HSC trends hark back to gender stereotypes of '50s Looking at trends in this year's HSC results, one could be forgiven for thinking the results were from the 1950s. The achievement of students in each subject is split, almost without exception, along stereotypical gender lines. Female students dominated textiles and design, food technology and community and family studies, while male students excelled in engineering studies, software design and physics. Subjects with a more even divide included music, business studies and geography. The president of the NSW Board of Studies, Tom Alegounarias, said it was likely the skew in achievement reflected enrolment patterns rather than any intrinsic differences in ability. It is unsurprising that female students collected 99 per cent of the scores above 90 in textiles and design, for example, given they account for 98 per cent of students in that subject. And the same could be said for engineering studies, given that 96 per cent of the students are male. Yet, while girls outperformed boys in most HSC subjects and took out two-thirds of the first in course awards, boys claimed 32 of 48 top ATARs of 99.95. Mr Alegounarias said that was probably because male students were over-represented in high-level maths and science subjects, which typically scale well. But, even though male students have taken more than their share at the very top of the ATAR scale, female students came out on top overall. Mr Alegounarias said it reflected a trend in Western countries that "girls at the business end of schooling tend to outperform boys." Given the gender bias is so stark, he said we need to interrogate how our society reflects and reinforces the patterns. "There's a challenge ahead of us to confront the potential role of education in reinforcing these gender stereotypes," he said. But I'm confident that they're a reflection of culturally embedded biases rather than biases in the curriculum.