Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/145187 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 10053
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Gender differences in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines are widespread in most OECD countries and mathematics is the only subject where typically girls tend to underperform with respect to boys. This paper describes the gender gap in math test scores in Italy, which is one of the countries displaying the largest differential between boys and girls according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we use data from an Italian national level learning assessment, involving children in selected grades from second to tenth. We first analyse the magnitude of the gender gap using OLS regression and school fixed-effect models for each grade separately. Our results show that girls systematically underperform boys, even after controlling for an array of individual and family background characteristics, and that the average gap increases with children's age. We then study the gender gap throughout the test scores distribution, using quantile regression and metric-free methods, and find that the differential is small at the lowest percentiles of the grade distribution, but large among top performing children. Finally, we estimate dynamic models relating math performance at two consecutive assessments. Lacking longitudinal data, we use a pseudo panel technique and find that girls' average test scores are consistently lower than those of boys at all school years, even conditional on previous scores.
Subjects: 
math gender gap
education
school achievement
inequalities
cross-sectional data
pseudo panel estimation
quantile regression
JEL: 
J16
I24
C31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
245.93 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.