Gender gaps in school grades: An analysis on resistance behaviour and class compositions in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden

In recent years, research has increasingly focused on boys’ educational trajectories, revealing that boys are often at a disadvantage compared to girls in various educational outcomes. School resistance behaviour, referring to actions such as disrupting lessons, defying school norms and rules, rejecting authority, and not putting effort into schoolwork, is found more often among boys. We argue that gender differences in school resistance behaviour can explain part of gender differences in school grades. Furthermore, the gender composition of the school class is likely to matter in this dynamic. Our study offers a comprehensive, large-scale examination of gender differences in school grades in language and mathematics among secondary school students in four European countries (n = 18,234 students in 886 classes). When controlling for test scores in cognitive and language ability, respectively for grades in mathematics and language, as well as for demographic characteristics, our results show that gender gaps in fact do not consistently favour girls, as boys have an advantage in mathematics. Boys more frequently demonstrate school resistance behaviour, which partially explains the gender gap in language grades (where girls are advantaged), but not in mathematics grades (where boys are advantaged). Moreover, we found that resistance behaviour affects girls' grades more severely due to differential punishment. Lastly, there was no evidence for the gender composition of a school class to be related to individual grades.