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Notes -
To give an example of some of the stuff @TitaniumButterfly is talking about, here's the way the tertiary entrance rank worked in Victoria (where I live) when I was in year 12 (back in the oughties!).
You do four or more subjects, and get a score of 0-50 for each. Languages other than English (LotEs) get a +5 to their score; uni-level subjects get a +5 to their score. Then you add up your top four subjects' scores, and add on 10% of your fifth- and sixth-highest scores. So far, so good.
Except that English is required to be counted as one of your best four, and LotEs can count as one of the top four (and you can do more than one, for a theoretical maximum of +16) while uni-level subjects can't (and you can only do one of them, for a theoretical maximum of +0.5).
Guess what sex does better at English and other languages (my score for English was 15 points lower than the worst of my other six subjects*). Guess what sex is more likely to be doing uni-level science in year 12 (I'd have done two - physics and maths - if I could). Girls' best subjects are prioritised over boys' when calculating the TER, which means yes, you will wind up with more girls than boys qualifying for competitive uni positions, including science courses which have nothing to do with year 12 English (i.e. writing essays about Hamlet or the linguistic differences of Aboriginal English) or LotEs. This is not meritocracy - not, at least, when talking about sex disparities.
*Actually, I'm like 70-80% sure that I failed English outright (which doesn't count as a score at all, and means you can't graduate), but my English teacher fudged the paperwork. Not that it wasn't justified after the complete trainwreck my life was at that point, but this demonstrates even further how wide the gulf was between that and my other subjects.
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