Ethnicity and gender gaps in early childhood

Abstract

Gender differences in academic performance and achievement have been of policy concern for decades—both interest in lower performance by girls in the areas of mathematics and science and, more recently, in boys' underperformance in most other academic areas. Much previous research has focused on gender gaps, while overlooking other factors that may play a role, such as ethnicity. This study looks at the gender differences in cognitive assessments at age five across ethnic groups in a sample of English children from the Millennium Cohort Study. While girls generally perform better than boys, general trends mask some differences across ethnic groups. Results show gender gaps at the mean are largest for black and Pakistani and Bangladeshi children and smallest for white children, they are also larger for the teacher‐rated assessments than for the survey‐administered tests.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank David Gillborn, Bob Michael and participants at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies internal workshop as well as two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Ethnic groupings are different in the UK and USA. In the UK, the main groupings are white, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, black African, black Caribbean and mixed. In the USA they are white, black, Hispanic and Asian.

2. Score gaps at the mean and variance ratios were investigated by religion—Hindu, Muslim and Sikh—for Indian children. The gap at the mean favoured girls for all, but was especially large for Muslim children. Boys had higher variance among Hindu children, but girls had higher variance among Muslim and Sikh children.

3. We cannot differentiate black Caribbean from other black children in our data.

4. The data were collected in England for the MCS by the Department for Education.

5. Although families had to be resident in the UK when the children were nine months old to be in the MCS sample.