[RobAtticus]

In your first link, and also the link submitted, she states that women do better than men in school. I don't see where she gets this information (she doesn't cite any study that I can find), and I'm curious about the claim. Is it simply that men have a wider range of grades in school so there are many more in the failing range that brings down the average, whereas women have a smaller range with fewer women failing so the average is higher? Is it even measured in terms of grades? I only wonder because in my experience, my peers who did the best in school were mostly male (however, the ones doing the worst were also mostly male). Then again, maybe my peer group is just an exception to the norm?

[roguecoder]

It depends on which society you are in; the more gender-equal, the better girls perform in school. There are places where they do slightly outperform boys overall, including in many colleges. The broader trend is that girls' test scores have been improving much faster than boys have over the past 40 years. It isn't that boys are performing any worse than they were before, or are being ill-served by school, it's just that girls have overtaken them. This change mostly came when standardized testing came about and grades were no longer subjective: with clear goals and unambiguous feedback, girls had new opportunities to excel. Boys, on the other hand, aren't socially rewarded for working hard on things they aren't good at, for empathizing and thus developing social intelligence (which is enormously valuable in school and particularly test performance) and weren't driven by the same fear of failure: worst that happens to me is I end up in my parents basement failing to pay child support.

(Your proto-bell-curve explanation has been mostly dismissed at this point, just like all the rest of the "variation" arguments: variation ends up being highly influenced by social and cultural factors. The variation in American boy's performance in school, for example, is partially a product of how shittily our schools serve poor African-American boys.)