Relationships between gender gap in academic performance and measures of gender equality: Evidence from Chile

• In Event: Gender Inequality and Education: Case Studies from Chile and Colombia

Proposal

Globally, gender gaps have been identified throughout people's lives. At the educational level, typically gaps favor women in areas associated with communication and men in areas related to mathematics. Differences in gender equality in professional trajectories, labor insertion, remunerations and political participation are considered to be an explanation of these gaps.
In this regard, a study by Stoet and Geary in 2014 concludes that gender differences in PISA academic performance are not related to political, economic and social equity, which contravenes a series of theorizations and research that demonstrate the influence of social context in academic and economic performance differentiated by sex. In this paper, we aim to investigate if municipal gender equity indicators are related to gender differences in academic performance in Chile.
This study combines the analysis of data from the Chilean SIMCE test (Sistema Nacional de Evaluación de Resultados de Aprendizaje or National System of Evaluation of Learning Outcomes) taken by fourth graders between 2011 and 2015 and equality data from a number of reliable national institutions, such as the Department of Statistics and Information (DEIS), Ministry of Social Development and the United Nations Development Program (PNUD).
The SIMCE data was collected from the study center of MINEDUC (Ministerio de educación de chile or Ministry of Education of Chile). Years 2011 to 2015 were analyzed in order to identify fourth graders gender gap in mathematics and language. Further, municipal SIMCE average scores were calculated in order to determine the municipal gender gap.
Equality data from different previously mentioned sources were used in order to replicate the Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) published annually by the World Economic Forum in the Global Gender Gap Report (Hausmann, 2010). This index considers four specific variables (subindexes): Economic Participation and Opportunity, educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment and it’s generally calculated at a national level. Particularly in this study, we replicate the GGI at the municipal level.
Two other variables were considered in the analysis in order to further study their relationship to SIMCE gender gap, municipal rurality index and parents’ expectations. Pearson correlations are used to analyze relations between sex differences on the SIMCE and municipal equality scores. 324 Chilean municipalities were included in the analysis. More than 250.000 fourth grades take the SIMCE test every year.
Results show that SIMCE gender gaps correlate minimally with the constructed equity indicators. Language gender gap at the municipal level shows a positive and significant correlation, however this is a very small correlation r(324) =.145, p=.009. Further, this analysis shows that the prediction of greater gender equality leading to smaller sex differences in mathematics achievement was not supported, correlation values are small and not significant r(324) =-.057, p=.305.
When municipal level of rurality it’s analyzed, both mathematics and language sex difference outcomes show small but significant correlations, r(324) =-.278, p=.000; r(324) =.280, p=.000 respectively. Municipalities with higher rurality index show lower mathematics gap in SIMCE test and higher language gap.
Finally, parents’ expectations for fourth graders female students correlate negatively with language gender gap r(324) =-0.187, p=.001. Municipalities where parents’ expectations are higher for female students show lower language gap in SIMCE.
Our main findings suggest that there was no reliable relation between gender equality measures and sex differences in mathematics or language achievement. Although municipal rurality indexes and parents’ expectations differences could somehow explain gender gap in SIMCE tests, there are a number of other factor that are not being measured by the Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) used in this paper. For instance, differences between teachers attitude toward female and male students in the classroom. Future research should aim to study how these factors are related to sex differences in SIMCE achievement.

References:
Hausmann, R. T. (2010). Global gender gap report. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum.
Stoet, G. & Geary, DC. (2014). Sex differences in academic achievement are not related to political, economic, or social equality. Intelligence, (48), 137-151.
Zentner, M. &. (2012). Stepping out of the caveman's shadow: Nation's gender gap predicts degree of sex differentiation in mate preferences. Psychological Science, 1176-1185.

Authors

• Karina Gabriela Diaz Yanez, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Javiera Ravest, Universidad de Chile