67.4% for Asian/Asian British pupils, 63.3% for Black pupils, 50.2% for pupils of mixed heritage and 40.5% for White pupils.

The interaction is where the argument gets interesting. Among pupils eligible for free school meals, DfE figures for the 2020/21 cohort show that 21.0% of White British girls and 13.0% of White British boys had entered higher education by 19 — against a national average of 44.7%. Both figures are low; the gender gap between them is real but small next to the gap separating either group from the average.

Older survey evidence points the same way. Analysis of the British Household Panel Survey for the Centre for Population Change found that boys were less likely than girls to aspire to university across all ethnic groups, with the widest gap in the White group (57% of boys against 74% of girls). Broken down by class, boys from professional backgrounds aspired to university while boys from every other background largely did not — whereas girls from all class backgrounds did. The data is now dated, but the pattern it describes is exactly the pattern the current progression figures show.

MAGE: chart showing HE progression by sex and free school meal eligibility

So the correct formulation for an essay is not that girls do better than boys. It is that the gender gap is real, is narrowing, and is the smallest of the three major achievement gaps — and that gender interacts with class and ethnicity rather than operating independently of them.

How this comes up in the exam

Gender and achievement appears on Paper 1 (7192/1: Education with Theory and Methods) and is one of the most reliably examined parts of the education topic. Expect it in three forms:

• A 10-mark ‘outline and explain two’ question with no item, asking for two external factors, or two reasons for boys’ underachievement. Two developed paragraphs, no evaluation — there are no marks for it on this question type.
• A 10-mark ‘applying material from the item, analyse two’ question, where both points must come from the item.
• A 30-mark essay, usually framed around whether external or internal factors better explain gender differences in achievement, or whether the gender gap has been exaggerated.

For the 30-mark essay the structure that works is external factors, then internal factors, then the class and ethnicity comparison, concluding that gender is the weakest of the three and that the gap has narrowed sharply. Use current statistics — the 2024/25 GCSE gap and the 2026 A-level reversal are exactly the kind of contemporary evidence that separates a top-band answer from a textbook one.

For a full worked answer, see my model essay: Evaluate sociological explanations of gender differences in educational achievement. Revise here, practise there.

Revision checklist

You should be able to do all of the following without notes.

Concepts

• The gender gap
• Crisis of masculinity
• Gender socialisation and gender stereotyping
• Service sector and the decline of manufacturing
• Feminisation of education
• Gendered subject domains
• Primary and secondary socialisation

Studies

• Sue Sharpe (1976, 1994) — girls’ changing ambitions
• Fiona Norman (1988) — differential parental socialisation
• Paul Willis (1977) — the lads and the counter-school culture
• McDowell — white working-class male identities
• Spelke (2005) — innate ability does not explain the gap
• Cavaglia et al. (2020) — personal-level factors in English education

Check you can answer

• Why are girls outperforming boys? Give three external factors and explain each.
• Why has the gender gap narrowed since 2019?
• Using one example, explain how the gender gap in education differs from the class gap.
• Outline and explain two external factors which have resulted in girls outperforming boys in education (10)
• Evaluate the view that external factors are the main reason for gender differences in educational achievement (30)

Sociology of Education Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle – which contains the following:

[IMAGE: Education Revision Bundle Cover — linked to Sellfy product]

1. 34 pages of revision notes
2. mind maps in pdf and png format – 9 in total, covering various topics within the sociology of education
3. short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
4. how to write sociology essays, including 7 specific templates and model answers on the sociology of education

Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the education topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.

The other half of this question is covered in Explaining Gender Inequality in Education — In School Factors, which deals with labelling, laddish subcultures and the feminisation of teaching.

Students usually study gender and subject choice next, which asks the related question of why boys and girls choose different subjects rather than why they get different grades.

For how pupils construct and perform gender in school, see Gender Identity and Education; for how schools transmit gender norms as institutions, see Gender Socialisation in Schools.

When you are ready to practise, work through the model answer in Evaluate sociological explanations of gender differences in educational achievement.

More on this topic on my main sociology of education page.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

• Department for Education, Key stage 4 performance, 2024/25 (accredited official statistics, published April 2026, updated August 2026)
• Department for Education, A level and other 16 to 18 results, 2024/25 (accredited official statistics, published April 2026)
• Joint Council for Qualifications, A level results, summer 2026, published 13 August 2026
• Ofqual, Qualification results in England: summer 2026, published 13 August 2026
• Department for Education, Widening participation in higher education, 2023/24 and 2024/25
• House of Commons Library, Women and the UK economy, updated July 2026
• Cavaglia, Machin, McNally and Ruiz-Valenzuela (2020), ‘Gender, achievement, and subject choice in English education’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 36(4), pp. 816–835