Mathematical competence is a key competence, considered necessary for personal development and fulfillment. Educational stratification precedes later social stratifications, and inequality of social opportunities is strongly related to inequality of educational opportunities. Therefore, exploring factors affecting inequalities in learning math is a priority for an equitable educational policy agenda.
The study of gender differences in math has received increasing attention over time but the literature is not yet conclusive and, to some extent, even contradictory across cultures and geographies. In fact, gender differences vary by country, with sharp variations, for example, among European countries: on average, girls living in the North of the EU perform better than boys in all subjects, whereas girls living in the South underperform boys in scientific subjects. Such evidence supports the hypothesis that gender differences in math are mainly related to the (sociocultural and economic) context and where students live rather than individual, or genetic differences. But precisely how culture and geography are significant is still an open question.
We contribute to this knowledge gap by exploring the association between differences in students’ achievement and the gendered, sociocultural places students’ experience, at both national and regional levels.
The study of gender differences at regional level is not new in the literature but previous studies have used a number of different tools to measure sociocultural environmental factors, and thus comparability of results across such studies is limited. In our study, we developed and validated a new measure to capture and synthesize sociocultural factors (and in particular people’s perceptions’ of gendered roles) we showed to be related to gender differences in math. The use of the same tool in different countries and regions enables valid comparisons and allowed us to draw an updated map of educational inequalities at different levels of locality in Europe.
This measure enabled us to further evaluate the association between gender differences in math and gender attitudes at different cultural locations, with clear implications for policy-makers (as educational policy needs to explicitly account for sociocultural locales in order to be effective); practitioners (as they need to be aware of the strength of the association between local sociocultural factors and students’ learning outcomes); and, educational and social research (with the new, updated and replicable measures validated across all European countries and regions enabling comparability of results across cultures and geographies and thus contributing to understandings of educational inequality).
