FACULTY OF BUSINES ECONOMIC & ACCOUNTANCY

UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA SABAH

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN
EDUCATIONAL ATAINMENT IN
MALAYSIA

GROUP ASSIGNMENT

PREPARED TO:
LECTURER’S NAME

PREPARED BY:
No Name Matric No. Signature
1 Kamal Bin Hj Hassan YE2016-1131
 TABLE OF CONTENT

PAGE
TITLE PAGE i

1. INTRODUCTION
1
1
1.1 Objective of study

2. METHODOLOGY
2.1 Research Data 2
2.2 Data Analysis 2

3. RESUL
3

4. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 9

5. CONCLUSION
5. REFERENCES 9
6. APPENDICES 11

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1. INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, people keep talking about gender differences in many aspects whether in politics,
workplace, occupation, family and relationships, or the economy. In spite of that, have we
ever wondered why people keep on making comparison between males and females
performance especially when it is involving education context? Academic gender differences
are one of the most highly researched topics within the educational system. In response to
this problem, research has found that males and females learn differently in many aspects
of education (Aslan, 2009). The term "gender" clearly reveals the social and contextual
expectations which society puts on part of each gender (male or female) culturally and
socially (Kamari, Gorjian, Pazhakh, 2012). Block (2002) also considers gender as a social
phenomenon. Hence, there is a shift in view from perceiving gender as an individual concept
to perceiving it as a social construction (Aslan, 2009).

Busch (1995) observed that gender studies in the eighties and early nineties
concentrated, amongst other concerns, on self efficacy with respect to mathematics, science
related subjects and the use of computers where gender differences were well noted. It was
found that male students had significantly higher self efficacy than female students in those
areas. However, it was also found that in other studies women’s performance in
mathematics challenged male’s supposed superiority in the subject (Bridgeman and Wendler,
1991) and that gender differences in mathematics vary from country to country (Xu and
Farrel, 1992) investigating gender performance of high school graduating Chinese students
who took the China Regents Competency Mathematics Examination did not find conclusive
gender differences in their results

At the macroeconomic level, gender gaps in education and employment have been
shown to significantly impact economic growth (Klasen and Lammana, 2009). At the
individual level, such gaps perpetuate income inequality and, worse, poverty (Borass and
Rodgers III, 2003). Gender inequality lowers individual well-being and is inimical to social
justice. For this reason, gender equality in education has been a key goal of the Program of
Action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (1994)
and reaffirmed by the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (Unterhalter, 2005).

Let us now look beyond aggregate enrolment figures for males and females,
respectively and unravel prevailing gender differences in secondary and tertiary level
courses. Universally, girls lag behind boys in the area of science or technical or vocational

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subjects. Azizan Baharuddin’s (2003) study showed that more than half of the secondary
students in Malaysia who qualified for the science stream at the Form 4 level in the 1990s
comprised females. However, in 1993 and 1994 only 47 percent of girls who qualified to do
science at the Form 4 level chose to do so as compared to 62 percent in the case of males.
The lower percentage of girls who opt for science reflects the preference girls have for home
economics and commerce. At the Form 6 level about the same percentage of girls and boys
take up science but girls in the science stream prefer biology and chemistry while boys
generally prefer science subjects such as mathematics and physics that emphasise the
application of formulae.

This essay is organised in five sections. In the next section, we investigate the
literature review on factors underlying gender differences, education and the labour force.
The aim is to find out the effects of gender on the linkage between education and
occupation. The third section considers the methods in gathering the information and
making it in one framework. The following section reports on the analysis and discussion
based on methodology. The essay concludes with a discussion on the policy implications of
the foregoing analysis.

1.2 Objective

There are few objectives in conducting this essay:

i. To investigate the factors influenced the performance of man and woman in educational
context in Malaysia perspective.
ii. To analyse the performance of mans and women’s in education by using economics’
theory
iii. To find out the solution for improving educational attainment from gender perspective.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Theoretical and conceptual facts

Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain gender differences in degree

performance (Hoskins et al., 1997). However, one important explanation that we are not
able to consider with the data available is that gender differences in academic attainment
are due to psychological or biological factors. Gender differences have been found in such
things as anxiety and examination stress, in self-efficacy and in the willingness to adopt risk-
taking strategies in preparation for exams. However, these are not found to account for the

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gender gap in degree performance. Indeed, on some counts, such as motivation and work-
effort questions, women score higher than men (Mellanby et al., 2000).

One explanation for observed differences in attainment is that they are a

compositional effect and reflect gender differences in the types of subjects studied and the
fact that there are observed differences in the percentage of good degrees awarded across
disciplines. Strictly speaking, if there were consistency in the application of academic
standards across disciplines, subject-specific effects should be small or non-existent. The
fact that there are significant variations in degree results by subject is, however, well
documented (Johnes and Taylor, 1990). These may arise because of differences in the type
of subject material, with students in more quantitative subjects being more able to achieve
very high or very low exam marks. There may also be an element of custom and practice
whereby disciplines have, over time, established rather different standards.

One reason commonly put forward for why the distribution of students by subject
area is different by gender is that the relative scarcity of female faculty in traditionally male
disciplines has contributed to the reluctance of females to study in those disciplines.
However, this hypothesis has found little empirical support (Canes and Rosen, 1995) though
Rothstein (1995) has found that the percentage of faculty who are female in an institution is
significantly associated with the probability that female students obtain an advanced degree.

A second explanation for observed gender differences in attainment is that they

reflect differences in academic aptitude. The suggestion is that the variation in ability is
greater for men than it is for women and that this explains why male students are more
likely to be found at the extremes of the distribution of degree attainment (Holdstock, 1998).
Ability is, however, notoriously difficult to measure though A-level (or Scottish Higher)
scores are often used as a proxy (Johnes and Taylor, 1990). In the absence of any
alternatives in the data used in the present study, gender differences in academic ability will
be measured using A-level score. Two approaches are used in the empirical analysis. First,
the gender effect on degree performance is estimated net of ability by including ability (as
proxies by A-level/Scottish Higher score) in the models to be estimated. Second, we
estimate predicted degree performance probabilities for students with maximum A level/
Scottish Higher level scores. This provides an alternative estimate of the gender effect for
students who are more homogenous in terms of academic ability.

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 Also included is the main entry qualification that was used to obtain admission to
university. This will enable us to examine whether students who enter with no formal
educational qualifications or with qualifications other than A-levels/Higher are at a
disadvantage and do not perform as well as students with conventional academic
rerequisites. Such students may be less academically inclined or may find full-time education
more arduous than students who enter university on the basis of their A-level/Scottish
Higher results.

Beyond these inequalities in education and employment, however, the often-

ignored linkages between gender inequality in education and the extent and nature of
women’s labour force participation also impacts development (Mak 1998). Given the critical
role played by human capital at each stage of development, any mismatch between the
output of the education system and labour force participation naturally leads to inefficiencies
in resource use. This has major consequences especially for developing countries, given
their scarcity of human capital. As the recent example of South Korea shows, even for
middle-income countries, it is the depth of human capital (that is, its quality) upon which
they must rely to graduate to an advanced country (Cimoli et al., 2009).

Malaysia recognises the important role of women in development and is committed

to their increased participation in education and in the economy. As one of the World Bank’s
‘miracle’ economies, the nation’s economy has experienced rapid economic growth and
structural change (Hill et al. 2012). The economy has transformed from one of dependency
on agriculture to one in which manufacturing, and increasingly services, play a dominant
role. In line with the structural transformation of the economy, there have been changes in
the patterns of employment away from agriculture to the secondary and tertiary sectors
((Malaysia, Department of Statistics).

Undoubtedly this changing face of the Malaysian labour force has been made
possible by the massive investment in educational opportunities over the years. Today, all
Malaysians have access to tuition-free education up to the end of secondary school. Tertiary
education is now available not only from public institutions of higher learning but also a
large number of private colleges and universities.

The strategy to provide equal educational opportunities to all has brought

substantial gains to women. Since the beginning of the 1990s, enrolment ratios of females
have been equal to, or exceeded, those of males at all levels of education, the disparity

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favouring women rising with the level of education (Tey, 2006). This is the result of a higher
retention rate among females as well as sharper increases in the enrolment of females in
tertiary education (Lee and Nagaraj, 2006). Does the gender imbalance in tertiary education
have any implications for the labour force? The objective of this paper is to examine the role
of gender in the interaction between human capital formation and labour market dynamics
in Malaysia. Labour market dynamics is understood from the perspectives of Malaysia’s
attempt to avoid the middle-income trap (Yusuf and Nabeshima, 2009) by becoming a
knowledge economy by 2020 (Reich, 2005) described a three-tiered work force in
knowledge economies consisting of workers providing personal service at the bottom,
production workers in the middle and ‘symbolic analysts,’ like engineers or lawyers, who use
information at the top with a shift from the middle to the other two groups as the economy
advances. The role of gender is examined specifically through the changes in, and linkages
between, educational attainment and the occupational structure of the Malaysian labour
force.

3. METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES OF DATA

3.1 Measuring Educational Attainment

In measuring the educational attainment, this essay analysed the secondary data based on
the previous research in terms of gender difference’s determinants. The data analysed
descriptively using descriptive and inferential methods.

3.2 Library Observation

In this method, some articles, journal, books and media were analyzed to get the reliable
data regarding the topics. The data includes the differences of academic performance
among students in secondary schools until degree level.

4. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Hence, this study addresses two categories of findings namely those from secondary data
and from the library observation.

4.1 The secondary data

From the secondary data, according Jelas and Dahan (2014), to it is found that for the last
twenty (20) years there has been no gender differential in the population. The male - female

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ratio for the year 2000 is 102:100. At the primary school level, the male population exceeds
that of the female by 2.6-2.8% but the former starts to dwindle at the upper secondary level
when the male students start leaving the system after two major public examinations, PMR
and SPM respectively. These have resulted in the female population becoming more visible
by 30.66% to 32.98% at higher secondary level. Recent data obtained from the Malaysian
Ministry of Education reveal that girls have consistently performed better academically in
public examinations in most of the subjects with the exception of technical subjects such as
technical drawing and technical engineering. The graphs (Table 1a) below show the trends
of gender achievements in three major areas of English, Mathematics and Science for the
years 1996-2003.

Figure 1(a): Percentage of gender achievements in SPM English (1996-2003)

Source: (Jelas and Dahan, 2014)

4.2.1 Gender differences in students’ academic performance.

5. CONCLUSION

Gender differences in degree performance are striking, but little understood. In this essay,
we have explored the relationship between gender and academic achievement controlling
for various personal and institutional attributes. Overall, women are less likely than male
students to get a first class degree but are more likely to graduate with an upper second. In
this paper we have investigated why academic achievement differs by gender and, in
particular, why female students are less likely to achieve first class degrees. Our findings

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indicate, first, that differences in such things as subject mix and individual and institutional
characteristics cannot explain the gender gap in achievement to any significant degree. An
important conclusion of the analysis is that gender differences in academic achievement
arise because of differences in the way these attributes impact upon performance.

Secondary data demonstrate the trend that female students are more successful
academically and thereby confirming findings of research conducted in other developing
countries. Primary data show that female students’ learning characteristics contribute
substantially to their academic excellence. However, this exploratory study has merely
scratched the tip of the iceberg. Further research is needed to explore the nature of male
and female anxiety about learning/schooling and its consequences for academic
performance and to develop whole-school approaches to intervention strategies.

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6. REFERENCES

Aslan, O. (2009). The role of gender and language learning strategies in learning English.
Unpublished Master’s thesis.

Baharuddin. A. (2003). Servicing the Global Society: Women in Science and Technology. In
Omar, R. & Hamzah, A. eds. Women in Malaysia: Breaking Boundaries. Kuala Lumpur:
Utusan Publications, 31- 64.

Bridgeman. B., & Wendler. C. (1995). Gender differences in predictors of college

mathematics course grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83: 275-284.

Busch. T. (1995). Gender differences in self-efficacy and academic performance among

students of business administration. Publisering: Scandinavian Journal of Educational
research,39: 311-318.

Block, D. (2002). Language & Gender and SLA. [Electronic version] Quaderns de Filologia.
Estudis Linguistics, 7: 49-73.

Jelas. Z., & Dahan. H. M. (2010). Gender and Educational Performance: The Malaysian
Perspective. International Conference on Learner Diversity 2010. Procedia Social and
Behavioral Sciences, 7(C): 720–727

Kamari. E., Gorjian. B., & Pazhakh. A. (2012). Examining the effects of gender on second
language writing proficiency of Iranian EFL students: Descriptive vs. opinion one-paragraph
essay. Advances in Asian Social Sciences (AASS), 3(4).

Ling. K. S. (2004). Women Engineer Their Way In. New Straits Times, 25th April.

Xu. J., & Farrell. E. (1992). Mathematics performance of Shanghai school students: a
preliminary look at gender differences in another culture. School Science and Mathematics.
92(8): 442-447.

Warren. B. Z. (1997). Personality, Learning Style, Gender, and Ethnic Characteristics of

Students Attending Supplemental Instruction. Spring of 1997 at the University of Central
Florida. Paper. Annual Teaching/Learning Conference (Ashland, KY, October 10-11). ERIC
Document No:ED397373.

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