The education gender gap is bad for girls as well as boys

More girls are applying to university this year; 62,000 more of them to be exact. To anyone who has followed the steady rise in girls' educational achievements over the past few decades, this should come as no surprise. While boys may be gaining ground in recent years (notching up more top A-level marks), overall girls now "outperform" boys from the early years through to postgraduate qualifications.

No surprise either, the headlines about boys being disadvantaged and "left behind". But could the new gender gap in university admissions point to how our secondary schools are failing girls as well as boys, albeit in more subtle ways?

No one would decry the rise in girls' achievements, or take pleasure in the relative failure of boys. Exam success lays down a first and important marker of, and template for, intellectual development throughout life. It confirms the importance of effort and celebrates the productive mastery of difficulty.

However, exam success is not so good at developing the equally important skills of experimentation, challenge and risk-taking. It is hard to convey to those without children of exam age just how fact-choked and test-obsessed schools have become. For some boys, the resulting boredom and frustration provokes them to make the "wrong" sort of challenge to the school's authority. But many girls, faced with the same pressures, respond by becoming too compliant.

In Tough Young Teachers, the riveting new TV series on Teach First graduates, we witness the tensions between Charles, a slightly stolid RE teacher, and the articulate Caleb who just won't jump through the hoops. Dragged into the head's office, reduced to tears, Caleb just won't play the game – even for a B. And in another often chaotic classroom, who walks across the desks? Boys. I don't recall a single girl sashaying along the tops of the tables. Pretty much all of them had their heads down.

There are successful and not-so-successful versions of the heads-down scenario, and it's the least successful we should really worry about. But conducting interviews for my recent book, it was striking the number of parents who worried about the side effects of their daughters' exam efficiency.

The following example is typical: "She methodically went through every syllabus for every course, discovered what the 'assessment objectives' for every relevant unit were … and exactly how they would be marked." Those same parents also report that it is still often boys who dominate classroom discussions, if and when those conversations happen.

What many parents of high-achieving girls worry about is the wholesale caution, a kind of female compliance that feels horribly familiar and that too easily leads teenage girls to crush and suppress their own questions, uncertainties, furies, hunches and passions. In short, all the things that make individuals interesting.

Mothers, in particular, know that too much obedience won't serve our daughters well later in life. Talented, hard-working women often flounder in work because they haven't been taught to think or fight for themselves, psychologically, professionally or financially. Even the Girls Day School Trust, a chain of independent schools, has instigated "failure weeks" in some of its schools because they think girls have become too risk-averse, obedient or unhelpfully modest.

Who knows? It could turn out that some of those 18-year-old young men who have decided not to continue into the rather depressing world of modern higher education could be making a bold decision to get going in the jobs market. Let the good girls sit in overcrowded lecture halls – with their heads down.