Educational gender gaps

Abstract

Crosscountry studies reveal two consistent gender gaps in education-underachievement in school by boys and low rates of participation in STEM studies by girls. Recent economics research has shown the importance of social influences on women's STEM avoidance, but male low achievement has been less-studied and tends to be attributed to behavior problems and deficient noncognitive skills. I revisit the determinants of the gender gap in U.S. educational attainment with a relativelyadvantaged sample of young men and women and find that school behavior and measured skills are not very important drivers of gender differences, particularly in the transition to college. Educational aspirations, on the other hand, are strongly predictive of educational gaps and the gender difference in aspirations cannot be explained, even with rich adolescent data that includes parental expectations and school achievement indicators. These results suggest that gender identity concerns may influence (and damage) the educational prospects of boys as well as girls through norms of masculinity that discourage academic achievement.

Gender and Educational Achievement: Stylized Facts and Causal Evidence

“…Fortin et al (2015) show that, in US high schools, greater educational expectations (such as plans to acquire a graduate degree in law or medicine) have important explanatory power for the higher GPAs achieved by girls. Using survey data from the U.S., Lundberg (2020) finds that boys are much less likely to report a desire to pursue higher education and aspirations are much better predictors of educational achievement than behaviours. She concludes that "gender identity concerns may influence (and damage) the educational prospects of boys as well as girls through norms of masculinity that discourage academic achievement.…”

Who Gains from Class Size Reduction? Another Look at Malaysia’s “Lost Boys Phenomenon” in Student Achievement

“…The answer may lie outside schools into family and community factors. Therefore it is suggested by some that the focus must shift to attitudinal and aspirational gender gap (Khattab 2015;Lundberg 2020;Sarker et al 2017;Wang & Calvano 2022). Evidence on gender gap in education in Asia perspective such as a topic raise by Asadullah et al (2020) for Vietnam and Singapore study should be conducted further for comparison purposes in Asia education context and eventually help in moving Asian countries towards the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4): quality education.…”

First Generation Elite: The Role of School Networks

“…Second, elite peers and their families could a↵ect university application behaviour conditional on GPA, e.g. by raising aspirations and providing information on access and returns to these routes (Lundberg 2020;Porter and Serra 2020;Mani and Riley 2019;Michelman, Price and Zimmerman 2022).…”