I find the worst problem is when an atractive girl is the student then the technical stuff gets totaly forgotten when you add the fact that the girl probably has very little mechanical background to start with then you are on to an uphill strugle.
this normaly means that i have to take these people to the engineering hangar as an "iron drawing" is worth a thousand words and the engineers tea is the best on the airfield.
What i have found is that once the average girl student gets a grip on the technical stuff then there is a real effort made to get into every last detail.
the best example of this was when an examiner asked a student that i had been teaching "what controls the alternator ?" expecting the answer to be "one side of the red master switch" but no she went on to give him a lecture on DC voltage control !.