Where Boys Outperform Girls in Math

Stanford study of some 260 million test scores shows that boys doing better than girls in math is related to their being in a rich, white, and suburban district. In poor and black districts, girls tend to do better than boys. This is distinct from English proficiency, which is constant across all these factors (girls always outperforming boys there):

The study included test scores from the 2008 to 2014 school years for 10,000 of the roughly 12,000 school districts in the United States. In no district do boys, on average, do as well or better than girls in English and language arts. In the average district, girls perform about three-quarters of a grade level ahead of boys.

But in math, there is nearly no gender gap, on average. Girls perform slightly better than boys in about a quarter of districts – particularly those that are predominantly African-American and low-income. Boys do slightly better in the rest – and much better in high-income and mostly white or Asian-American districts.

Note that this is synchronous with gender roles of parents in the given districts. In rich, white, suburban districts, parents are more willing to say they have egalitarian values, but actually more like to have traditional gender roles in the family (e.g., full-time working father and stay-at-home mother).

New York Times.