Gender, socioeconomic status, and numeracy test scores

Abstract

We study the interrelationship between the gender gap in numeracy and socioeconomic status (SES) based on household income, parental education, and labor force status. A composite measure of SES confirms the well-established fact that boys from lower SES are more disadvantaged. In contrast, we find that separately the three aspects of higher SES interact uniquely with gender to drive differential outcomes in numeracy for girls and boys. Income and mother’s role in particular, are important drivers of the gender gap at the extremes of the income distribution. Mother’s education and labor force participation is associated with increasingly higher test scores for girls across the income distribution, thus leading to a double disadvantage for poor girls. But the gender gap does not disappear at the top of the income distribution, as for boys, test scores increase with stay-at-home mothers. In high-income households boys benefit from a traditional household structure; while in low-income households, the gap is driven by girls having worse numeracy scores in the traditional household structure.