University entrance: gender, poverty and ethnicity

In the Paula Principle book I gave only a little space to ethnic variations in the gender gap -partly because I'm no expert on ethnicity and partly because I didn't want to overload the book with figures. A recent report in The Times looks at statistics from the Department for Education on university entrance, paying particular attention to those students who were on free school meals - the standard indicator of poverty. The ethnic variations are striking; the common factor is that girls do better than boys. At one end no fewer than 75% of Chinese girls getting free school meals went to university, 10 points ahead of Chinese boys.…
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