Gender Gap Traced Back

Article here. Excerpt:

'Recent research has suggested various ways in which girls outperform boys in high school, making them more likely to go to college: stronger desire to get good grades, better social skills, greater validation from academic performance. But a new study suggests gender sorting -- a boy’s or girl’s decision to attend one school or another – could have its own effect on the college enrollment gap.

In a study of public school systems in Florida, researchers found that what high school a student attends is “strongly associated” with college enrollment; girls are attending high schools that have higher rates of college-going than one would expect based on the students’ test scores – and boys, vice versa.
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“Either girls are choosing to attend high schools that are going to advantage them by making them more likely to go to college, or girls are simply attracted to high schools whose students have higher college-going rates -- even if the school does not cause this outcome -- while boys are attracted to other features of high schools,” such as facilities or the characteristics of the school's students, said Mark C. Long, co-author of the paper published in Educational Researcher and associate professor of public affairs at the University of Washington.
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“Thus, increasing opportunities for choice may facilitate higher amounts of gender sorting (just as they might increase sorting by race and class) in future years,” the paper says. “If continued monitoring suggests an increase in gender sorting, and further research suggests harmful consequences to such sorting, then school systems may want to consider gender balance in their school assignment policies."'