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When Girls Fall Behind in Math [1]

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Date: 2025-06-24

First grade. This is not an effect of age. Girls a day apart in age, sorted into different school years, start to show this effect at the same time in first grade. Obviously some are immune to this effect, and excel in math throughout schooling and careers, but most suffer. This clearly calls for much more research. Why is it so? How does it happen? What can be done about it? What other subjects are affected?

Nature [Paywalled]: When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment

Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months (see ‘Watch the mathematics gender gap emerge’). A more dramatic gap in mathematical performance emerges after 12 months of school, according to the analysis, published on 11 June in Nature1 Around the world, teenage boys outperform girls on mathematics tests, and men are more likely to pursue related careers — despite baby boys showing no superior sense of numbers or grasp of logic. Now, a gigantic study of schoolchildren in France pinpoints that this ‘mathematical gender gap’ appears during the first year of school. The finding could help to focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind.

Close the mathematics gender gap: huge study prompts urgent call to action

Researchers reveal when boys pull ahead of girls in mathematics, sounding an alarm and providing both an opportunity for schools, parents and researchers. The lack of differences in achievement at the start of school is an indication that boys have no inherent advantages when it comes to raw ability or interest. That, in turn, indicates that the gap could be reduced, or even erased, if children’s early environment at school and at home is changed. By pinpointing when girls start to fall behind boys, this study should help to focus further research into interventions that could reduce the gap. Such interventions are needed. Women in many countries are less likely than men to study maths, computing or engineering at university and to pursue careers in these fields. This deprives certain professions of a diversity of minds and could impair women’s salaries relative to men’s. Previous studies have shown that a gender gap favouring boys emerges during the first year of school (J.-P. Fischer and X. Thierry Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 40, 504–519; 2022). The latest work reveals how prevalent this gap is. The authors use the power of their massive data set — four consecutive cohorts of five- to seven-year-olds between 2018 and 2022 — to show that the gap affects children from all socio-economic groups, in all regions of France and in all types of school. Moreover, by comparing children born just a few days apart who are in separate school years, the researchers show that it is the start of school, not age, that seems to be the trigger; another indication that biological factors are not the main cause. The study cannot explain what it is about starting school that prompts boys and girls to diverge. But the authors propose several possible explanations. This study provides far more information than previous analysis, demonstrating that it is time in first grade, not age, that kicks off the change. Boy's math performance, compared to girls', jumps at age 6 (in the ELFE's data at least)

The mathematics achievement discrepancy between girls and boys, with its subsequent occupational consequences, is an issue that has received considerable attention in the literature. It is often referred to as the ‘math-gap’ and favours boys. A major component of the explanation of this gap resides in determining its age of onset. We analyse here data from more than 10,000 (cross-sectional study) and 2000 (longitudinal study) French students aged 4–7 years, tested in the framework of the Etude Longitudinale Française depuis l'Enfance (ELFE). The results allow to precisely determine the age of onset, since the gender difference, non-existent (or even slightly in favour of girls) in kindergarten (4–5 years), is clearly in favour of boys in first grade (6–7 years). They could therefore provide an important element in the controversial debate on the origin of gender-differentiated performance in mathematics.

Next question: How does this happen? What is it about school that does this to most, but by no means all, girls in France? Teachers? Textbooks? Other social factors?

Then we want to know what happens in other countries, how bad it gets in higher grades, and so forth and so on.

And, of course, what we can do about it. That means we need testable conjectures, funding, and political will, starting with overcoming Denial and Obstruction from the Usual Suspects.

I assume that my readers are in on this. What can you suggest?

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