Question

you look smarter than boys of your age who said to whom​

Answer 1

Explanation:

Data from internationally benchmarked tests show that boys lag behind girls on test averages. In all but six of the 72 countries participating in PISA, 15-year-old boys are more likely than girls of the same age to be low-achievers on the composite average of all three subjects tested. Whether on Latin America’s TERCE, the SAT and the NAEP in the United States, or an array of national and regional assessments around the world (here, here, here, and here), girls outperform boys on total test averages in the majority of countries and economic regions.

Behind the averages is a more complex story. Boys’ test scores are much more dispersed (here and here). In fact, boys outscore girls at the top of the distribution, and they underperform at the bottom. Across the OECD countries, 6 out of 10 underachievers—“those who fail to meet the baseline standard of proficiency across the tests”—are boys. Boys are more likely than girls to repeat a grade, less likely to attend college, and less likely to persist in attaining a degree if they do (here and here). Despite this higher performance by women, female college students continue to be under-represented in technical fields like engineering and computer science.

Boys perform marginally better on mathematics and science

This higher average performance by girls masks important variations across individual subjects (as demonstrated in the figure below). While girls consistently score higher in reading and writing across the assessments, boys tend to perform better on assessments in mathematics and science in the majority of countries in which these tests—and others, such as the PASEQ and SACMEQ and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—are administered. The Middle East seems to be the only region for which the mathematics advantage for boys does not hold. This male advantage in mathematics is otherwise so pervasive, in fact, that a gender gap is observed even when analyzing the results of twins of different genders in Chile.