Girls perform better in English and Maltese, boys and girls draw in Maths

Moreover, boys – especially those hailing from affluent localities like Swieqi – tend to get very bad results in Maltese.

The analysis is based on statistics presented in parliament, which show the number of candidates passing their SEC examination in the three compulsory subjects in 2011 in each Maltese and Gozitan locality.

A sample of 12 localities, which include the most populous towns as well as a number of key northern and southern localities, was chosen for the analysis.

In English, girls performed better than boys in 9 of 12 of the chosen localities. In Maltese, girls performed better than boys in 11 out of 12 localities. But in Mathematics, the same amount of girls and boys passed the exam in five localities while boys outperformed girls in four localities. In three other localities, girls surpassed boys by a wide margin.

In upper middle class localities like Swieqi and Sliema boys performed very badly in Maltese, to the extent that only 36% of Swieqi boys and 39% of Sliema boys pass their Maltese exam. 

Girls from both localities tend to perform better – 63% of girls passing the exam in Swieqi and 54% passing in Sliema.

Although boys in these two localities do much better in English than in Maltese, girls do even better than boys in English.

While 75.7% of Swieqi boys pass their English exam, a staggering 96% of girls pass the same exam. While 71% of Sliema boys pass their English exam, 80% of girls pass.

But the situation changes with regards to Mathematics in Sliema where boys do better than girls (56% against 51%). Swieqi girls still do better than boys in maths.

The situation is not much different in Marsaskala, Naxxar and Attard where practically the same percentage of boys and girls pass their Maths exam but girls do better in Maltese and English.

On the other hand, girls in other southern localities like Cospicua and Zejtun tend to do much better in Maltese than in English.

While girls outperform boys in Maltese in both localities, in Cospicua, more boys than girls pass their English exam while in Zejtun an equal number of girls and boys pass their English exam. Girls do better in Maths in both localities.

Gozitan capital Rabat and rural Mgarr also tend to defy the national trends.

Boys from Rabat (Gozo) perform better than girls in both English and Mathematics but fare worse than girls in Maltese. On the other hand, in Mgarr boys do better than girls in Maltese and Mathematics but not in English.

The results of this study tallies with other international studies showing girls facing greater difficulties in Mathematics than other subjects.

A study by Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues conducted in 2008 shows that the gap in Mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains.

Analyzing 276,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries who sat the same Maths test, the researchers found that on average, girls’ maths scores were lower than those of boys. However, the gap was largest in countries with the least equality between the sexes such as Turkey. It vanished in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the sexes are more or less on a par with one another.

The latest results suggest that although in Malta girls do much better in languages than in Maths, they still perform slightly better than boys in this subject.

The relatively higher achievement of girls over boys at secondary level is reflected in the greater number of females at university even if males still tend to dominate science and engineering courses.