Greater exposure to high-achieving boys in high school negatively impacts girls’ science and math grades, according to a new working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They are also less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree and, according to new data, they pursue two-year degrees instead.
By ages 26 to 32, the research found, these girls also have lower labor-force participation and have more children. (Labor-force participation is defined as employed, on sick leave or temporary disability, on parental leave, or looking for work.) Boys, for their part, were not affected by their high-achieving male or female peers.
‘Being in a class with a lot of high-achieving male peers hurts women’s long-run educational attainment. They are less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree.’
“Being in a class with a lot of high-achieving male peers hurts women’s long-run educational attainment,” Angela Cools, the lead author and a graduate student in Cornell University’s economics department, told MarketWatch. “They are less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree and, instead, they are completing either associate’s degrees or vocational or technical degrees.”
Being exposed to high-achieving girls, meanwhile, had a very different impact on certain groups of girls. Those who had lower ability, who didn’t have a college-educated parent and who went to a school in the upper half of the socioeconomic spread, were actually more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree if they had greater exposure to high-achieving female peers, according to the study.
“It is a little bit surprising to us that we find these very strong results for girls,” Cools said, “and we find no results for boys of having high-achieving peers of any gender.”
A decline in girls’ interest and achievement in math can be detrimental after high school. Some of the most demanding jobs are in math, science and technology. A lot of high-paying jobs require a combination of math and social skills, including financial managers, engineers and registered nurses or physicians.
As a proxy for “high achiever” status, Cools and her co-authors used the question of whether at least one of the students’ parents had some post-college education. (Research shows a strong link between parental educational attainment and their children’s academic achievement.) They sought to use a characteristic like parental educational attainment because it is typically determined prior to students’ meeting peers, Cools said.
Do math and science teachers pay more attention to male students?
The researchers acknowledged that the way in which teachers pay attention to male students over female students, and the potential for high-achieving boys’ parents to lobby schools could play a role.
The study authors analyzed data from the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health, also called Add Health, a sample of U.S. students in grades seven to 12 starting with the 1994 to 1995 school year. Cools conducted the research with co-authors Raquel Fernández, an economics professor at New York University, and Eleonora Patacchini, an economics professor at Cornell.
A separate 2012 study published in the journal Gender & Society found ‘consistent bias against white females’ among teachers who believed math was just easier for boys than girls.
Teachers may give girls less attention and, consciously or not, make them feel unwelcome in the class. One 2012 study published in the journal Gender & Society found “consistent bias against white females” among teachers who believed math was just easier for boys than girls.
It concluded that “disparities in teachers’ perceptions of ability that favored white males over minority students of both genders are explained away by student achievement in the form of test scores and grades.”
This may extend to the workplace, too. Experts say women working in STEM face unfriendly and, sometimes, hostile work environments. In STEM jobs, “discrimination and sexual harassment are seen as more frequent, and gender is perceived as more of an impediment than an advantage to career success,” according to survey published by the Pew Research Center in January 2018. Women working in STEM jobs are more likely to say they have experienced discrimination in the workplace (50% versus 41% in other fields), the survey found.
Still, a fear of math is not uncommon, and is known as “math anxiety.” Girls tend to be more anxious about math than boys, even if they’re higher achievers, according to research from the University of Missouri, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Glasgow, which looked at boys and girls around the world.
Why do some girls do worse in classes with high-achieving boys?
But the latest study also linked greater exposure to high-achieving boys with a range of far-reaching outcomes among girls — namely a heightened probability of having a child before age 18, and lower ambition and self-confidence. As always with studies such as this, the researchers cite correlation rather than causation.
Girls didn’t have a college-educated parent but were in a school with a higher socioeconomic demographic, were more likely to earn a BA if they had greater exposure to high-achieving females.
“Faced with a greater proportion of ‘high-performing’ boys, girls may become less self-confident about their own ability in traditionally male-dominated fields such as math and science,” the authors speculated. “More generally, these high-school girls may become more discouraged or think themselves less competent which could then affect their actual performance.”
The girls most vulnerable to these negative effects had below-median ability as measured by their score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a commonly used verbal-ability assessment. Cools suggested this may be a group already on the margin of not going to college, and that the exposure to high-achieving boys could push these girls over the edge.
Also among those most affected by exposure to high-achieving boys were girls who had at least one college-educated parent and those whose schools were “in the upper half of the socioeconomic distribution,” a variable defined by the share of students at a school who test at or above grade level.
‘Faced with a greater proportion of ‘high-performing’ boys, girls may become less self-confident about their own ability in traditionally male-dominated fields such as math and science.’
The study cites and builds upon previous related research: One 2017 study of students in China found that exposure to a greater proportion of high-performing males reduces girls’ likelihood of selecting a STEM path in high school, while a 2018 paper analyzing data from a Dutch business school found that “women with higher-achieving male peers choose fewer mathematical courses and majors.”
While Cools and her colleagues don’t prescribe any detailed solution to the negative effects outlined in their research, they noted the potential positives of policies aimed at lower-ability girls to boost self-confidence or reduce exposure to high-achieving boys.
“If this effect is working through teachers, one policy recommendation might be to draw teachers’ attention to these girls,” Cools told MarketWatch. “There may also be implications for the way that students are split into classrooms. For example, administrators might want to ensure that girls who are in an environment with many ‘high-achieving’ boys also have access to ‘high-achieving’ girls.”
(Alessandra Malito also contributed to this story.)
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