I find it a little hard to get as exercised as many people appear to do about the relatively poor performance of boys at school. Part of the reason I am fairly relaxed about this may be entirely selfish – I have daughters. But part of it is because I cannot help but notice that this lack of academic prowess in no way seems to hold the male gender back when it comes to the world of work.

We know, for example, that even though girls go to university in greater numbers than boys (100 to 80) and generally outperform them, winning the majority of university medals and distinctions, they are paid less from the very first day they enter the workforce. This pay gap is estimated to add up to about $1 million across their lifetime. Women remain clustered in low paying, feminised occupations. They are much more likely to work part-time. They are much less likely to be promoted and remain remarkable for their invisibility at any table where major decisions get made. Worse, for many women a lifetime of low pay ends up in a poverty-stricken old age. The majority of those eeking out an existence on the single pension (currently at $737 a fortnight) are women and they are the lucky ones. The fastest growing group among the homeless is women over 55.

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Yet the moral panic about gender in our education system has been about the under-performance of boys. Various solutions have been offered for this problem, most of them to some degree pointing an accusing finger at women. Indeed, the under-performance of boys is most often blamed on their female teachers – either explicitly or implicitly. One Federal Minister of Education, Brendan Nelson, went so far as to suggest positive discrimination in favour of male teachers, even to the extent of paying them more money! This was to overcome what is seen as the insidious feminisation of education. Too many damn women emasculating our boys, apparently.

Other learned men (and they are usually men) have suggested that boys learn differently from girls, they need to move around more and hate being confined to a classroom. Implicit in this reasoning is that schools are biased towards girls by their female teachers who actively (if possibly unconsciously) work to hold boys back. Hang your heads in shame, women teachers and female students, you with your wicked, hard-working, sitting-still ways, you are ruining our energetic, high-spirited boys.