The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior

Abstract

This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment -boys do especially poorly in broken families. In contrast, we find little impact of the early school environment on non-cognitive gaps. Differences in endowments explain a small part of boys' non-cognitive deficit in single-mother families. More importantly, non-cognitive returns to parental inputs differ markedly by gender. Broken families are associated with worse parental inputs and boys' non-cognitive development, unlike girls', appears extremely responsive to such inputs. Marianne IntroductionThere has been a recent wave of interest in the role that non-cognitive skills might play in explaining educational achievement, labor market success and other significant life outcomes. Jencks et al (1979) were among the first to document that factors such as study habits, 2 In summary, the evidence in Table 1 supports the view that non-cognitive deficiencies, to the extent that they are adequately proxied for by school suspension, are important drivers of future educational outcomes.But what determines non-cognitive skills? A large and growing body of research has already highlighted one important determinant of behavioral and socio-emotional development: gender.Boys are known to perform worse than girls on many non-cognitive dimensions. Boys have welldocumented attention and behavioral difficulties (Beamen et al., 2006; Entwisle et al., 2007; Gilliam, 2005;Ready et al, 2005) and are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (see for example Szatmari, 1989). In a meta-analysis of the psychology literature on gender differences in temperament, Else-Quest et al (2006) gender gap in college attendance that currently exists in the US and many other developed countries might be best explained by gender differences in non-cognitive skills. In support of this claim, Jacob (2002) shows that controlling for the greater incidence of school disciplinary and behavioral problems among boys explains a substantial share of the female advantage in college enrollment.3

Gender gaps in the effects of childhood family environment: Do they persist into adulthood?

“…If the skill development of boys is affected more by father absence or family disadvantage than the skill development of girls, then changes in the living arrangements of children over time may play a role in the growing education gender gap. Bertrand and Pan (2013) provide supportive empirical evidence, showing that living with a single mother or a young mother has a much larger effect on externalizing behavior and school suspensions for boys than for girls. They interpret the negative behavioral impact of father absence and young mothers as evidence that the non-cognitive skills development of boys is particularly sensitive to family disadvantage.…”

“…Family disadvantage is strongly negatively associated with early social and behavioral skills for both boys and girls, and it has been suggested that trends in family structure, and in particular the increasing prevalence of single parent families, may have a particularly deleterious effect on the skill development of boys (Bertrand and Pan, 2013;Autor and Wasserman, 2013). If exposure to father absence, povery, or poor neighborhoods harm boys more than girls, then changes in the living arrangements of children over time may explain part of the growing gender gap in educational attainment.…”

The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

“…Due to differences in labor force participation and educational attainment trends across genders, as well as the fact that boys are more affected by adverse events and environmental factors than girls (Bertrand and Pan 2013;Autor et al 2016), examining the effect of teacher collective bargaining by gender is instructive. We first focus on estimates among men: Panel A of Table 7 shows estimates of equation (1) The labor force effects are similarly larger for men.…”

Compressing instruction time into fewer years of schooling and the impact on student performance

“…Cahill, 2006), differences in socialisation (see e.g. Bertrand & Pan, 2013) or differences in personality and non-cognitive skills (see e.g. Spinath, 2014) may also cause a differential impact of the G8-reform on girls and boys, because they may differ in their capacity to concentrate on longer school days or to organise their activities within the tighter time schedule, for example.…”