Objectives or purposes of the paper

Usually it has been taken for granted that girls outperform boys in reading. International surveys show that statistically they indeed have a significantly higher average achievement than boys in most countries. The difference in achievement is usually up to one fifth of the standard deviation. In comparison to the differences in achievement between different socioeconomic groups this difference is not big, but still it stays in main focus as a problem that needs to be resolved in a lot of countries.

In our study we aim to show that girls are not necessarily better readers in all circumstances. We will show that under certain conditions (which are the same for both genders) girls become the vulnerable group. We will expose the notion that every child who does not read well needs special measures regardless of sex or socioeconomic background. However, there are certain phenomena which deserve more attention. This phenomena are peer-to-peer violence and attitudes of schools towards boys from more wealthy and educated families.

Main perspective or theoretical/conceptual framework used.

Since Coleman Report (Coleman, 1966) we know that socioeconomic factors matter. Sirin's (2005) big meta study of surveys from 1999 to 2000 showed that among all the factors, socioeconomic factors are the ones that can explain the most variance. 

Girls perform better in reading (Mullis et al. 2003, 2007, 2012). Societies empower and favourize higher social groups at the expenses of lower social groups and men at the expenses of women. This is done through language and underlying ideology (Bourdieu, 1996, van Dijk 1993, 1998).

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