Strange Idea of an Achievement Gap
The OECD Directorate for Education reports on educational achievement on a gender basis. Interestingly, the text includes a strange idea of an achievement gap (my emphasis):
There’s no denying it: when it comes to education and employment, women are on a roll, all over the world. As described in the latest issue of the OECD’s new brief series Education Indicators in Focus, the achievement gap between boys and girls has narrowed so much at lower levels of education that the focus of concern is now on the underachievement of boys. On the 2009 PISA reading assessment, for example, 15-year-old girls outperformed boys in every OECD country, on average by 39 points – the equivalent of one year of school.
… In fact, the proportion of women who hold a university-level qualification now equals or exceeds that of men in 29 of the 32 OECD countries for which data are comparable.
Despite their own text screaming that young male education is in real need of assistance, the authors manage to make it all about getting more girls into science.