The Role of Social Status in Status Derivation

I wonder how much of this is about social status that we've got for the different sexes and what will give us status. As a kid myself, I didn't want to do well in exams because it was seen as like, you know, overly prudent or whatever. The girls I knew seem to base their entire identity around how well they did in exams and things. If they failed it was like a failure of identity so it was just everything on the line. So there may be like an element of status involved as well - especially if you don't have anything to counteract that.