Last updated: 10/04/08
Female students are doing better at university but men are earning more

New research shows boys are more confident about their academic ability than girls but are less likely to go to university.

This confidence is what a research team worry may lead to an imbalance in the gender of our graduates. Led by Dr Arnaud Chevalier from Royal Holloway at the University of London, the research team found boys are more confident than girls in thinking they can get a good job without going to university.

They tested a sample of first year university students in maths and English and got students to predict their performance. The results show boys overestimate their ranking by 9% in maths and 4% in literacy compared with girls.

You only have to look at the university admissions to see how this over confidence is taking effect. A survey commissioned by ACS International Schools found that in 2007, 47% of 17 to 30-year-old women went into higher education compared to 37% of young men.

Chevalier’s team also found white females from disadvantaged backgrounds were the most likely group to underestimate their own test results.

Speaking to The National Student, Chevalier said, “The worrying implication of my research is that some teenagers from lower social class may not go to university despite
having the ability to succeed in higher education. This is either because they do not apply due to their lack of self confidence, or because the course they would like to attend is already taken by individuals with more self-confidence (crowding out).”

Chevalier expected to find boys to over-estimate their academic abilities but was taken aback by this result.

“I was surprised by the size of the social class gap. Controlling for performance at the test, I was not planning to find large differences in self-assessment by social class.”

Despite these new findings overall girls are still outperforming
boys’ academically. The National Literacy Trust found girls generally perform better than boys at GCSE and A level (or equivalent) in the UK. In 2002, 58% of girls in their last year of compulsory schooling achieved five or more GCSE grades A* to C, compared with 47% of boys. Although girls are outperforming boys academically, it would be unrealistic to suggest gender inequalities have disappeared.

The American Association of University Women Education Foundation (AAUW) ‘Behind the pay gap’ 2007 report found that women working full time one year after graduation only earn 80% of their male counterparts. This gap increases ten years after graduation with women earning 69% as much as men in the same field.

This figure lies in contrast to the academic averages of females. Melissa Hodge, a sociology graduate student from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is currently researching gender inequalities. She argues occupational segregation is one reason behind these figures.

“Some say women are socialised into taking the lower paid jobs like teachers and nurses,” Hodge said.

Having children and the positioning of women in the role as caregivers is another factor, Hodge argues.

“Women have to take time off at a point in their career when they are starting to build up their contact network,” she said.

Chevalier thinks it may be a possibility that the confidence levels you have at a young age could permeate through to your adult life. “Some research has found women are less likely to bargain when they get a job offer (maybe bargaining is correlated with academic self-confidence).

Or it could be that employers mis-perceive self-confidence for ability and would thus end up over-paying males,” he said.

Chevalier thinks the accuracy of self-assessment should be improved to try and balance confidence issues across gender and class.

“If schools ask pupils to self-assess themselves more often, pupils will become better at it. Self assessment is a difficult task, so practice surely must improve the ability of doing it.”

by Pamela Lawn