The declining ability of many boys and men to compete at school and in the workplace has become both a social and a political issue.
David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., writing with four colleagues, has delved into this loaded terrain to analyze elementary school data and found:
While realized gender gaps in adult educational outcomes are large, a wrinkle in the examination of the precursor childhood gender gaps is that these differences appear on average to be relatively modest.
For example, recent work documents that among U.S. eighth-grade students during the early to mid-2000s, boys and girls exhibited modest differences in their mean test scores, with boys maintaining a small advantage in math and girls maintaining a more robust advantage in reading. In behavioral outcomes, where boys have long experienced a higher incidence of disciplinary problems than girls, the average female-favorable gap is larger but still modest. In the Florida public school system that we study here, the gender gap in school absences is a mere 0.45 percentage points, with the average boy and girl both attending more than 94 percent of school days.
Modest average differences among grade school students can be amplified with the onset of puberty, producing significant differences in high school graduation rates (89 percent for girls, 83 percent for boys in 2021), not to mention gaps in college attendance (57.9 percent female, 42.1 percent male) and college graduation rates (66 percent for women, 58 percent for men).
Autor, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth and Melanie Wasserman noted that the explanation lies in the disproportionate share of boys ranked at or near the bottom on measures of academic performance and behavior — what statisticians call the left tail or lower tail of the distribution.
“Female-favorable gaps in behavioral and academic outcomes during childhood — where present — stem largely from the overrepresentation of boys in the lower tails of the academic and behavioral outcome distributions,” the authors wrote.
Getting low scores is, in turn,
highly predictive of subsequent high school dropout. High school dropouts are drawn disproportionately from the lower tails of the test score and attendance distributions. Children at the 10th percentile of the math and reading score distributions are almost four times as likely to leave high school without a degree as those at the 90th percentile. Poor attendance in school is even more predictive: the dropout ratio among 10th percentile attendees exceeds that of 90th percentile attendees by a factor of six.
Why do boys disproportionately fall into the bottom tenth?
Fascinatingly, Autor and his colleagues found that boys suffered much more than girls from “adverse child-rearing conditions” and “that less favorable home environments differentially raise the prevalence of adverse outcomes among boys relative to girls.”
The consequences?
“Because these adverse outcomes are determinative of high school dropout rates,” they wrote, “this differential sensitivity could help explain the large gender gap in dropping out.”
