The Effects of Schooling on Gender Differences

Abstract

The study on which this article is based examined the gender differences in educational achievements based on a longitudinal sample of more than 45,000 secondary school students in Hong Kong who took a public examination in 1997. The results coincided with the findings from recent British studies that boys did less well than girls in all areas of the school curriculum. The multilevel analyses of the effects of schooling, after controlling for initial ability, indicated that schooling did have an effect on gender differences. Girls achieved better results studying in single‐sex schools whereas boys achieved better in co‐educational schools. Compared with other students, it was those boys studying in the arts stream that did the least well in the public examination. The results are discussed in the context of the methodology of investigating gender differences and of the substantive questions of school effectiveness.

Gender Inequalities in Education

“…Single-sex schooling may be a reasonable policy response to the underperformance of boys, but to implement such massive changes to any educational system without empirically-based assessments of the consequences of such changes is shortsighted. For example, recent research by Wong et al (2002) on Hong Kong schools found that girls do better in single-sex classrooms while boys do better in mixed-sex classrooms. Other research shows that the performance of both boys and girls improves when the proportion of female students in the classroom increases (Hoxby 2000;Lavy & Schlosser 2007).…”

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