“Outline and explain reasons for female achievement in education since the early 1990’s.”

Concerns over the link between gender and educational attainment focus mainly on the extent

to which males and females perform differently in education and their tendency to study different

subjects. However it is not true that males attain more qualifications in general than females at

school. Girls have outperformed boys in 16 + examinations since at least the late 1960s but these

overall gender differences in educational achievement began to increase in the late 1980s after the

introduction of the GCSE. Previously traditional ideas about the proper role of women in society

prevented them from achieving their full potential, yet now women have different priorities and are no

longer destined to be only housewives and homemakers; women are now expected by society to go

to school and get an education.

Female aspirations have changed dramatically from the 1970’s to the present; Women have become

more than just bearers of children, cooks, cleaners and wives. They are now educated; becoming

surgeons, pilots, physiatrists and anything they want to be. An ethnographic study done by sociologist

Sue Sharpe: ‘Just like a girl’, found a change in the aspirations of females in an interview conducted

in the London borough of Ealing in the 1970’s and early 90’s. Her findings display a major shift in the

views of women and education. In the 1970’s women had lower ambitions, they viewed educational

success as unfeminine and unnecessary as intelligence and ambition made them unattractive to men.

Female Priorities were the family, and home, anything that could prevent them from marrying and

having children were avoided. Yet 1990’s became an era of female independence where women’s

priorities became reversed: women began