boys educational outcomes

A few papers that we have looked at in the last few months have indicated that boys tend to respond to immediate incentives to a greater extent than girls. i was re-reading the paper "Patience among children" by Bettinger and Slonim. They show that boys are markedly more impatient than girls, as measured by choice behaviour in a field experiment involving incentives. In particular, young boys may need educational incentives that give immediate rewards (rewards that they actually like!). The literature on domain specific discounting indicates that money itself may or may not be the incentive but it strikes me that if it is case that boys are falling behind, one hypothesis is that the immediate cost that they get from studying very hard is relatively higher than the discounted benefit. The benefit itself may be roughly the same and I haven't seen much evidence that returns to education are lower for boys than for girls. However, the discounting process may be different. In terms of the feminisation of teaching argument, i suppose this could be seen as different costs of study, with the idea being that a more feminised subject matter would impose a higher study cost on the boys in terms of them having to contend with subject matter less interesting to them. One argument for the role of gender composition is that it is more plausible to suggest that this has varied over the last few years than it is to suggest that relative discounting processes have varied. as with all this discussion though, it should be borne in mind that outcomes for males are improving in almost every conceivable domain and therefore, looking for reasons why "boys are failing" etc., is not the correct language. The relative changes in gender performance in school exams is an interesting question though.