The gap in gender gapping

The gap in gender gapping

When asking whether boys and girls are equally prepared for life [1], the OECD compared boys’ and girls’ math and reading scores across nations and achievement levels. They find, as most of us would expect, that boys outperform girls in math and girls outperform boys in reading. But the story doesn’t end there. They also find that there is no gender gap in math among lowest performing boys and girls, with the disparity concentrated at the top achievers, while the 10% worst readers amongst girls outperform the 10% worst readers amongst boys by more than twice as much as the 10% boys best in math outperform the 10% girls best in math. In other words, not only the gender gap in reading is much wider on average, but also it’s widest where it’s most problematic. And yet, when evaluating whether boys and girls are equally prepared for life, the OECD spends the rest of their article speaking only about the gap in math (while arguably more often than not most of us who are not Physicists, Mathematicians or Engineers, invest far more of our time reading than doing math). To get a sense of this, simply search their document for the words ‘reading’ and ‘mathematic’, and find them mention the latter eight times more than the former.

[1] OECD, “Are boys and girls equally prepared for life?”, 2014.