Black-white differences in adolescent girls’ gender typicality and academic performance

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2) Education, Socialization, and Academic Pathways

Abstract

Research on gender gaps in K–12 achievement shows boys underperform girls (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). Recent work models “gender typicality” as the predicted probability of a respondent’s sex from survey behaviors (Yavorsky & Buchmann, 2019; Mittleman, 2022), linking typicality to lower GPA for boys and somewhat mixed patterns for girls. Here, I specifically focus on adolescent girls, and disaggregate by race. I build a LASSO-based gender classifier in Add Health (Wave I) and link it to transcript-based GPA (AHAA). After excluding overtly gendered survey items, cross-validated lasso selects 72 predictors in the public subsample (N=6,503), from which I compute gender-typicality scores. Preliminary densities show white girls cluster at very high typicality (≥0.8), while Black girls’ distribution is less concentrated. I plan to estimate race-specific associations between GPA and typicality for Black and white girls and examine which predictors drive distributional gaps, situating findings alongside Strong Black Woman schema hypotheses. Additionally, I may also calculate gender typicality for Asian adolescent girls, as well as race differences in gender typicality and its association with GPA for adolescent boys. I believe that both of these additions would provide compelling fodder for comparison, and expand insights on race as a component of gender socialization.

Author

• Vanessa Ntungwanayo, Princeton University