When girls are described better than boys: The use of language abstraction in evaluation of boys and girls at primary school

Consistent evidence shows that girls perform better than boys throughout their scholastic career up to high school, when boys start to outperform girls. Research in this domain has mainly analyzed grades and marks obtained in different subjects. However, no study has considered that evaluations are constantly and mainly conveyed through language during everyday school life and summarized in written judgements at the end of the year. Thus, the aim of the present contribution was to investigate whether teachers use language abstraction to differentiate the performance of boys and girls. We coded the level of abstraction of final evaluations of 141 students (69 boys; 72 girls) of a first grade Italian school. Moreover, final grades (expressed as “not sufficient”, “sufficient”, “good”, etc) on all subjects were collected. Results confirmed that girls had higher grades than boys for all subjects. Moreover, we found that those grades were positively correlated with positive language abstraction and negatively correlated with negative language abstraction. Interestingly, evaluations of boys were composed with negative terms at a more abstract level than evaluations of girls, whereas no difference was found for positive terms. This language use implies that the negative characteristics of boys are more stable and endurable. Taken together those findings clearly revealed that evaluations of girls are more favourable than those of boys at both explicit and implicit level. Implications will be discussed in reference to the opposite pattern of results found in personnel selection, where female applicants were linguistically discriminated by varying the level of abstraction of written judgements.