It’s A-Level results day, so where are all the clever boys?

So the day of reckoning has finally arrived: the day which thousands of hopeful A-level students have waited for with trembling anticipation. Facebook has been flooded with UCAS screenshots, celebratory cocktail pics and much-deserved praise from friends and family alike, but if you checked a newspaper you’d be forgiven for thinking the only people getting any good news today were girls.

Have the boys been less successful than the girls I wonder? Regardless of their whereabouts, the lack of pictures of any of them jumping in the air or hugging mum in tears is concerning to say the least.

This should only be OK if it’s an all-girls school

We already know there are thousands of clever guys out there (I think). The Tab recently reported how one student who turned down a scholarship at Eton was offered an unconditional place at Harvard University, which is impressive to say the least. But apart from him, the lack of boys is starting to really concern me. Not only do I seem to have no hope of finding an intelligent, fresher toy-boy, any SU events this year are going to suffer from a chilling lack of the opposite sex. How’s a night out meant to be fun if you can’t pull a fresher?

The best chance any one seems to have had today of catching a glimpse of boys getting their results has been The Telegraph, and even they just included them in the background rather than giving them a close-up. It was also quite hard to see them past all the girls in the foreground. Presumably the pictures were an attempt to make some sort of artistic statement, we’ll never know.

It probably didn’t help that so many boys just weren’t ready for a photo session when they turned up at school today. One boy was considered well-dressed enough to get a feature in The Independent but unfortunately half of his face was sliced off. Bet he’s wishing he’d just opted for taking selfies instead.

As ridiculous as this lament about a lack of grinning boys might seem, there is potentially something more sinister happening than newspaper editors preferring pictures of attractive girls. The Guardian reported there is a “worrying” gender gap, with 27,000 more young women going to university than boys this year. So maybe the clever boys really have gone. It’s that or they’re camera shy. I guess the only way to tell is to head down to the SU in freshers week and hope for the best.