Gender differences in Iceland's education system

Zoega, Gylfi and Gylfason, G. (2021) Gender differences in Iceland's education system. Icelandic Journal of Education 30 (2), pp. 135-165. ISSN 2298-8394.

Abstract

This paper describes and compares the performance of boys and girls in the Icelandic education system. The study of gender differences in schools has a long history. An extensive and interesting survey edited by William Hadow in the U.K. in 1923 examined existing evidence from the perspective of medicine, psychology and education studies. The authors found that intra-gender variation in abilities was greater than gender differences. Nevertheless, notable gender differences had to do with girls being more obedient, industrious and respectful while boys were more independent and harder to manage. Recent research in the field of education studies has confirmed many of these differences. In recent decades, the apparent educational underperformance of boys in the Western world has received increased attention. Several books, some of which are controversial, have been written on this topic (such as Kindlon & Thompson, 2000; Palmer, 2009; Sax, 2016; Sommers, 2001). This paper surveys research on gender imbalance in education, which covers the effect of boys having lower non-cognitive skills; boys having a different set of values and attitudes and not valuing educational performance as much as girls; the importance of family background in shaping boys’ attitudes towards education; and teachers viewing boys as being lazier and girls more conscientious. We then use data on comprehensive examinations in 4th, 7th and 10th grade for two cohorts in Iceland. We find that there is no statistically significant difference between the mean grade of boys and girls in mathematics but a significant and sizeable difference in the mean grade in Icelandic, which exists in 4th grade and then becomes larger in 7th grade and in 10th grade. However, the intra-gender variation is much greater than the differences in mean grade. We then look at the tails of the distribution and find that a large majority of those with the 10% lowest grades in Icelandic were boys and a minority of those with the 10% highest grades. The gender differences are also pronounced in the PISA tests and they are larger than the OECD average in reading, mathematics and the natural sciences. Moreover, the gender difference in these examinations has grown since year 2000. Next we describe data on high school graduation rates where 60% are female and the dropout rate is 50% higher for males before moving on to the university level where two thirds of graduates are women. A large majority of students in the health sciences, humanities and social sciences are female but men remain a majority in engineering, mathematics and physics. Within the social sciences, there is gender balance in economics and also to some extent in business studies. Within the humanities, only history and philosophy have a higher proportion of men. Finally, we compare average grades for men and women in the first year of study at the University of Iceland for the school year 2018–2019 and the fall of 2019 (COVID-19 making it impractical to use the spring of 2020 or the following school year) and find that women outperform men by around 0.5 on the 0–10 scale. The gap survives correcting for the high-school GPA. We show that the gap is mainly due to a higher dropout rate of male students. We then draw on the education literature in Iceland to explain the gender gap. Some studies find that girls are more interested in reading and that the choice of reading material suits girls better than boys. Other studies have found that girls place a much greater emphasis on educational performance than boys and this affects their self-image to a larger extent. Girls tend to become more anxious about examinations and this can contribute to anxiety problems that affect their performance. There are studies of the high dropout rate in Iceland, which find that many students who drop out of high school return to school, which explains the high average age of high-school graduates. The overall conclusion is that the underrepresentation of boys among high-school and university graduates is not a consequence of choice but of greater academic failure among the weaker students. Our findings are a call for action in addressing the gender gap.

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