Does being the minority gender affect learning/participation?

Given that these past couple weeks I've been in the category of people Anny mentioned who "don't have time to eat," this will be a rather short entry. I've decided to look into the topic of how being in the minority versus the majority in terms of gender affects how students learn, specifically in the 8th grade Spanish class I observe twice a week as well as in general.

In regards to the specific aspect, the first two hours of the class I observe have a first hour with 4 more boys than girls, and a second hour with 3 more girls than boys. These will be useful, and from my first observations at least, it appears that my idea that those in the majority form a "tyranny of the majority," and disproportionately participate in class. I'm especially interested in getting to observe my field placement teacher's sixth hour, however, which is composed of 20 girls, and only 9 boys. This observation of participation will hopefully be coupled by examining the grades of those in the majority vs. the minority, as well as possibly interviewing a few students to get their feelings about class participation.

As to the general approach, I've read several articles reviewing books over the years loosely tied to the subject that I've meant to check out, but have never had the time to (including and especially during the past two weeks). I'm thinking specifically of books examining gender bias in primary education, how it is geared toward girls' learning styles and has systematically left boys behind during the past few decades. This would certainly help explain why the entering class of college freshman now contains significantly more women than men in many large universities, which is a statistic I read somewhere that I also will dig up and post. I'm also interested, knowing several women who either are currently or were originally in undergraduate engineering programs, at looking at how women perform in math and science classes, this being spurred in part from the former dean of Harvard's comments two years ago to the effect of "women's brains are different from men, and are more likely to have an aptitude for languages and the humanities and not do well in math and the sciences." Given that I know only a quarter of the undergraduate engineers in U-M are women, this is something I want to read about that I'm sure other people have been looking into as well.