Around the world, education systems have made enormous strides to close gender gaps. In all 65 countries that took part in the PISA 2012 assessment, girls now show better reading skills than boys. Even in science, often perceived as a domain of boys, there are now more countries where girls do better than boys than the other way round.
In Jordan and Qatar, 15-year-old girls are almost a school year ahead of boys and in the United Arab Emirates, Bulgaria and Thailand girls are still have a school year ahead.
And yet, in most countries women still earn substantially less than men with similar qualifications. This isn’t mainly about men and women doing similar work for different pay, but about men and women pursuing different careers.
New OECD report
As our new report The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence suggests, those career choices may be made much earlier than commonly thought.
The report finds that, even though boys and girls show similar performance on the PISA science test, less than 5% of 15-year-old girls in the 65 participating countries contemplate pursuing a career in engineering or computing, while 18% of boys do (it’s almost exactly the other way round when it comes to health services).
Gender differences in self-confidence in science offer part of the explanation for this gap. While we made progress in closing gender gaps in the knowledge and skills of boys and girls, we may have lost sight of important social and emotional dimensions of learning that may be far more predictive for the future life choices of children.
Strengthening girls’ self-confidence in science and math
In most countries, teachers and schools need to do better to help girls see science and math not just as school subjects, but as essential to career and life opportunities. This is significant not only because women are severely under-represented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields of study and occupations, but also because graduates of these fields are in high demand in the labour market and because jobs in these fields are among the most highly paid.
What is most striking is that six out of ten low achievers in all three of the subjects that PISA assesses – reading, mathematics and science – are boys. These low achievers seem to be stuck in vicious cycle of low performance, disengagement and low motivation. But in math and science, boys are also more prevalent among the top performers, where girls often miss out.
And while we’ve known for a while that even the highest-performing girls are less confident in their abilities in mathematics and science than high-performing boys, our new study suggests that they don’t seem to be getting much encouragement from their parents.
Parents and teachers play a key role in boosting confidence
In all countries and economies surveyed on this question, parents were more likely to expect their sons, rather than their daughters, to work in a STEM field – even when boys and girls perform equally well in mathematics and science.
Some 50% of parents in Chile, Hungary and Portugal expect their sons to have a career in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, but less than 20% hold such expectations for their daughters. Interestingly, in Korea that gap is just 7 percentage points, so we can do better.
The good news from the report is that narrowing these gender gaps does not require extensive – and expensive – education reform. Rather, it requires concerted efforts by parents, teachers and employers to become more aware of their own conscious or unconscious gender biases so that they give girls and boys equal chances for success at school and beyond.
Girls and boys learn differently
For example, PISA shows clearly that boys and girls have different reading preferences: girls are far more likely than boys to read novels and magazines for enjoyment while boys prefer comic books and newspapers. If parents and teachers gave boys a greater choice in what they read, they might be more successful in at least narrowing the wide gender gap in reading performance.
Teachers can help both boys and girls to improve their mathematics performance. PISA finds that when teachers help students to learn from mistakes they have made, ask students to explain how they solved a mathematics problem, and require students to apply what they have learned in new contexts, among other teaching strategies that require students to work more independently, all students, but particularly girls, perform better in mathematics.
Higher marks at school don’t always lead to more professional success
One of the most disturbing new findings is that teachers consistently give girls better marks in mathematics than boys, even when boys and girls perform similarly on the PISA mathematics test. That may be because girls are “good students” – attentive in class and respectful of authority – while boys tend to exert less self-control in their behaviour when they are in class.
But while higher marks may lead to success at school, they aren’t necessarily an advantage for girls in the long run, because labour markets reward people for what they know and what they can do with what they know, not for their grades at school.
Employers have an important role to play too. While PISA shows that girls are more likely than boys to get information about future studies or careers through Internet research, boys are more likely than girls to get hands-on experience, by working as interns, job shadowing, visiting a job fair or speaking to career advisors outside school. This implies that employers can do far more to engage girls in learning about potential careers.
And in what may be a surprising finding, the large gender gap in reading performance observed among 15-year-olds virtually disappears among 16-29 year-olds. The data show that young men are much more likely than young women to read at work – and at home. This again proves that there are plenty of ways to narrow or even eliminate gender gaps in education and skills, as long as learning becomes everyone’s business.