Good point. It’s hard to differentiate these things. Aptitude is important to measure here because that is generally the goal when it comes to learning skills for careers or life, and they’ll try to measure these learned abilities with aptitude tests. Ie: you might have taken the ‘Scholastic Aptitude Test’ (SAT) in high school. One of the possible considered reasons for this discrepancy is just that males are better at taking tests and/or females are better at classwork, discussed in the first linked study.

From what I understand because I haven’t read more than the abstracts and intros is that the second study was supposed to have accounted for that idea and still found statistical bias.

It’s a well documented phenomenon over the last few decades with a few possible explanations. It’s hard to search for general studies because most studies seem to be either super specific or more focused on the male/female differences in math and science/reading and writing performance. But here are the major ones I keep seeing cited.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120992 I believe the first to prove there is a general gender gap in received grades vs aptitude. Not in here but I believe other studies suggest this trend is present everywhere except Nordic countries.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942 Major study recently to suggest that this gap is systemic.

From personal experience, I can’t give much to secondary school because it was all boys, and my tertiary is a very small male-dominated field, but I distinctly remember my primary school was very sexist against boys in a number of ways, and I would not be surprised if this were also in grades.

Most stuff I agree with, but I think imposter syndrome may also be heavily attributed to being in a heavy male dominated field.

Yeah, also it’s grade averages and not a standardized test which may have an effect. Most schools tend to artificially bias female students’ grades higher, so doing it for a standardized test may give more accurate data.