At A Level, young women achieved higher results in total than young men. However, subjects in which male students outperformed female students included several subjects taken by relatively few male students, such as Modern Foreign Languages, suggesting that the young men taking these subjects are relatively high achievers.
These findings may suggest that low achieving students have been filtered out by this stage, or that male students choose, on average, just those subjects in which they are likely to perform well.
Comments
This reminds of the variability hypothesis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis