"The Evolution of Gender Gap in Beijing's Middle Schools: Are boys left behind?"

Fang Lai, Assistant Professor, International Education and Economics, New York University

DATE:	Tuesday, September 4, 2007
TIME:	2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
PLACE:	2515 Tolman Hall, Graduate School of Education
FORMAT:	BEAR Seminar
SPONSORS:	Center for Chinese Studies, Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center

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Gender equity in academic progress is one of the key components of the equity of education.  Recent U.S. evidence shows that girls outperform boys in the overall performance, doing especially better in reading and writing, but slightly lag behind in math and science.  With the increasing convergence in primary and secondary education policies between US and China, it would be interesting to compare the educational performance of these two countries.  This paper is among the first attempts to provide rigorous empirical evidences of the gender achievement gap in China.  Using census and administrative data on a cohort of 7,235 students who entered middle school in Beijing’s Eastern City District in 1999 and graduated in 2002, this paper looks at the evolution of the gender gap in student performance over the middle school period.  We find that within each school, girls have higher test scores in all subjects for most part of the middle school period, and that the within-school gender gap favoring girls is bigger than that during the primary school, ranging from 0.17 to 0.38 standardized scores in the average scores across subjects.  However, this gap has been steadily closed up over the three years of middle school period, especially in two science subjects, physics and chemistry, until a comeback of girls’ performance on the Middle School Graduation Examinations, which is then followed by a sudden drop in the girl-dominant gender gap on the High School Entrance Exams taken right after the former.  The magnitudes of gender gaps decrease over the distribution of the performance in both raw and value-added measures.  We relate these patterns of gender achievement gaps over the years to the differences in cognitive and non-cognitive skills, parental care received, and schooling experiences between boys and girls by adding the relevant mediators to the model and using Oaxaca decomposition.  The conclusions raise concerns about boys’ performing under their potential in a test-oriented system, which is detrimental to the continuation of their education beyond the compulsory stage.