Girls are routinely being given more generous grades than boys with the same academic competences, a new study of tens of thousands of pupils and their teachers concludes.
This bias against boys could mean the difference between a pass and a fail in subjects such as maths. It could also have wider consequences in areas such as college admission, job choice and earnings, warn the Italian researchers.
Their study, published in British Journal of Sociology of Education, is the first to demonstrate that the problem is systemic—it is present across a variety of educational environments and irrespective of teachers’ characteristics.
Gender-related gaps in educational achievement are common worldwide. However, the nature of the gap differs with different ways of measuring achievement.
When the results of standardised tests, which have a standard scoring system, are used, girls typically outperform boys in humanities, languages and reading skills, while boys do better in maths.
In contrast, when grades are awarded by teachers, females do better than males in all subjects.
To find out how teachers’ evaluations tend to favour females, the University of Trento researchers began by comparing the scores almost 40,000 students received in standardised tests of language and maths with the grades they achieved in their classroom exams.