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 that:
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” 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 write.
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 write, “this differential sensitivity could help explain the large gender gap in dropping out.”
In order to test the strength of adverse family conditions on boys and girls, the five scholars analyzed
Florida birth records for years 1992-2000, matched to public school test score and disciplinary outcomes, to assess the effect of childhood environmental influences — family, neighborhoods, and schools — on the gender gap throughout the distribution of behavioral, academic, and high school attainment outcomes.
What were the findings?
First, we show that the differential adverse effects of family disadvantage for boys appear to be concentrated in precisely the parts of the distribution where the gender gaps are most pronounced. These relationships are evident from unconditional quantile regressions, and they are robust to including detailed controls for confounding factors.
Second, by extrapolating the effects of family environment on the gender gap in grade school behavioral and academic outcomes to high school dropout and on-time graduation decisions, we show that a substantial fraction of the gender gap in high school outcomes can be explained by the differential effect of family SES (socioeconomic status) on boys’ medium-run outcomes.
The differential effect is striking:
For the lowest decile of the behavioral and academic outcome distributions, a one standard deviation increase in family SES — equivalent to the difference between a family with a married high school graduate mother and a family with an unmarried high school dropout mother — would eliminate over 40 percent of the decile-specific gender gap in high school dropout.
In conclusion, the authors write:
We document and analyze two patterns that in part explain why modest mean gaps between boys and girls in early academic and behavioral outcomes translate into large differences in educational attainment: first, female-favorable gaps in childhood behavioral and academic outcomes are driven primarily by a preponderance of boys at the lower tails of the respective outcome; and, second, conditional on these outcomes, there is only a small remaining gender gap in high school dropout.
We find that family disadvantage differentially reduces the outcomes of boys at low quintiles, thus expanding the gender gap at the tails of the distribution. These tail differences translate into substantial gender gaps in the likelihood of high school noncompletion.
The analysis by Autor and his collaborators fits into a growing body of research on the plight of males in academia and the workplace. Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has led the charge with his book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It.”
The Autor paper focused on the gender difficulties males in the bottom quintile and decile experience. A different story emerges when looking at the gender make up of those who score at or near the top — the right tail.
Two economists, Glenn Ellison of M.I.T. and Ashley Swanson of the University of Wisconsin, report in their 2010 paper, “The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels,” that
The gender gap on math tests among high-achieving students is consistently much larger. For example, there is a 2.1 to 1 male–female ratio among students scoring 800 on the math SAT, and a ratio of at least 1.6 to 1 among students scoring in the 99th percentile on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test.
The most striking finding, Ellison and Swanson write, “is that the gender gap appears to widen substantially at percentiles beyond the 99th: at the very high end of our data, the male–female ratio exceeds 10 to 1.”
In a separate 2010 paper, “Sex Differences in the Right Tail of Cognitive Abilities: A 30 Year Examination,” Jonathan Wai, Megan Cacchio, Martha Putallaz and Matthew C. Makel examine:
male–female ability ratios from over 1.6 million 7th grade students in the right tail (top 5 percent in ability) across 30 years (1981–2010) using multiple measures of math, verbal, and writing ability and science reasoning from the SAT and ACT.
They discovered that:
Male–female ratios in mathematical reasoning are substantially lower than 30 years ago, but have been stable over the last 20 years and still favor males. Over the last two decades males showed a stable or slightly increasing advantage in science reasoning. However, more females scored in the extreme right tail of verbal reasoning and writing ability tests.”
At the very highest level of test scores, Wai and his colleagues found the “the male–female ratio in the top 0.01 percent of mathematical ability on the SAT-M rapidly declined from 13.5 to 1 in the early 1980s to roughly 4 to 1 in the early 1990s,” where it stabilized.
The reality is that on many measures, some negative, others positive, men tend to dominate the extremes, a phenomenon known as “the greater male variability hypothesis.”
Take, for example, violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2022, men committed 78.6 percent of violent crimes, nearly five times the 16.5 percent of violent offenses committed by women (in the remainder, the sex of the offender could not be determined)
In 2023, men committed 14,127 homicides, women 1,898. Men committed 35,304 aggravated assaults, women 10,866. Men committed 16,230 robberies, women 2,407.
Autism spectrum disorder, to give another example, is diagnosed four times more often in males than in females. In 2021, nearly five times as many men than women committed suicide.
These difference can emerge in unexpected domains. Take disease. More than nine out of ten cases of primary biliary cirrhosis, an autoimmune disease of the liver, are found among women, while primary sclerosing cholangitis, a cholestatic liver disease, is far more common in men than women.
Or take brains. In a 2009 paper, “Sexual Differentiation of the Human Brain in Relation to Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation,” Dick Swaab and Alicia Garcia-Falgueras reported that “the intermediate nucleus of the human hypothalamus” is “2.5 times larger in men than in women and contains 2.2 times as many cells.”
Conversely, the National Institutes of Health in 2020 reported that a study found that
Females had greater volume in the prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, and insula. Males, on average, had greater volume in the ventral temporal and occipital regions. Each of these regions is responsible for processing different types of information.
What remains unknown is which of the myriad arcane variations between the sexes contributes to one of the most salient gender differences: risk tolerance.
“Across many real-world domains, men engage in more risky behaviors than do women,” Christine Harris and Michael Jenkins write in their 2023 paper, “Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why Do Women Take Fewer Risks than Men?”
The authors surveyed 657 men and women to determine “their likelihood of engaging in various risky activities relating to four different domains (gambling, health, recreation and social).”
Women, they found, reported a “greater perceived likelihood of negative outcomes and lesser expectation of enjoyment,” factors that “partially mediated their lower propensity toward risky choices in gambling, recreation, and health domains.”
One consequence of men’s lower level of risk aversion, they write, is that “men are three times as likely as women to be involved in fatal car accidents.”
In addition, in the United States, “women report using seatbelts substantially more often than men and men have been shown to run yellow lights more often than women,” according to Harris and Jenkins.
Male pedestrians in Britain, they note, “are involved in accidents about 80 percent more often than female pedestrians, and men die much more often from drowning or accidental poisoning throughout the Western world.”
The authors cite a 2002 study, “A Domain-Specific Risk-Attitude Scale: Measuring Risk Perceptions and Risk Behaviors,” by Elke Weber, Ann-Renee Blais and Nancy E. Betz, that assessed risk taking in five domains: financial decisions, health and safety, recreation, and ethical and social decisions.
They found that “for the 307 women and 253 men in our sample, male and female respondents differed significantly in their perceptions of all risk categories except social risks.”
Research on gender differences has been fraught, a focal point in campus wars, entangled in bitter disputes over genes and culture, the fixity or fluidity of sexual identity and demands for equal representation.
Even so, this research has proved itself consistently illuminating, including from a political perspective. In contemporary America, the more one learns about male and female propensities, the more one understands partisan hostility — the currently male-heavy Republican Party, today’s female-freighted Democrats, and the understandable but increasingly hopeless impossibility of reaching productive compromise or finding common ground.
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