ResearchEducation & Skills
Gender gaps in school readiness are evident at kindergarten and vary by place
This is a summary of the working paper “Gendered From the Start: Patterns of Kindergarten Readiness Skills, 2013–2024” by Sadie Richardson, Sofia Wilson, and Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University.
As early as kindergarten, boys and girls differ in the skills that help them learn. Girls tend to arrive at school with better literacy skills as well as more developed social-emotional skills like self-regulation, paying attention, and getting along with others. In math, boys and girls start out about even. Earlier work has shown that, in grades 3 through 8, gender gaps differ substantially across more- and less-advantaged communities. But it has been unclear whether those patterns are already present at school entry or emerge only after several years of classroom exposure.
To answer that question, we assembled a large, multistate dataset of kindergarten readiness scores reported for both girls and boys for each school district in the state. For this analysis, literacy data come from Idaho, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington; math data from Oregon and Washington; social-emotional data from Kentucky, Oregon, and Washington; and combined readiness scores from Kentucky, Maryland, and Ohio.
Because these states assess nearly every entering kindergartner, we can measure the male-female score gap in each district and track how it varies with the income and education of the surrounding community. In all, the data cover roughly 1.9 million children in more than 1,200 districts, spanning 2013 to 2024, though no state covers the whole period. Our findings echo earlier research but show that gender gaps are already present at school entry and vary across communities. We find:
- Girls start ahead in literacy and social-emotional skills, but not math. At kindergarten entry, girls score 0.31 SD higher in social-emotional skills and 0.13 SD higher in literacy; math scores are essentially even. For scale, typical kindergarten-to-first-grade gains are about 1.5 SD in reading and 1.0 SD in math; the social-emotional gap is similar in size to Black–White gaps on several behavioral measures.
- Gender gaps are smaller in higher-income communities across every domain, with the strongest shift in math. Each one-standard-deviation rise in community socioeconomic status shifts the gap about 0.045 SD toward boys in math, versus 0.006 SD in literacy and 0.008 SD in social-emotional readiness.
- The gaps held steady over the last decade. From 2013 to 2024 the broad patterns changed little; a few states show small movements, but no clear overall trend emerges.
- We can describe these patterns, but not their causes. Our data capture children’s skills and their community’s income and education, not parenting or home life, so the explanations below are possibilities, not conclusions.
Girls start ahead, except in math
Figure 1
Girls lead boys in every domain except math. The gap is widest in social-emotional skills, smaller in literacy, and near zero in math. Where states report a single combined score, girls lead there too (0.24 SD). The pattern holds in every state that reports these domains, despite their different assessments, which suggests it reflects something real about children’s skills, not a quirk of one test.
The most telling feature of these gaps is when they appear. Because these data measure children as they enter kindergarten, the gaps predate sustained exposure to formal schooling.
What happens next is less clear. The kindergarten literacy gap is about half the reading gap we previously documented in grades 3-8, suggesting girls may pull further ahead in reading over the school years. But that conclusion is based on a comparison of students in different states, cohorts, and tests, while a recent longitudinal study finds that reading gender gaps remain stable through elementary school.
Boys fare better in higher-income communities
To see how the gaps vary from place to place, we rank districts by a summary measure of socioeconomic status (SES), which combines income, adult education, poverty, SNAP receipt, unemployment, and single-parent households. While the data can describe how gender gaps vary with community SES, they cannot determine what produces that relationship.
Still, the results are clear. In higher-SES communities boys do not lag as far behind girls, and are ahead in math. The math effect is strong enough that the gap tips from slightly favoring girls in the poorest districts to slightly favoring boys in the richest (Figure 2), though we interpret this cautiously as it rests only on the two states reporting math, Oregon and Washington.
Figure 2
Data noteEstimated average male–female gap, by district SES, from 1.5 SD SES below to 1.5 SD SES above the average district. The lines are modeled, not raw district values, and treat the gap as a straight-line function of SES. States included by measure: literacy—ID, OH, OR, and WA; math—OR and WA; social-emotional—KY, OR, and WA.
Prior research has found that among older students, math gaps are more boy-favoring in more advantaged communities. We find the same pattern among children just entering kindergarten, and not only in math but in literacy and social-emotional skills as well. Comparing our estimates with those for grades 3–8 suggests that school may weaken this relationship over time rather than create it.
Potential reasons for the gender gaps
Why do girls enter school with higher readiness, and why do boys do relatively better in higher-SES communities? While our data cannot test causes or cleanly separate the possibilities, several explanations have been proposed in the literature.
Why girls start ahead
The leading explanation is developmental. Girls, on average, develop self-regulation and executive function earlier than boys, which fits with the largest gap appearing in social-emotional readiness.
A second possibility is that parents tend to spend time differently with sons and daughters, for instance, by doing more reading and storytelling with girls and more counting and building with boys, which could nudge skills in gendered directions before school. However, the evidence for how much these practices contribute is still limited.
A third possibility is teacher bias. Because many readiness assessments rely on teacher ratings, teachers’ perceptions could, in principle, widen the measured gap. However, we think this plays little role, as studies using trained assessors to administer direct assessments find similar gaps.
Why the gaps shift with community income
Boys are held back from kindergarten, or “redshirted,” more often in higher-income areas, which could leave them older and more ready when tested; but our own rough calculation suggests this could account for at most a very small share of the 0.045 SD math shift.
More plausibly, higher-income families may provide different inputs, such as more number games with sons and more reading with daughters, which would widen gaps in their stereotypical directions in richer places. The math pattern fits this explanation, but boys in those places also gain ground in literacy and social-emotional readiness, which gendered inputs alone would not predict.
Alternatively, boys may get a greater return from broadly similar inputs: where both boys and girls receive more resources and support, boys tend to benefit more, which would help them relative to girls across every domain. Our evidence leans toward this account, though it cannot rule out a mix.
What this means for policy
Boys arrive at school already behind in literacy and social-emotional skills, with the largest gaps in less-advantaged communities. That suggests the need to look beyond the classroom to the family and early-childhood environments that shape development before kindergarten—while recognizing that this study cannot determine which of those influences matters most. Pre-K may offer particular benefits for boys: while a 2016 meta-analysis found similar cognitive and achievement gains for boys and girls, it did find larger benefits for boys in grade retention and special-education classification. Boston’s universal program produced larger gains for boys in college-going and disciplinary outcomes.
The findings also argue against treating boys’ educational disadvantage as a single, uniform problem. The gaps are largest in social-emotional skills, smaller in literacy, near zero in math on average, and vary across communities. Early support may therefore be most useful when it is tailored to the particular skills and communities where boys begin furthest behind.
Finally, the data are valuable in their own right. As more states report kindergarten readiness results by district and gender, policymakers could use them to identify where gaps are already emerging at school entry, and act accordingly, rather than waiting until later-grade test scores reveal them.
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