The educational gender gap, catch up and labour market performance

The superior performance of girls in GCSE/A level subjects has increased during the past decade, leading to concerns that the relative ‘failure’ of boys results in poorer performance in the labour market in terms of employment and wages. This project:

(i) estimated the extend to which the observed gender gap in educational attainment is explained by individual and school level performance;

(ii) investigated whether, and why, the gender gap persists in post-compulsory education i.e. at age 18; and

(iii) analysed the impact of the gender gap on early labour-market performance.

Importantly, the researchers compared the attainment of four groups: boys and girls in single sex schools and boys and girls in mixed schools. They used a unique source of data, which combined information from the Youth Cohort Surveys with unpublished school-level information supplied by the DfES and OFSTED for a sample of young people who left school during 1991-98.