Leaving Boys Behind
Gender Disparities in High Academic Achievement
- Nicole Fortin is professor of economics at the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia. Philip Oreopoulos is professor of economics at the University of Toronto. Shelley Phipps is professor of economics at Dalhousie University. All co- authors are Senior Research Fellows at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Abstract
Using data from the “Monitoring the Future” surveys, this paper shows that from the 1980s to the 2000s, the mode of girls’ high school GPA distribution has shifted from “B” to “A,” essentially “leaving boys behind” as the mode of boys’ GPA distribution stayed at “B.” In a reweighted Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of achievement at each GPA level, we find that changes to gender differences in post-secondary expectations, in particular expectations for attending graduate or professional school, are the most important factors accounting for this trend after controlling for school ability and they occur as early as the eighth grade.
- Received August 2012.
- Accepted April 2014.
- © 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
This open access article is distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) and is freely available online at: http://jhr.uwpress.org
