In almost all countries, including SA, women are less likely to be in paid employment than men and, when they do have jobs, are paid less on average than their male counterparts. Yet at the school level, the exact opposite is true: girls in SA are more likely to remain in school and, on average, do unequivocally better than boys.
They do so much better than boys it seems unfathomable that the conventional wisdom — entrenched by the education department — is that boys outperform girls in maths and physical science in matric.
In a huge new research project, Stellenbosch University researchers Nic Spaull and Nwabisa Makaluza find that girls outperform boys on average in all subjects and all grades, including in maths and physical science.
Their paper, "Girls Do Better: The Pro-female Gender Gap in Learning Outcomes in SA", was published in the peer-reviewed quarterly journal Agenda late last year.
The idea that boys outperform girls in maths and science is based on an artificial comparison, say Spaull and Makaluza: it ignores the fact that the high dropout rate among boys results in an academically stronger cohort of boys left writing matric.
In 2018, for every 100 girls in matric there were only 80 boys, though there are almost equal numbers of males and females at birth.
When the researchers compared an equal number of boys and girls in matric — the top 282,180 learners from each gender — they found that on average girls did unequivocally better in all 13 of the most popular matric subjects.
The gender gap was very large in eight of these subjects (see graph). The biggest differences were in accounting and business science, where the girls were roughly 10 percentage points ahead on average. The differences were less large, but still pro-girl, in maths (2.1 pp) and physical science (2.3 pp).
Girls’ outperformance is not widely acknowledged in SA, and the department of basic education appears to be unaware of the need to correct for the sample selection bias when interpreting the matric results. In its 2018 matric report, it concludes that "in both [maths and physical science] males performed better than females".
Gender differences are also pronounced at primary school, particularly in reading. At grade 4 level, SA girls are an entire year ahead of boys in their reading ability.
Though nearly all international studies show that girls outperform boys in reading (irrespective of assessment, grade or country), SA has the second-largest pro-girl gender reading gap in the world, after Saudi Arabia.
Research has shown that because reading proficiency is the foundation upon which all other learning is built, when boys don’t read well their overall academic performance lags. This helps to explain why, by the time they get to matric, the average SA girl scores almost eight percentage points higher in the English exam than her male counterpart.
Importantly, girls do even better at university than at school, ostensibly because they are building on a stronger academic foundation.
In a separate paper, Spaull and fellow Stellenbosch University researcher Hendrik van Broekhuizen show that girls’ superior academic achievement at school is "consolidated and compounded" at university, regardless of race, age, socioeconomic status or location.
Their study tracked the access and outcomes of the class of 2008 in the six years after they finished school. Of the 500,000-odd cohort, 27% more female pupils qualified for university. When it came to the 112,000 students who enrolled for university, 34% more were female, and 66% more female students went on to attain a bachelor’s degree (see graph).
The researchers even came up with a catchy name for it: the "Martha effect". It’s the opposite of the so-called Matthew effect — where children (most often boys) who fail at early reading begin to dislike it and so fall further behind the strong readers, who tend to read more.
Spaull and Makaluza believe their research is important because "it dispels the myth that the poor outcomes women face in the labour market are somehow driven by female underperformance at school or university".
The obvious question is why girls do so much better than boys at school. But even more important is why, despite this, girls continue to fare worse in the job market.
The leading explanation the world over as to why girls do better at school comes down to their stronger socioemotional skills and the way they are socialised.
"Girls generally have better socioemotional skills than boys (things like self-control, self-management, perseverance, working in a team, goal setting), and schools are designed to reward those skills," explains Spaull.
"On the other hand, the way society currently socialises boys, and the role models put forward, relate to things like risk-taking, sport, physicality, dominance and competitiveness," he adds. "While these may help later in a patriarchal labour market, in schools these are not the things that lead to academic success."
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation & Development (OECD) secretary-general Ángel Gurría, summarising the findings of the organisation’s "ABC of Gender Equality in Education" report (2015), says: "Gender disparities in [educational] performance do not stem from innate differences in aptitude, but rather from students’ attitudes towards learning and their behaviour in school, from how they choose to spend their leisure time, and from the confidence they have — or do not have — in their own abilities as students."
In most OECD countries, the report finds, boys are less engaged with school than girls, spend more time playing video games and less time doing homework and reading for enjoyment, and are more likely to drop out and report that school is a waste of time.
However, in all the OECD countries surveyed, parents are more likely to expect their teenage sons, rather than their daughters, to work in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics field, even when they perform at the same level in mathematics.
"Another pernicious effect of a gendered labour market is that in male-dominated professions all the role models and lecturers tend to be male, which further alienates girls as they find it difficult to see themselves in those professions," adds Spaull.
The upshot is that, on average, less than 5% of girls across OECD countries contemplate pursuing a career in engineering and computing. In SA, too, girls shun male-dominated degrees and so are underrepresented in male-dominated professions.
The World Economic Forum’s 2018 "Global Gender Gap" report found that girls in SA are three times less likely to get a degree in engineering, manufacturing and construction, half as likely in information and communication technologies, and 22% less likely in the natural sciences, mathematics and statistics. This is primarily because girls do not enrol for these traditionally male courses in the first place, rather than as a result of lower completion rates.
Because many fields of study involving science, technology, engineering and maths require a 60%-plus mark for matric maths as a prerequisite for university entrance, it’s important to know if girls still outperform boys at the top end.
Among high-performing students in most OECD countries, girls do worse than boys in maths. The OECD paper suggests this may be because girls typically have less self-confidence than boys in their ability to solve maths or science problems.
The same appears to be true for SA. Spaull and Makaluza found that when looking at 60%-plus subject pass marks using a comparable sample, girls do better in nine subjects and boys do better in two — maths and physical science. (But boys are also more likely to fail these two subjects.)
Research has shown that when boys don't read well, their overall academic performance lags
Among those in matric in 2018 who received 60% or higher in maths, 45% were girls and 55% were boys. In physical science the split was 47% female to 53% male.
But these differences are too small to explain the extremely large differences in the choice of university degree by gender. For instance, even among male and female high school students with the same matric scores, boys are 72% more likely to choose engineering than girls.
Spaull thinks it’s "really unhelpful" for boys and girls alike that certain professions like engineering, mathematics, data science and statistics are thought of as being male professions while those like teaching, psychology and most other health-related professions are viewed as female.
But even within any chosen profession, women are typically paid less on average than their male counterparts. Why is that?
Wits University professor of economics Dori Posel, who co-edited the issue of Agenda in which Spaull and Makaluza’s paper appears, says women’s disproportionate responsibility for child care (many as unmarried, single mothers) is one of the fundamental reasons for gender inequality in SA.
"This responsibility influences the nature of women’s labour force participation — the kinds of jobs women apply for and the continuity of their labour force participation — which influences their returns to education," she adds.
Spaull and Makaluza’s paper, read with other academic literature, strongly suggests that academic performance is not determined by innate gender-related differences in ability.
But if boys and girls are to realise their full potential, it will clearly take a concerted effort by parents, teachers and policymakers to shift the deeply entrenched biases in the way society views them.
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