The highly gifted program in my district is almost 2/3 boys. I actually looked up data on this subject a year or two ago and found that above a certain IQ level on the CogAT (the test our district uses to identify), boys with very high scores far outnumber girls on certain sections, especially the quantitative section. Our district requires 98th percentile or above. They don't care much about non-verbal, but they want a high quanititative and verbal. So a lot of girls are going to get crossed off the list for the highly gifted program, even if their achievement scores are really high. In fact the data from our district showed that the girls achievement data and grades are higher than the boys, but it's the boys who are more likely to be id'ed as gifted and given specialized instruction.
I don't know why those with very high scores on the CogAt quant and non-verbal sections are more likely to be boys but I'm surprised that no one has made a fuss about this in terms of gifted selection programs and how widely the test is used. A lot of districts eliminate people for services based on one piece of data like the CogAT.
