Opinion | Men and women are politically divided. There’s a lot more to it than that.

The declining competitiveness of many boys and men in school and the workplace has become both a social and a political problem.

David Autor, an economist at MIT, along with four colleagues, tackled this challenging terrain to analyze elementary school data and found the following:

While the identified gender differences in educational outcomes in adulthood are large, when examining the antecedent differences between the sexes in childhood, it is striking that these differences appear to be relatively small on average.

For example, recent work documents that between the early and mid-2000s, among eighth grade students in the United States, boys and girls had small differences in their average test scores, with boys having a small advantage in math and girls having a more significant advantage in reading. On behavioral outcomes, where boys have long been more likely to experience disciplinary problems than girls, the average gap between women and men is larger but still modest. In the Florida public school system we study here, the gender gap in school absenteeism is just 0.45 percentage points, with the average boy and girl both attending more than 94 percent of school days.

Modest average differences between elementary school students can widen as puberty begins, leading to significant differences in high school graduation rates (89 percent for girls, 83 percent for boys in 2021), not to mention gaps in college attendance (57 percent). .9 percent for women). 42.1 percent of men) and college graduation rates (66 percent of women, 58 percent of men).

Authors David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth and Melanie Wasserman found that the explanation lies in the disproportionate share of boys who rank at or near the bottom on measures of academic performance and behavior – what statisticians call the “left end.” of the distribution.

“Women-favorable differences in behavioral and educational outcomes during childhood—if they exist—are largely due to the overrepresentation of boys at the lower ends of the distribution of educational and behavioral outcomes,” the authors write.

Achieving low values ​​is again

very predictive of later school dropout. Dropouts are disproportionately drawn from the lower ends of test scores and attendance distributions. Children in the 10th percentile of the math and reading achievement distribution are nearly four times more likely to leave high school without graduating than children in the 90th percentile. Poor school attendance is even more telling: the dropout rate among students in the 10th percentile exceeds that of students in the 90th percentile by a factor of six.

Why do boys disproportionately fall into the bottom tenth?

Intriguingly, Autor and his colleagues found that boys suffered from “adverse parenting conditions” much more than girls and “that more adverse home environments differentially increase the prevalence of negative outcomes in boys compared to girls.”

The consequences?

“Because these negative results are key to dropout rates,” they write, “this difference in sensitivity could help explain the large gender gap in school dropout.”