Why are girls outperforming boys academically?

"Boys are in full retreat on a global scale academically," said Xie Zuoxu, a professor of high education at Xiamen University, in the wake of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report published earlier this month showing that at age 15, girls are outperforming boys in all subjects but math.

Across the 64 countries and regions studied, which included Shanghai, Macao and Taipei in China, the OECD found that boys are 50 percent more likely to fail to achieve basic proficiency in maths, reading and science, and twice as likely to consider school to be a "waste of time."

Women are also better-represented than men at university, making up 56 percent of university enrolments.

The trends are consistent with domestic studies of education in China.

A 2014 National Institute of Education Sciences report looking at the overall academic performance of more than 20,000 primary school students in Beijing, Heilongjiang, Jiangxi and Shandong provinces found that 65.33 percent of boys could be considered to be achieving poorly, compared to 27.56 percent of girls.

In universities as well, women have outnumbered men in enrolments since 2009, according to the Ministry of Education.

In 2013, women students accounted for 51.9 of admissions into China's universities.

Not only are girls outperforming boys on the whole academically, said Xie, but they are beginning to surpass boys in areas of tertiary study in which women have traditionally been under-represented.

"More and more women are choosing to study sciences or engineering at university, and in some places, their enrolment numbers have surpassed male students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level," said Xie. "In the US, this trend is more obvious, and in China it is also developing fast."

Boys more easily distracted?

The gap in academic performance between boys and girls is most likely not a result of an innate difference in ability between the genders, according the OECD report.

Researchers noted that in top-performing regions like Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei, boys scored much higher in reading ability than girls from other regions. Similarly, in the three aforementioned places, girls were found to be on a par with boys in mathematics, and to have achieved a considerably higher proficiency than boys from other countries and regions around the world based on scores in the Programme For International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012.

The discrepancy in academic achievement between boys and girls in the participating Chinese regions was also smaller than in many other countries.

According to the OECD report, one of the primary reasons for the discrepancy in academic achievement between boys and girls are that boys are more easily distracted by technology-based forms of recreations.

The report showed that a girl on average spends an hour more on homework per week than a boy, whereas the average boy spends more time playing videogames or browsing the Internet.

"The Internet has affected all the children[negatively], but the influence may be a little bit stronger in boys than in girls," said Xie, who added that there are always more boys than girls in cyber-cafes.

Qi Yujie, the mother of a 15-year-old boy at Beijing No.19 High School, blamed her son's failing grades to his spending too much time playing videogames. Previously a middle-ranked student, according to Qi, her son has failed four of his six math exams since September last year.