Preventing gender disparities in mathematics is a global concern. In early childhood, boys and girls demonstrate similar basic knowledge of numbers and spatial concepts. It is therefore believed that gender disparities in mathematics primarily reflect the internalisation of the sociocultural stereotype that ‘girls are bad at maths’. However, it is not yet clear where, when or to what extent this stereotype has taken root. This article presents the results of a four-year longitudinal evaluation of the language and maths performance of all French pupils in CP and CE1 (2,653,082 children).
Rapid emergence of a gender gap in maths in Year 1
IPP researchers Thomas Breda, Joyce Sultan and Lola Touitou joined a team of neuroscientists also working on the subject, and their joint findings led to a paper being published in *Nature*, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.
Reference Nature, volume 643.
Presentation
Key Results
Boys and girls showed very similar results in mathematics on starting school, but a gender gap in favour of boys became very significant after four months of schooling and reached a magnitude of around 0.2 standard deviations after one year. These results are consistent year on year and vary only slightly according to family type, class or school, and socio-economic status. Analysis of quasi-orthogonal variations between age and time spent at school reveals that the gender gap increased with length of schooling rather than with age. These results indicate that it is during the first year of school that the gender gap in
mathematics emerges in favour of boys, which allows the search for solutions and interventions to be focused on this particular stage.
Pauline Martinot
Bénédicte Colnet
Lola Touitou
Pascal Huguet
Elizabeth Spelke
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
Pascal Bressoux
Stanislas Dehaene
Partners
This article is the result of research carried out at the IPP on educational disparities between boys and girls, funded under the Dauphine-PSL Chair in Women and Science and the ‘Innovations, Data and Experimentation in Education (IDEE)’, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the ‘Investissements d’avenir’ programme (ANR-21-ESRE-0034).