Boys out of balance: What is driving the attainment gap in education?

Research by Associate Professor of Economics Esteban Aucejo and his co-author found that what shows up as a major racial discrepancy would be smaller if the level of participation in education between genders within race were more proportional.

What's driving the gap in educational attainment between white and minority students may well be better understood by clarifying the causes of the growing gap between males and females. That’s because what shows up as a major racial discrepancy would be smaller if the level of participation in education between genders within race were more balanced.

“There is a lot of general discussion in the media about minority students underperforming in the educational system,” says Associate Professor of Economics Esteban Aucejo, “but a big chunk of that empirical regularity is driven by differences between African-American males and females.”

While white youths are 35% more likely to enroll in college than black youths, and among black youths, females are 50% more likely to enroll in college than their male counterparts. This means that for every 25-year-old black male with a college degree there are two black females. This makes the gender gap within black youth larger than the black-white divide.

From the 1980s onward, females became significantly more likely to attend college than males, and the gap, now about 10 percentage points, is only increasing. This is despite the greater likelihood that males will pursue higher education in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math), fields in which female participation has traditionally lagged.

These statistical realities are well-known among academics; what is less clear is what the causes of this discrepancy are. Esteban Aucejo and his co-author on this research, Jonathan James of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, set out to help clarify in their study, “Catching Up to Girls: Understanding the Gender Imbalance in Educational Attainment Within Race.”

"We wanted to better understand what is driving the gender gap," says Aucejo, "and, especially, to focus on the reasons for the difference in performance between African-American males and females."

Three types of factors studied

The study sought answers by exploring three main types of factors and their impact on educational attainment. The first set of factors was family background characteristics. These include the socioeconomics of the family, parental educational levels, number of family members, and whether the family was led by a single parent.

Since males and females have similar family backgrounds on average, it may not be immediately clear how family background can produce gender differences in educational attainment. However, one possibility is that males and females may respond differently to similar background characteristics. The study found that the education decisions of black males are more heavily influenced by family background characteristics than black females. Consequently, while 77% of black families in the study were led by a single parent, reducing this number would disproportionally improve the outcome of African-American males.

One possible reason for this result is that single-parent households tend to be led by the mother, rather than the father. Aucejo suggests that the presence of a positive male role model in the household may benefit males more than their female counterparts.

The second set of factors the study explored was cognitive skills in math and verbal ability. The participants were tested around age 14, and again the results favored the girls but not nearly at a rate that would explain the overall discrepancy in college enrollment between them.

The third set of factors, which Aucejo considers the most significant, are non-cognitive skills. This is an umbrella term for all the skills that go into academic success that are not, strictly speaking, a measure of intellectual ability. They can range from the ability to get along well with peers, maintain emotional composure, make positive life choices, complete work on time, and even to have the fortitude to carry on through difficult circumstances. Because non-cognitive skills are broad and varied, they can be difficult to measure. So, the study focused on a few specific objective indicators.

This is where girls are doing well and boys are doing badly. According to the study, boys were found to be far more likely to be disciplined in school, use illegal drugs, get suspended from school, or be involved in a fight.

The study notes that “there are large differences in our behavior factor between males and females that are prevalent across all racial groups … Concerning college enrollment, differences in behavior explain 50% of the gender gap for black youth, 70% of the gender gap for white youth, and all of the gender gap for Hispanic youth.”

What does it all mean?

“We tend to think kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to attend college because their families don’t have the resources to invest in their kids,” Aucejo observes, “but males and females come from similar families on average, so there has to be something else.”

Part of the answer no doubt lies in the propensity of boys to take part in risky and disruptive activities, which one way or another impact education. But another question Aucejo raises is far more fundamental.

Is school today better suited for girls than boys?

Starting even from kindergarten, this study found that boys are substantially more likely to need special education and be suspended while getting worse grades. Girls perform far better in English and are catching up in math. Is it perhaps simply harder for boys to sit still and follow instructions because they are boys?

Non-cognitive abilities: The need and the opportunity

Aucejo doesn’t try to answer that question. What is clear, according to this study, is that to improve the educational attainment of males we need to do a better job of teaching non-cognitive skills.

“This is not simple to address,” warns Aucejo, “for example, one element of non-cognitive skills is conscientiousness. If you have trouble focusing, then even if you have high cognitive skills, it may difficult to achieve your goals.”

The good news is that some new literature published in the past couple years, according to Aucejo, suggests that after age 6 to 7, improving non-cognitive skills can be easier than raising cognitive performance, which seems to be far less malleable in growing children. An emphasis on developing non-cognitive skills might give us a second chance to improve outcomes for students who’ve already fallen behind academically, which we might not otherwise be able to impact.

From a policy perspective, this study helps further validate the importance of so-called “soft skills” such as communication, resilience, and patience, finding that non-cognitive performance has equally as much impact on GPA as cognitive performance.

“We need to invest in teaching these non-cognitive skills and emotional skills, especially for boys. If we don’t invest in every facet of the children’s lives, it could be a problem. The question is, how do you do it?”

Some possible answers include more funding for universal pre-kindergarten and making childcare more accessible. Some schools are trying to give greater emphasis to non-cognitive skills in their curriculums.

“At this point, we don’t exactly know what works,” says Aucejo. “We need more study to shed light on this.”