Gender Gap Closing on Reading

What Kids Are Reading 2012 report finds children are now reading to the same level of difficulty across genders.

From a story in the Guardian...

After examining the reading habits of over 210,000 primary and secondary school children from 1,237 schools across the UK, the What Kids are Reading 2012 report found that the gap between girls' and boys' reading abilities appears to be closing. "We can no longer claim that boys read at a lower level of difficulty than girls so overall under-achievement must be caused by other factors," wrote the report's author Professor Keith Topping of Dundee University.

Although in some academic years girls are continuing to outperform boys, on balance across years one to 11 the reading gender divide is closing, the report said. Using software to analyse the level of difficulty of books, researchers found that across all years, there were four cases when the difficulty level of books read by boys was greater than girls, three cases where girls' difficulty was greater than boys, and two cases where it was equal.