Boys start school behind girls, and the gaps are widest for those struggling most

This research snapshot summarizes Benjamin M. Smith’s article in Educating Boys: Bridging Gaps, Building Futures, a special volume of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Key questions

Where do boys fall behind in K–12 education, and how do these gaps vary by age and achievement level? Using nationally representative longitudinal data, five decades of national assessments, and international comparisons, the article traces gender gaps in reading, math, behavior, discipline, disability identification, grades, and high school completion. It shows how these gaps vary by age, over time, and across the achievement distribution, providing a common empirical picture for understanding where boys’ educational challenges are most pronounced.

Read the paper

Key takeaways

• Girls arrive at kindergarten ahead of boys in reading, and the gap persists through high school. Girls have outscored boys on national reading assessments at ages 9, 13, and 17 in every round since the early 1970s, and in virtually every country tested internationally. Among 12th graders at the 10th percentile, girls lead by 0.37 standard deviations (SD), nearly three times the gap at the 90th percentile.
• Boys’ advantage in math is smaller, emerges later, and is less uniform. Differences are near zero at school entry. For much of the past two decades, boys’ average advantage on national assessments in grades 4, 8, and 12 was between 0 and 0.10 SD. That advantage widened after 2020 as girls’ scores declined more sharply.
• The biggest gaps are behavioral. Kindergarten teachers rate girls about 0.45 SD higher on attentiveness, persistence, and eagerness to learn. That gap grows to 0.59 SD by fifth grade and rivals differences by race and class.
• Boys earn a 3.0 average high school GPA compared to 3.23 for girls, and they make up two-thirds of the bottom 10% of GPAs but only one-third of the top.
• Boys are 65% of special education students and are suspended at higher rates than girls in every racial group.

Key figure

Across countries participating in PISA 2022, girls generally outperform boys in reading, with the largest gaps often appearing among the lowest-performing students. The consistency of this pattern across different education systems suggests that boys’ reading difficulties extend beyond features specific to American schools. The size of the gap nevertheless varies across countries. This pattern is consistent with an interaction between boys’ development and their learning environments.