WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new study shows that girls outperform boys academically in math, reading and science, even in countries in which females are restricted socially.

The findings, recently published in the academic journal Intelligence, comes from analyzing the grades of 1.5 million 15-year-olds from countries around the world between 2000 and 2010, and defy common belief that boys excel in those subjects, WTXF reports.

David Geary, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, said “even in countries where women’s liberties are severely restricted, we found that girls are outperforming boys in reading, mathematics and science literacy by age 15, regardless of political, economic, social or gender equality issues and policies found in those countries.”

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Geary teamed with University of Glasgow professor Gijsbert Stoet in the study with the aim of understanding how gender equality plays into education, and looking at ways to close achievement gaps among students.

In 70 percent of the countries examined, girls excelled over boys in general, but it was the other way around in three countries or regions: Columbia, Costa Rica and the Indian state, Himachal Pradesh.

Educational achievement was about equal for boys and girls in England and the United States, according to Science Daily.

“In countries known for relatively low gender equality ratings, such as Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the educational achievement gap is relatively large and favors girls,” Science Daily reports.

Another exception to girls outperforming boys was evident in high achieving students in developed countries. Worldwide, high achieving boys outpaced high achieving girls, according to researchers.

“With the exception of high-achievers, boys have poorer educational outcomes than girls around the world, independent of social equality indicators,” Stoet said.

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“Results show that a commitment to gender equality on its own is not enough to close the achievement gaps in global education; the gap is not increasing,” he said. “Although it is vital that we promote gender equality in schools, we also need to make sure that we’re doing more to understand why these gaps, especially among boys, persist and what other policies we can develop to close them.”

Geary told The Huffington Post the study reveals “an important problem and a worldwide problem and potentially has some serious implications.

“It just hasn’t been addressed and is not even on people’s radar to even figure out why this is the case,” he said.

Geary said the issue is important because, outside of high achieving students, boys aren’t doing very well, which could be bad news that can lead to “a lot of boys who are going to become young adults with few employable skills,” according to The Huffington Post.

“If you have countries with a large percentage of these types of men, crime rates go up,” including violent crime, he said.

“All the debate and fretting over STEM stuff, where boys go into STEM fields and do better in math, that’s all at the upper end of achievement,” Geary told the news site.

“But there’s a whole lot of other kids in the world that are never going into STEM fields. When you look at all of those other 95 percent of the world’s kids, we see boys falling behind girls pretty much everywhere.”