Investigating gender differences in the science performance of 16-year-old pupils in the UK

This paper investigates whether gender stereotypes of boys outperforming girls in physics and girls outperforming boys in biology are still present. The paper will consider the performance on individual question parts of a UK examination for 16-year-olds. The question parts that solely involved retrieving scientific information from memory were identified and the existence of gender differences was verified for them. The memory processes involved in answering these question parts were considered and related to the gender differences in science in performance.