The paper attempts to determine whether there are significant gender differences in academic performance among undergraduate students at Middle East Technical University (METU), which is a large public university in Turkey, and if so, the factors that give rise to these differences. Academic performance is affected by a host of factors. These include individual and household characteristics such as student ability, motivation, the quality of secondary education obtained and the like.
The gender of the student may also be a factor in determining student performance. Childhood training and experience, gender differences in attitudes, parental and teacher expectations and behaviors, differential course taking and biological differences between the sexes may all be instrumental in giving rise to gender differences in achievement (Feingold, 1988). The rather high gender disparity in various spheres of public life and the patriarchal social structure in Turkey may also lead to poorer academic performance among female university students.
In terms of educational attainment women lag behind men in Turkey. The 2000 Population Census records the illiteracy rate among men at 6.1%, while that of women at 19.4% (SIS, 2003). Among the literate population, men’s average level of schooling far exceeds that of women though there does seem to be a faster improvement among the latter (Day?o?lu and Tunal?, 2002). Gender disparity in schooling is also observed among the younger population, where female school enrollment in basic and secondary education falls behind male children (Tansel, 2002; Ertürk and Day?o?lu, 2004). Despite the numerous studies that analyze the disadvantaged position of women as adults and children, there is almost no work on the educational experiences of women as young adults.
The paucity of such work has been one of the motivations for this study. The other motivation has been our observation that in the undergraduate classes we teach female students often outperform their male counterparts. This casual observation contradicts with the general experiences of the female population as children and adults. Hence, this study grew out ofour curiosity to find out how far our personal observations hold for the general undergraduate student population in our university.
Following the introduction, the study is organized as follows: Section 2 looks at the literature on gender differences in scholastic achievement. Section 3 presents a brief account of the education system in Turkey and gives information about Middle East Technical University. Section 4 presents the employed methodology, while Section 5 discusses the data set used. Section 6 presents the results on student academic achievement and compares the performance of male and female students on the basis of a number of indicators. Section 7 concludes the paper.
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