In The Hunger Games she plays the lead role of Katniss Everdeen, a classically modern heroine: intelligent, attractive, altruistic, brave and highly physical. She hunts. She is lethal with a bow and arrow. She saves the life of the boy hero - not the other way round - and she does it twice. You will hear a lot more about Lawrence because she is so charismatic on screen that she blurs the line between fiction and reality. Millions of young women are going to be deeply affected by her performance in The Hunger Games. Already, over just two days, the movie has had one of the biggest openings in box-office history, taking in an estimated $130 million in its first 48 hours. It is a blockbuster, but without Lawrence it would be ordinary. With her, it is a billion-dollar franchise. Lawrence made her reputation in Winter's Bone (2010), at 20 becoming the second-youngest person ever nominated for an Academy Award for best actress.

Now she is leading a fictional revolution to be played out in a series of four films. Her character is required to kill people to survive. In the hands of Lawrence, the heroine is both deadly and convincing even though it is science fiction, in the same way that Rooney Mara, as Lisbeth Salander in last year's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was deadly and compelling as an enemy of sexual violence against women. Neither of these characters match the cartoon hyper-violence of the 11-year-old vigilante schoolgirl Hit-Girl in the controversial 2010 movie Kick-Ass (played by a martial-arts-trained 13-year-old), but the new reality is unmistakable: young women are full-blooded action heroes now. Not just in movies. Not just in sport. They are kicking ass all over the place. It is most striking in the area where we can best measure the performance of girls - schools. An analysis of my new favourite website, My School, shows that of the top 40 high schools in NSW, as ranked by National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test results, 19 are girls' schools and 23 are coeducational. Only eight are boys' schools. Given that the schools ranked 39th and 40th are private boys' schools, it means that 32 of the 38 top-ranked schools in NSW are girls' schools or coeducational.

On the day when the Higher School Certificate results are released, it is not macho young males who do the strutting; it is more likely to be girls who have kicked butt. Overall, girls do better than boys on NAPLAN scores, and in the HSC, and in university entrance. Inevitably, a yawning gender gap has opened at Australian universities, where 60 per cent of all undergraduate students are women. As well, almost 60 per cent of postgraduate students are women. With such a skewing of the university population, a wide gender gap has also opened up in Australia's population of university graduates. The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics Gender Indicators report revealed that 40 per cent of Australian women aged 25 to 34 have at least a bachelor degree, compared with 30 per cent of men in the same age group. This has broad implications for finding work and reaching management positions in the future economy, which will increasingly be an information economy. What prevents the dominance by women at university from translating into the workforce and management is, above all, the fertility factor. It is a very big factor, but also a separate issue.

The other broad implication of the superior performance of young women over young men in education is that society needs to address this growing imbalance. Western societies have experienced two generations of affirmative action in favour of women to redress the decades of restrictions that were placed on the potential of women. Just how much potential was squashed is being shown in the flowering of young women at school and at university. But what about the boys now? If it were girls being left behind by the education system, we'd never hear the end of it. Nothing can change the fertility schism, but we have reached the point of post-feminism in social policy. Australia now has a woman governor-general, a woman prime minister, has had several woman premiers and a series of women High Court judges.

Politicians Bligh and Gillard may have had a rough weekend, but neither woman ever asked the public to vote for them because they are women, but because they are leaders. As it must be. Loading As for post-feminism social policy, we have to address the widening faultlines in our schools system based on class and gender. Read a list of the top 40 NSW high schools ranked by NAPLAN scores at smh.com.au