We find no real relationship between parental input and girls' achievement. It's kind of like they are protected, in a sense. The parental input just becomes more relevant for the boys than for the girls."
The findings were in no way intended to stigmatise single parents, she stressed. "It's obviously a much more complicated picture. The only thing we're trying to say – and we're not the first ones to make this point – is that these families are very different in how much time they spend with their children, maybe because they have to spend more time at work. They don't have to be malign reasons.
"But we're not really going down that path. We're documenting this fact, which is already fairly well accepted, and saying that, because this input matters so differentially for boys and girls, boys do particularly poorly in these families."


