Education and gender differences

Half-lost in the now predictable August clamour about sex differences in examination results, renewed today by publication of the GCSE results, are old familiar clues, swirling neglected like scraps of paper in the storm around our heads. In one page of the newspaper you read that girls are doing better than boys at A Level and GCSE, in another you read that young women get fewer Firsts at Oxford than young men, in a third you read how much better all pupils perform when segregated into single-sex classes. Putting these observations together directs attention to a pivotal fact about education: that there are gender-specific differences in the way people get most benefit from it.