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Gender Gap in GPAs Seen as Linked to Self-Discipline

Girls’ self-control may help explain boys’ lower grades, researchers say.

Concern over boys and whether they were falling behind girls in classroom achievement and college enrollment drew a spate of media interest last year. All that attention, in turn, sparked a backlash of sorts from analysts who argued that boys were still making academic strides, but that girls were just making greater ones.

What may have gotten lost in the conversation, suggests Angela Lee Duckworth, a research associate in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, are gender differences in an area that has attracted little research attention over the years: the old-fashioned attribute of self-discipline.

Girls typically get better grades than boys in elementary, middle, and high school. But those higher grades are not always predicted, on average, by their performance on...