The attainment gap between girls and boys, in terms of the proportion of Higher entries amounting to A grades, hit almost 10 percentage points this year - nearly double the 2019 figure, when the gap was just shy of 5 percentage points.

This year, the A-grade attainment for girls at Higher was 52.1 per cent, against 42.2 per cent for boys, resulting in a gap of 9.9 percentage points.

In 2019 - the last time external national exams were sat in Scotland - the A-grade gender gap at Higher was 4.7 percentage points; in 2020, the gap was 7.4 percentage points.

At National 5, the gap between boys and girls getting A grades was also around 10 percentage points this year, sitting at 9.7 percentage points, up from 8.4 percentage points in 2019. And at Advanced Higher, the gap was 5.1 percentage points, up from 0.5 in 2019.

So, what’s going on? First, it should be noted that gaps in the overall A-C pass rate between male and female students have remained more stable - this year, male and female students were more likely to pass their Highers than in 2019 but the attainment gap remained the same, at 4.6 percentage points.

So, the figures show the gap in terms of girls and boys passing Higher hasn’t got any worse - and, in fact, by at least one measure it reduced between 2019 and 2021.

However, the gap in the proportion attaining the top grade has widened in this year when learning was disrupted by the national lockdown and bouts of self-isolation, and when schools and teachers were responsible for assigning grades, rather than Scotland’s exam
body, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA). 

One explanation could be that girls worked better during remote learning - certainly there are teachers who reported that this was the case. 

In response to a survey carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), 21 per cent of teachers reported that “boys have fallen further behind normal expectations than girls” during lockdown. 

This research indicated that older boys, in particular, seemed to have slipped back during the pandemic, with secondary teachers more likely to report that boys had fallen further behind than girls compared with primary teachers.

Meanwhile, in England, a review of research into learning during the pandemic said that “some studies found that girls completed more schoolwork than boys” but it noted that “this difference is also observed for learning before the pandemic”.

Maybe boys put in less work because they are more likely to overestimate their ability - a finding that emerges from other research.

In a bid to tackle this, one of the tips shared in a 16 July Tes magazine article, “What can schools do to motivate boys?”, is to get boys to assign a confidence rating out of 10 next to their answers in class. This is so that the teacher is aware of their confidence level on a given
topic but also to make the student “acknowledge the errors they make on high-confidence answers”.

Other writers have recommended splitting classes by gender in a bid to get the most out of boys and girls.

However, there is a school of thought that believes looking at the gender gap is a distraction. Jessica Ringrose, professor of the sociology and gender of education at UCL Institute of Education, argued in a piece for Tes in August 2020 that “we shouldn’t be comparing boys and girls in the first place. The question, instead, should be: which boys? Which girls?”

She argued for looking at race and class factors, and not being “obsessed by the gender war”.

Scotland’s far greater focus on another gap - the “poverty-related attainment gap”, as it is referred to in official circles - would doubtless, therefore, meet with Ringrose’s approval.

There has long been agreement that we should address the gap in entries for Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) qualifications between boys and girls, given that girls tend to lag behind. But the gap in overall attainment - where boys statistically do worse, time and again - is certainly worth highlighting, too.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 20 August 2021 issue under the headline “The exam grades gender gap has grown - as has the debate about how to close it”