This paper comes from a review of 71 Brazilian Master and Doctoral dissertations on gender differences in school achievement produced from 1993 to 2007 and focus on 21 studies selected by their special contributions. These are predominantly qualitative researches about public elementary schools from different regions of the country, covering urban and rural areas. It is possible to conclude that there is some homogeneity in Brazilian school culture, especially among teachers, who reinforce differences in discipline between girls and boys and attribute these differences to family socialization. Studies that consider children' speech and middle-class families are rare. From a theoretical point of view only a few researches work simultaneously with gender and other social conditions and there is a lack of more complex understanding of the concept of gender.
gender; school achievement; review