Why are girls outperforming boys in literacy skills in the Western education system today‎?‎ To date‎,‎ there have been few attempts to answer this question‎.‎ Literacy and Gender sets out to redress this state of affairs by re‎-examining the social organization of literacy in primary schools‎.‎ In studying schooling as a social process‎,‎ this book focuses on the links between literacy‎,‎ gender and attainment‎,‎ the role school plays in producing social difference and the changing pattern of interest in this topic both within the feminist community and beyond‎.‎ Gemma Moss argues that the reason for girls‎'‎ relative success in literacy lies in the structure of schooling and in particular the role the reading curriculum plays in constructing a hierarchy of learners in class‎.‎ Using fine‎-grained ethnographic analysis of reading in context‎,‎ this book outlines methods for researching literacy as a social practice and understanding how different versions of what counts as literacy can be created in the same site‎.‎