What girls do better than boys in HAVO and VWO
Johan Coenen, Christoph Meng and Rolf van der Velden of Maastricht University have written a research report on how boys and girls differ in their classroom results in the Netherlands.
The basic idea is that boys are not necessarily performing worse, but that girls are performing a good deal better, because education as it currently works and the expectations of the labour market fit their way of studying and working more closely. Think of independent study, more language-based subjects, and the choice of subject profiles.