Ask the average South African whether girls do better than boys in matric, and which gender does better in maths and science, and you are likely to be told that they do about the same overall, but boys are on average stronger in maths and science.
This is completely untrue, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at South Africa’s matric results; on the face of it, they perpetuate these stereotypes.
In the 2023 National Senior Certificate (NSC) the overall pass rate was 82.92% among boys and 82.88% among girls. However, even though the number of boys and girls born in South Africa is roughly equal, only 44% of those who wrote and passed the matric exam last year were male.
This means that 72,765 more girls than boys passed matric in 2023 and 44,120 more girls got bachelor’s degree passes. And because these ratios have remained fairly stable, continuing to favour girls over time, these differences are becoming too big to ignore.
So, over the past three years (2021-2023), a cumulative 202,615 more girls have passed matric than boys and, of these, 124,057 more girls got bachelor’s degree passes.
What on earth is going on? Why are the boys falling behind?
While the pro-girl gender gap in schooling may be news to many South Africans — and not something that has been of primary concern to the department of basic education (DBE) — it has preoccupied education researchers for years.
It is well known that school performance starts to diverge in favour of girls at an early age and is most pronounced in reading — the foundation for learning. These differences show up clearly in international reading assessments and favour girls in nearly every country studied.
In the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), grade 4 girls outperformed boys in reading achievement in 51 of the 57 participating countries, with an average difference in their reading scores of 18 points.
South Africa, however, had the largest pro-girl gender gap of the countries studied and by a very large margin — 57 points (see table). In the previous Pirls assessment, in 2016, South Africa’s gender gap was 52 points, which put the country in second-worst spot. This suggests that our boy-girl reading gap is widening.
This finding should worry policymakers, as 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.
There is even a name for this: the 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.
This helps to explain why, by the time they get to matric, the average South African girl is outperforming her male counterpart in every subject when equivalent cohorts are compared.
Absent any special focus on boys, it seems likely that girls will continue to benefit from the so-called Martha effect — where girls compound their educational advantage over time because they are building on a stronger academic foundation.
The term was coined by Stellenbosch University researchers Nic Spaull and Hendrik van Broekhuizen when they discovered that girls’ superior academic achievement at school is compounded at university, regardless of race, age, socioeconomic status or location.
Their study tracked the class of 2008 after they finished school. Of the 112,000 students who enrolled for university after matric, 34% more were female but, after six years, 66% more girls than boys from the original sample had attained a bachelor’s degree.
This dispels the myth that women tend to be paid less than their male counterparts or end up in less well-paid professions because of their underperformance at school or university.
So, if girls are increasingly pulling ahead, does it mean the education system is failing boys, and that the country should be shifting its gender equity focus to the emerging boy crisis in education — to ensuring, in other words, that boys are not left behind?
This is a controversial proposition in a country where the focus of gender equity programmes has been to encourage more girls to study science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects and to pursue careers in related fields in which they remain woefully underrepresented.
“There is a danger in swinging the pendulum too swiftly,” says Zambia-based independent education researcher Linda Zuze. She notes that even in countries where girls outperform boys at school they continue to face discrimination in the labour market.
This certainly is true of South Africa where males enjoy a large advantage both in finding jobs and in the wages they earn. Even in education, where most South African teachers are women, they are less likely than men to reach senior positions.
On the other hand, Zuze concedes that if boys are disappearing from the education system in large numbers, then this is a “highly relevant question” that warrants serious attention.
Prof Servaas van der Berg, who heads Stellenbosch University’s Research on Socio-Economic Policy (Resep) unit, fully agrees: “Clearly, the international focus on improving girls’ education was warranted, and still is in many countries, but perhaps the situation has changed enough that a country such as South Africa should pay more attention to the boys falling behind.”
In fact, Resep is starting a five-year research project to understand how best to address the issue of school repeaters. In 2019, a staggering 1.1-million pupils (about 8% of those enrolled) repeated grades. In Limpopo alone, 30,669 girls and 70,858 boys were primary grade repeaters in that year.
As boys make up about two-thirds of those who fall behind, Van der Berg feels that any measures that target these learners should pay specific attention to boys.
Ahead in maths and science
Zuze and her colleague Unathi Beku, a quantitative researcher at the University of Essex, studied gender gaps in mathematics, science and reading in grades 4-9 in South Africa across 19 international assessments between 1999 and 2015.
Their findings, summarised as a chapter in the 2019 book South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality are that South African girls have consistently achieved better average results than boys across various subject areas, grade levels and racial groups.
Though the widest gaps appear to be in reading (across all languages tested), and these gaps emerge early in primary school, a divergence is also evident in maths and science scores.
They note that in the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss), for instance, there was a higher percentage of boys than girls among the lowest achievers across grades 5-9 for maths and science.
The pro-girl gender gap was widest for grade 5 mathematics, where 64% of boys scored below the 400 minimum Timss benchmark — a score that represents a basic knowledge of mathematics and science — compared to 58% of girls.
The pro-girl gender gap in South Africa is the largest in the world and has become too big to ignore
— What it means:
In a huge research project in 2019, Stellenbosch University researchers Spaull and Nwabisa Makaluza found the same thing: that South African 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 South Africa”, was published in the peer-reviewed quarterly journal Agenda in 2019.
The common misconception in South Africa 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. But 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. 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 (2.1pp) and physical science (2.3pp).
It would be helpful if the DBE would explicitly acknowledge this in its summation of the matric results. However, in the 2023 NSA Technical Report, the maths pass rate is blandly presented as 61.2% for girls and 67.1% for boys, reinforcing the stereotypical notion that boys do quite a lot better than girls in maths.
What is not mentioned is that almost 60,000 or 22% fewer boys than girls wrote the maths exam — either because they had already dropped out of school or because they had been kept from writing it by schools keen to protect their matric pass rate.
Looked at this way, the problem is not so much that girls are overperforming, it’s that weaker boys are not even attempting matric or being allowed to do so.
The only hint from the DBE that weaker pupils are indeed being culled is a single paragraph in the technical report which comes after it extols the “significant improvements” in relation to access, redress, equity, quality, efficiency and inclusivity in the 2023 matric results.
In it the department says it would in future like to focus more attention on “the observed, discrete practice” of some principals not allowing some grade 12 learners, who perform poorly in the preliminary matric examinations or other internal assessments, from writing final matric exams in all their subjects.
The obvious question is why boys typically perform worse at school than girls from an early age and are also much more likely to repeat a grade or drop out entirely.
The leading explanation the world over comes down to girls’ stronger socioemotional or soft 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 currently designed to reward those skills,” Spaull previously told the FM.
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
— Ángel Gurría
“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. While these may help later in a patriarchal labour market, in schools these are not the things that lead to academic success.”
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation & Development’s (OECD’s) “ABC of Gender Equality in Education” report (2015), found that in most OECD countries boys are less engaged with school than girls, spend more time playing video games and less time doing homework or reading for enjoyment. They are also more likely to drop out and report that school is a waste of time.
“Gender disparities in [educational] performance do not stem from innate differences in aptitude,” OECD secretary-general Ángel Gurría summarised at the time, “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.”
But if the explanation were as simple as this, why do boys in the poorer schools do so much worse than girls, but in wealthier schools the pro-girl gender gap is not always present?
Where you go to school matters
In South Africa the type of school you attend matters, with the widest pro-girl gender gaps occurring in rural, government schools.
According to Zuze and Beku, the biggest gap they found based on school type was a 20-point difference in maths results favouring grade 5 girls in no-fee (poor) government schools. However, at the grade 9 level, while girls in public schools (both no-fee and fee-paying) achieved slightly higher average scores for both maths and science than boys, in independent schools, it was the boys who achieved slightly better average results.
Heleen Hofmeyr, a postdoctoral researcher in Stellenbosch University’s economics department, says South Africa’s pro-girl gap must be seen in the context of an education system that is characterised by very poor learning outcomes.
About 80% of pupils attend poorly resourced schools in which learners have to be “exceptional” to acquire even the basic skills required by the curriculum, she explains. By contrast, even the weakest pupils in the wealthiest 20% of schools obtain the skills necessary to achieve a matric pass.
So, the real question becomes: “Why are girls more likely to achieve exceptional results in a context of low average achievement?” To answer this, she says, we need to ask: “What is required for exceptional performance?” and “Why do girls have more of it?”
The academic literature shows that socioemotional skills (including engagement, motivation, attention, attitude, and emotional intelligence) are the strongest predictor of exceptional academic performance.
In the early grades, she says, these skills would include the capacity to control one’s behaviour, remember instructions and pay attention. In later grades, these skills remain important but higher-order skills such as perseverance begin to matter.
In fact, in a 2019 paper, Hofmeyr found that in local township and rural schools “grit” was the strongest predictor of exceptional academic performance in grade 6 — stronger than both school quality and home background resources.
She did further work on the role of socioemotional skills in the context of South Africa’s Pirls performance and found that grade 4 girls had more positive attitudes towards reading and school in general, and that this contributed significantly to the pro-girl gap in reading achievement.
So, why do girls have more of these soft skills?
“While the exact origins of socioemotional skills are still unclear, there is some evidence to suggest that part of the reason for this is that parents have different expectations of boys compared to girls, and therefore reward (or punish) different behaviours,” Hofmeyr explains.
“Existing evidence from outside South Africa suggests that the behaviours encouraged in girls — things like reading quietly, doing homework — support success in school more so than the behaviours encouraged in boys — like playing outside, being tough.”
In sum, she believes, based on her research, that the reason we see a pro-girl gap in quintile 1-4 (poor) schools but not quintile 5 (wealthy) schools is because exceptional achievement is required to succeed in the former but not the latter. And exceptional performance requires socioemotional skills which girls have more of than boys.
Zuze and Beku also considered whether bullying could be a factor adding to the pro-girl gender gap since there is an established link between being a victim of bullying and poor school performance.
In 2015, Timss found that boys were more likely to be bullied than girls in every type of school, but both boys and girls in public schools, particularly those in no-fee schools, were at a greater risk of being bullied than in independent schools.
In fact, as many as half of grade 5 boys and nearly a quarter of grade 9 boys attending no-fee schools were bullied on a weekly basis.
However, Zuze and Beku point out that while boys may be at greater risk of bullying, particularly physical forms of bullying, girls are at greater risk of sexual violence both from teachers and other pupils. They believe that were information about sexual violence in schools more readily available, the pro-boy gender gap on bullying would be narrower.
A question of confidence
In South Africa, as in many other countries, parental and societal expectations seem to play a large role in explaining why girls shun male-dominated degrees and professions.
The World Economic Forum’s 2018 “Global Gender Gap” report found that girls in South Africa are three times less likely than boys to get a degree in engineering, manufacturing and construction; half as likely to do so in information and communication technology; and 22% less likely to do so 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. Even so, given that many technical fields of study require that students have a 60%-plus mark for matric maths, it’s important to know if girls still outperform boys at the top end.
Spaull and Makaluza found that when looking at 60%-plus subject pass marks, using their comparable sample, girls do better in nine subjects and boys do better in two — maths and physical science. However, even among students with the same matric scores, boys are 72% more likely to choose engineering than girls.
Girls also do worse than boys in maths among high-performing students in most OECD countries. However, internationally, even when girls perform equally well to boys, they have lower levels of self-confidence in their ability to solve maths problems.
The same appears to be true for South Africa, say Zuze and Beku, who found that high school girls in local public schools are particularly unconfident of their maths ability.
Though the causes are not fully understood, they believe that social conditioning and low expectations of girls in technical subjects, either at school or externally, undermine girls’ belief in their own ability.
The bottom line is that even though numerous studies suggest strongly that, on average, academic performance is not determined by innate gender-related differences in academic ability, society still clings to stereotypical beliefs in this regard.
This is perhaps preventing boys from getting the extra help they need to cope with the behavioural aspects of school and may also be causing girls to doubt their aptitude for technical subjects and professions.
Clearly, if boys and girls are to realise their full potential, it will take a concerted effort by parents, teachers and policymakers to shift the deeply entrenched biases in the way society views them.
What should schools be doing?
While there is evidence from high-income countries that interventions to raise boys’ socioemotional skills can have lasting, positive impacts on educational outcomes, Hofmeyr doesn’t believe boys should receive special treatment.
She would rather interventions work to lift the socioemotional skills of all learners. After all, there is no question that in South Africa the main challenge is to raise school performance across the board.
Internationally, the most recent scholarly contributions to the debate focus on whether the contemporary schooling environment is suited to teaching boys, and whether prevailing reading materials and teaching approaches appeal to boys.
But in many poor South African schools, the issue isn’t so much whether the reading materials appeal to boys as opposed to girls but whether there are any materials at all.
According to the 2030 Reading Panel, grades 1-3 in no-fee schools (70% of all schools in South Africa) typically have access to just one reading resource — a workbook — out of a list of 10 resources recommended by the DBE. Graded reading anthologies, the norm in OECD countries, are hard to come by.
It stands to reason that successful local reading programmes have all involved teacher upskilling and the provision of additional classroom resources, including graded reading anthologies.
The most successful was run by the Funda Wande NGO in 120 no-fee schools in Limpopo in 2022. In addition to providing learner workbooks, teacher guides and graded readers, it provided an effectively trained teacher assistant to every grade 1 teacher for a full year. The impact was a staggering improvement of 110% of a year of learning.
Interestingly, in North West in 2017, the DBE’s Early Grade Reading Study showed that a structured learning programme, when combined with on-site coaching, seemed to narrow the gender gap in reading by helping boys to catch up.
Last month, at its 2024 conference, the Reading Panel lamented that only the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Gauteng are rolling out province-wide programmes to improve reading. This is despite the fact that South Africa experienced the largest decline in reading outcomes of all the regions that participated in the 2016 and 2021 Pirls — a period that encompassed the Covid pandemic.
While the number of South African pupils who can’t read for meaning increased from 78% in 2016 to 81% in 2021, more alarmingly, the percentage of grade 4 learners who cannot read at all doubled from 13% to 27%.
This means that whereas in 2016, a child in the poorest 70% of schools was five times less likely to read for meaning than a child in the wealthiest 10% of schools, in 2021 a poor child was 10 times less likely to reach this benchmark.
“The impact of Covid-19 on Pirls scores indicates that when there is pressure on the system, the poorest learners are those most heavily [affected],” said Sipumelele Lucwaba of the panel’s secretariat.
“Similarly, as we move into times of increased fiscal austerity, if we do not have guaranteed minimum [resource requirements] in place to support reading, with no national reading plan published to date, we are banishing the poorest learners to a lifetime of illiteracy.”
Clearly, given that the more formidable problem is government’s continued failure to address the glaring national illiteracy crisis, it seems unlikely that the complex role that gender plays in school performance is going to receive attention any time soon.
This means you are on your own, kids. But, of course, the girls already knew that.
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