Gender Gaps in Mathematics: The moderating role of Gender Equality and Socioeconomic Context

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 15: Labor Markets and Mobility

Abstract

Research question. Despite knowing that gender gaps in performance emerge in the early years of primary school, most research on educational inequalities has focused on PISA data with 15-year-old students. We need to understand these inequalities at their roots in order to propose effective policies and practices to address them at the earliest possible stage. Therefore, this research aims to examine how gender inequalities occur in primary school outcomes, focusing on 4th-grade students in Europe. Theoretical framework. We aim to shed light on the apparent contradiction between the gender stratification hypothesis (Baker & Jones, 1993) and the gender equality paradox (Stoet & Geary, 2018), by drawing on a dialogue between resistance theories and rational action models to explain gender inequalities in primary school through the proposed concept of perceived opportunities. Data and Methods. Data come from the international educational assessment TIMSS (2011–2023), with a pooled sample of 1,153,052 students in 4th grade worldwide. To better isolate the potential drivers of gender gaps, we focus our analysis on the narrower European context (N = 581,685), using multilevel models to identify the moderators of these gaps, as well as their variation between countries and across years. Findings. Preliminary results show persistent gender gaps in mathematics over the last decade, of small average magnitude, although with high variability between countries, tending to narrow in countries with greater societal gender equality, closing in the Nordic countries and widening in the Mediterranean context. We discuss how gender intersects with the socioeconomic context in emerging achievement gaps during primary school. Contribution. The results of this research contribute to improving our understanding of how the expansion of opportunities and their distribution by gender shapes performance inequalities between girls and boys, which is key to designing effective educational policies and practices to ensure equality of educational opportunities.

Author

• Daniel Bianchi, Universidad de La Laguna