Abstract Fifteen years ago attention was drawn to the neglect of sex differences in the sociology of education, and to ways in which social class differences in attainment could not ignore these sex differences. The original propositions concerning these differences are re‐examined and expanded in a neo‐Weberian analysis of the work‐marriage, class‐status, education complex, and considered in relation to the available empirical evidence. The alternative feminist‐Marxist approaches are found to be incompatible with the evidence of sex and social class differences in non‐capitalist societies.