Outline and explain two reasons for gender differences in educational achievement.

Due to society's views on gender, male children are often given a lot more freedom than female children. For example, boys are encouraged to take up traditionally masculine activities like sports, while girls are encouraged towards playing with dolls and other indoor activities. Some sociologists believe this leads to a 'bedroom culture' among young girls. This means that girls are much more likely to stay inside and do educational activities like reading from a young age, and boys are less likely to do as many educational activities. Girls often end up with much larger vocabularies and academically enclined minds much earlier in school that boys do for this reason, and subsequently tend to achieve higher in the education system. 

Statistics show that girls tend to perform much better in coursework assessment than boys, who tend to do better in exam assessments. Pre-2015, many A Level and GCSE courses included coursework. The trend was and still is that girls did much better in coursework and in school in general. More recently, coursework is being phased out of highschool education, and as a result, boys' achievement has increased. Therefore, gendered differences in achievement are at least partly to do with the style of assessment.