#University of Oxford says:
Boys do better than girls in exams such as science because they are better at taking risks, said the man in charge of admissions at Oxford University.
Mike Nicholson claimed: ‘We have generally seen male students tend to be much more prepared to take risks, which is why they do well in exams. ‘Generally, female students are risk-averse and will tend to take longer to think about an answer. If it’s a multiple-choice question [boys] will generally go with their gut feeling. Girls will try to reason it out.’
However, Professor Averil MacDonald, a board member of the Women in Science and Engineering campaign and chairman in science engagement at the University of Reading, said his statement was ‘factually incorrect’.
She pointed out that while boys dominated subjects such as physics, girls actually achieve better results across the board.
She added: ‘Girls are outperforming boys at all subjects. They are getting better results than boys even in subjects like physics, which are traditionally seen as a male preserve.
‘Boys may be following gut feeling, but that isn’t necessarily the way to get the right result.’
Professor MacDonald agreed that boys did tend to be favoured when more weight was given to exams than coursework.
‘If you phrase a question in the context of a story, boys tend to strip away what’s irrelevant more quickly.
‘But, if you ask any teacher, girls are more organised at completing coursework and getting it in on time.’
She added: ‘Industry is crying out for more female scientists and engineers because it’s important not just to have a male perspective, and more needs to be done to tackle the stereotypes in schools that mean teachers are pushing girls away from science subjects.’
Four in five physics exams were sat by boys, an increase of four per cent in a year. They also took 60.7 per cent of the maths papers, up 3.9 per cent.
But girls accounted for 74.3 per cent of psychology entries, a rise of 5.2 per cent, and around seven in ten psychology A-levels.
Experts suggested peer pressure might be deterring candidates from taking exams usually associated with the opposite sex.
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