Gender Disparities in High Achievement: The Gender Composition of High-Achieving Elementary and Middle School Students

• In Event: 47.021 - Gender Inequality in Achievement, Self-Efficacy, and Classroom Interactions in U.S. Education

Abstract

In the U.S., men disproportionately hold leadership roles in political offices, in businesses, and in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields (Noonan, 2017; Women and Leadership: Public Says Women are Equally Qualified, but Barriers Persist, 2015). Prior research postulates that gender disparities among high achieving students – those who are strong candidates for these high-prestige career paths – may contribute to these labor market gender inequalities (e.g., Penner & Paret, 2008; Robinson & Lubienski, 2011). But, they may also be shaped by labor market inequalities through the availability of role-models or norms about gendered participation in these fields.
In this paper, I build on prior research that explores gender disparities in high achievement at the state and national levels (e.g., Fryer & Levitt, 2010; Husain & Millimet, 2009; Lindberg, Hyde, Petersen, & Linn, 2010; Penner & Paret, 2008; Pope & Sydnor, 2010; Robinson & Lubienski, 2011) by conducting the first systematic study within U.S. school districts. I have two primary goals: (1) to describe the gender composition of high achieving students in U.S. districts; and, (2) to determine whether local labor market gender inequalities are associated with the gender composition of high achieving students.
Using state accountability test data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (Reardon et al., 2018), I estimate the relative proportion of female students in 9,652 U.S. school districts who score among the top ten percent of students within each state, subject (math and reading), grade (third through eighth) and year (2008-09 through 2014-15). I use this data, in conjunction with data from the Common Core of Data and the American Community Survey, to study the relationship between the gender composition of high achieving students and local socioeconomic and occupational gender disparities. All analyses are conducted using precision-weighted hierarchical linear models.
I find that, in the average district, high achieving math students are disproportionately male and high achieving reading students are disproportionately female, similar to prior work at the national level (e.g., Robinson and Lubienski, 2011). But, there is significant between-district variation: the gender composition of high achievers tends to favor male students more in some districts and female students more in others relative to the average district (Figure 1.1). Interestingly, there are a small number of districts that have equal proportions of high achieving male and female students in both subjects, but they tend to serve few high achieving students.
With regard to occupational disparities, I find that male students tend to be more equally represented among high achievers in reading in communities with more adults employed in business and science occupations, as well as in districts with larger male-female disparities in business occupations (Figure 1.2; Table 1.1). This is consistent with hypotheses that male students may have better academic role models or that negative female-academic stereotypes may be more pervasive in these types of communities. Notably, however, much of the between-district variance is unexplained by these factors, indicating that local labor market inequalities may not be strongly connected to gender disparities in high achievement.  

Author

• Erin Michelle Fahle, St. John's University