Here’s Richard Posner being unusually blunt and insightful even for him:

From the standpoint of most teachers, right up to and including the level of teachers of college undergraduates, the ideal student is well behaved, unaggressive, docile, patient, meticulous, and empathetic in the sense of intuiting the response to the teacher that is most likely to please the teacher. Those are traits less characteristic of boys than of girls.

I think I’ll be quoting this passage in my book on education (currently second in line after this).