How new gender gaps are opening up in education

Despite much progress reducing inequalities over the past century, new gender gaps in education are opening up, researchers said on Thursday after a wide-ranging study.

Boys are more likely to underperform academically than girls, but girls are more likely to be held back by low self-confidence, especially in mathematics and science, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study showed.

“As the evidence in the report makes clear, gender disparities in performance do not stem from innate differences in aptitude,” Angel Gurría, head of the Paris-based OECD, said in a statement. He attributed gender differences to differing attitudes, behaviour and confidence.

The study looked at test scores in reading, mathematics and science attained by 15-year-olds in various countries. It found that 14 percent of boys did not achieve the baseline level of proficiency in any of the subjects, compared with 9 percent of girls.

On average, boys spend less time than girls reading and doing homework, and more time playing video games, the report said, adding “reading proficiency is the foundation upon which all other learning is built; when boys don’t read well, their performance in other school subjects suffers too.”

However, the research suggests this gap in reading proficiency narrows over time, with no significant differences between the sexes among 16-29 year-olds.

“As boys mature and become young men, they also acquire, at work and through life experience, some of the reading skills that they hadn’t acquired at school,” the report said.

Among high-performing students in most of the countries studied, girls do worse than boys at mathematics. “In general, girls have less self-confidence than boys in their ability to solve mathematics or science problems,” the study found.

But it added that girls who report similar levels of confidence as boys do just as well as them.

These gaps in mathematical attainment are not apparent in the top-performing education systems studied, where girls do better in mathematics than boys in most other countries. Top performers include Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Taiwan.

As for reading proficiency, boys in the best performing education systems outperform girls in other systems. “These results strongly suggest that gender gaps in school performances are not determined by innate differences in ability,” the report said.

This article is published in collaboration with the Thomson Reuters Foundation trust.org. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Joseph D’Urso is an intern at the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Image: Syrian refugee children attend a class at their camp in Amman December 23, 2013. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed.