Gender Gap In College Education

Finally, at the college level, the cumulative effect of the academic achievement gap between boys and girls becomes very evident already when one is solely looking at the higher proportion of females who graduate from college. In the introduction, it was already explained how more and more women began to attain college education, because of their changing ‘role’, the acceptance and legality of using the pill as birth control, the shift towards later marriage, and the increasing consensus among women of the importance of college education for better paid jobs. This in combination with the emergence of feminist groups that pressured the government and companies on creating more equality, resulted in an environment in which women could catch up.

Even though the above mentioned societal developments did not happen in many other countries where women still do not have a more equal position in general, the same gender gap in academic achievement is found in these countries, suggesting that there are other reasons for why we see the

Some have stressed the possible existence of biological and cognitive differences between boys and girls which would explain the difference in their academic performance, but this is a less substantiated assumption in general. Studies that have controlled for intelligence for example, still found lower grades for boys, ruling out some of the possibilities for cognitive differences. However, one possible physical and psychological difference between the two sexes, which could be presenting itself in this issue, is that boys seem to mature later than girls do. Therefore, Michael Thompson, author of “Look it’s a Boy!”, criticizes the trend in testing children earlier on in their lives, claiming it would create an environment in which girls are favoured over boys. This could be an explanation for why we see boys delaying their kindergarten entry and repeating it more often than girls do, simply “because they are not ready yet”. However, when looking at the history of academic achievement, it seems more likely that the main mechanism behind the gender gap is societal by nature. First, it were the girls who were disadvantaged in education, nowadays