In this paper, the focus is on girls’ education in Portugal and other European countries (Spain, France, UK, etc) in the last thirty years concerning their numbers in school attendance and achievement, in secondary and university levels. Some authors, as Baudelot & Establet (1992) as well as Arnot, David & Weiner (1999) have call the attention in the 1990s that girls’ education was constituting an unexpected configuration regarding school outcomes. As Arnot et al put it, this has constituted “the most extensive inversions of social inequality in contemporary times” (1999:150) and was perceived by conservative sectors as a threat: “the effects of the backlash have been to convert girls’ educational successes into a moral panic about boys’ failure” (ib:151). The main traditions in Sociology and History of Education were not homogeneous regarding equality of opportunities. For functionalist perspectives, to open schools to all and expand the network of schools was enough to concretize equality of opportunities (e.g. T. Parsons). For social and cultural reproduction theories (e.g. Bowles & Gintis; Bourdieu, Bernstein), equality of opportunities was no more than a rhetoric, hiding social class domination. Gender equality was not the concern of both these perspectives. When gender and feminist perspectives have focused school education, exclusion, segregation and discrimination were the main concerns. Therefore, when the 1990s studies have shown the new reconfiguration, based on data on school access and achievement, mainly concerning secondary and university levels, this has constituted a blow for the different perspectives. School was able to bring new configurations to the lives of girls and this was also through class divisions (Baudelot & Establet 1992).Therefore, this paper, on crossing data from different European countries, and a special attention to the Portuguese situation, focuses girls and school success concerning the period under examination and moves to question this success at the labour market and the world of politics.

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