Why do we always pit boys against girls on GCSE results day and pretend everything is fixed to the girls' advantage?

Everywhere I look, there’s a headline suggesting that too many girls gaining top marks is a problem to be solved by examination reform. There seems to be a belief that girls have overstepped the mark and need reining in

'Male 'underperformance' is understood, not as performing below one’s capabilities, but as being beaten by a mere girl (PA)

It’s back: the annual GCSE result battle of the sexes. Who’ll be the victors this time? In the blue corner we’ve the boys – daring, inspired, risk-taking – while in the pink it’s the girls – plodding, diligent, safe. And this year there’s an added twist, with the new no-coursework 2016 specifications really putting them through their paces.

So, who’s come out on top? Have the reformed exams led to a shock result? Well, the short answer is no. Turns out it’s the same as last year, and the year before that, and the one before that. Girls have taken more of the top grades than boys but – BUT – they haven’t really deserved to.

Every year the story is the same and it’s one I’ve come to hate. Instead of reporting on exam successes without reference to gender, news outlets make it into a competition.

Perhaps I shouldn’t mind, given that I’m nominally on the winning team. The truth is, though, it tends to feel less like a win, more like a threat. Girls are doing too well! Something must be done about it!

“New ‘tougher’ exams favour boys as gender gap narrows” reports The Telegraph. Phew! At least that’s a start (even if it requires a fairly generous interpretation of the verb “to favour”). “Boys start to close gap on girls in reformed GCSEs” states The Times. Watch it, girls! Your era of global dominance may be coming to an end!

Everywhere I look, there’s a headline suggesting that too many girls gaining top marks is a problem to be solved by examination reform. I can’t believe I’m the only one to feel uneasy about this. It’s not that I have any particular beliefs about which sex should be dominant (if we really wanted to test this out, we’d start much earlier by abolishing gendered conditioning). It’s that there seems to be a belief that girls have overstepped the mark and need reining in.

Given the history of women’s exclusion from education, and the ongoing inequalities we face, I question the motives of those who are so eager to mitigate and qualify female exam success. For all the hand-wringing every time women do well, the odds remain stacked against us. As scientists such as Cordelia Fine and Angela Saini have documented so well, the assumption that male and female brains differ is not neutral, but driven by a desire to demonstrate that women and girls are intellectually inferior. The way in which we talk about gender and exam success shows this desire has not abated.

Boys are doing better in “tougher” exams; girls outperform boys in “softer” subjects; coursework “favours” girls. Girls might be running the gauntlet of sexual harassment every time they go to school, but boys “underperform because we look after their well-being less”. And then there’s the “fact” that no boy can possibly be expected to look up to a teacher who happens to be female.

The message is repeated, year in, year out: when girls outperform boys, the system is rigged in their favour. Forget the fact that actual examples of exam rigging – subtracting exam marks from female candidates, massaging 11 plus results to grant more grammar school places to boys, allowing women to sit university exams but not awarding them degrees – demonstrate centuries of systemic bias against women and girls. Forget the fact that contrary to popular myth, girls were already outperforming boys before the introduction of GCSEs.

Male “underperformance” is understood, not as performing below one’s capabilities, but as being beaten by a mere girl. This is not felt to be the natural order of things. Thus when girls do well, we decide there is a problem. We conclude we can’t be testing the right skills or delivering knowledge in the right way. Female intelligence is artificial and untrustworthy; male intelligence is natural and innate. Tinkering with a system in order to allow boys to rise to the top isn’t engaging in positive discrimination; it’s merely smoothing the path to allow nature to take its course.

You may ask why this matters. Surely it’s irrelevant who does best, as long as we’re all still learning something. It matters because this way of thinking gets in the way of what ought to be our real educational goals. Instead of expanding knowledge and increasing engagement with the world, we reduce examinations to a means of measuring human worth and justifying inequality. We expect exam results to prove that privilege is deserved and when they fail to do so, we blame the questions.

As a mother of three boys, I want them to get the best out of their education and to use their knowledge in a way that matters. I am not interested in them getting one over on their female classmates, and nor should they be. As we celebrate successes, let’s not forget what we’re really trying to test.