Belonging interventions can have a startlingly large impact this kind of failure mode.
Instilling "college is hard for people - they work hard, get help, and succeed" reframes difficulty from "I guess I don't belong here", affecting outcomes at scale. http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494...
Two Brief Interventions to Mitigate a “Chilly Climate” Transform Women’s Experience, Relationships, and Achievement in Engineering http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494... is interesting - two different ways of improving outcomes, with very different secondary effects.
The many questions of belonging. (2017, book chapter) http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494...
More on http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/research.html and http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/papers.html .
The second study only look at half the population, only during the first year of college, and the result they measure were GPA. Those are severe limitations if we are looking for a general solution to a problem that both genders suffer from. That said, social-belonging intervention in education seems useful in particular since bullying is still a major issue at all levels of education, and stress management also seems useful in a place where stress is creeping down the ages.
Thanks for the book. The summery was in particular a good read, highlighting both success and failures in prescribed solutions. If there is a one failure mode of physiological experiments that often seems ignored, it is the effect of false hope and empty charades. The recentness of the cited references implies there is a lot of more work to be done in the field in finding general solutions.
I can think of two major obstacles towards that. First, boys from average age of 15 enter a society where their attractiveness and social status is directly correlated to how much wealth they have. As such there is a strong incentive towards getting a job as early as possible or focusing studying towards specific high paying professions like tech. In order to girls to get the same incentive society would need to put similar pressure on them or stop putting the pressure on men to get wealth.
The second obstacles is a gender neutral phenomenon that I have seen several studies reflect on. When a student fail a exam at a university level, the risk that they will switch program is several time higher if their gender is a minority in their class. This factor also don't seem to go away as they advances in the course, but rather seems to grow stronger. One study also included data from when the graduates enter the work force (which share similar gender segregation), and based on the data they speculated that the first few years has the exact same effect, and the phenomenon only seems to go away after people been in the profession for many years.
I don't know a good solution to either of those, and for what I know, there isn't that much research into it.