While they have made great strides in the maths and sciences in schools, girls have yet to overtake men in the numbers and results that they do in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The signs are that it is particularly working class males who are disenfranchised from the education system. And the gender gap all but disappears in independent schools, and the most socially exclusive universities such as Cambridge and Oxford. This feeling of hopelessness, it is argued, has already percolated through to even young boys. Studies suggest that boys from very early on are under pressure to conform to a masculine stereotype - the macho, rebellious, unemotional male to whom study, school and authority are an anathema.
Boys actively participate in their underachievement as part of the rejection of school.
A recent UN study revealed the same phenomenon in many other countries. In the Caribbean, unlike the majority of the developing world, boys are doing significantly worse than girls at school. Schools were for sissies . There are after all basic biological differences in the way females and males learn and communicate. Girls develop different skills at different rates, boys prefer to learn actively, rather than passively.