Gender, Social Class and Educational Achievement. Explaining Gender Gaps in Primary School from an Intersectional Approach

PISA reports show that gender gaps in mathematics and reading performance persist (OECD, 2023), even despite trends towards the reversal of most gender gaps in educational attainment. Gender gaps in educational performance have long-term effects, with impacts on educational choices, gender segregation in labour markets and gender pay gaps (Kriesi & Imdorf, 2019). The gender stratification hypothesis posits that gender equality in society establishes an opportunity structure for girls to perform better and follow traditionally ‘masculine’ educational trajectories (Baker & Jones, 1993). The gender-equality paradox points, however, in a quite different direction (Stoet & Geary, 2018). We advocate an intersectional approach seeking to understand the interplay between gender and social class in the formation of gender gaps in different socio-cultural contexts.

We use an aggregated database of nearly 700,000 4th-grade students from 65 countries between 2011 and 2019 (plus soon to be released 2023 data), taken from the latest TIMSS assessments. Through multilevel structural equation modelling we address how socioeconomic status (SES) -as a composite proxy variable for social class- moderates the gender effect on achievement at the student level, and how socioeconomic development mediates the relationship between societal gender equality and gender gaps in mathematics.

Gender interacts with SES at different levels, with higher-SES boys increasing their advantage over girls, while lower-SES girls tend to match or outperform their male peers. At the country level, globally, the apparent inverse relationship between societal gender equality and girls' performance in mathematics vanishes, and in more developed countries becomes strongly positive, when we control for the average SES of the country. But there are still large variations in the magnitude of gender gaps in different contexts. We argue for the need to develop explanations that can be tailored to specific socio-cultural contexts by accounting for the intersection of different axes of inequality.