Gender achievement gaps: the role of social costs to trying hard in high school
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Gender achievement gaps: the role of social costs to trying hard in high school Joseph Workman1 · Anke Heyder2 Received: 8 May 2019 / Accepted: 10 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In American high schools female students put greater effort into school and outperform boys on indicators of academic success. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we found female students’ greater academic effort and achievement was partly explained by different social incentives to trying hard in school experienced by male and female students. Males were 1.75 times as likely to report they would be unpopular for trying hard in school and 1.50 times as likely to report they would be made fun of for trying hard in school. Social costs to trying hard in school were directly associated with less rigorous mathematics coursetaking and indirectly associated with lower GPA in STEM courses through lower academic effort. Keywords Gender · Peer relations · Masculinity · Oppositional culture · Popularity · Achievement
1 Introduction In most Western, industrialized countries female students outperform male students on indicators of academic success (Buchmann et al. 2008). In 1981, American women surpassed males in attaining bachelor’s degrees, and continue to outpace males in more recent years. Female students in American high schools also outperform male students in course grades and enroll in more advanced courses. Female
* Anke Heyder anke.heyder@tu‑dortmund.de Joseph Workman [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 208 Haag Hall, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA
2
Department of Psychology, Technical University Dortmund, Emil‑Figge‑Str. 50, 44227 Dortmund, Germany
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J. Workman, A. Heyder
students’ greater school effort explains a substantial portion of the female advantage in educational performance (Downey and Vogt Yuan 2005). The primary contribution of this study is to investigate the social costs to academic effort faced by male and female high school students and the implications of these social costs for the female advantage in academic effort and performance. Prior ethnographic and experimental research suggests male and female students experience different social costs to trying hard in school (Heyder and Kessels 2017; Jackson 2002, 2003; Jackson and Dempster 2009; Morris 2012). However, scholars have not been able to quantify how much more widespread social costs to academic effort are among male students than female students. In the current study we address this gap by comparing student reports of the social costs to trying hard in school in a nationally representative sample of American 9th grade students. In addition, we investigate whether differential social costs to trying hard in school among male and female students explain why female students try harder in school and have higher achievement than male students. 1.1 Gender achievement gaps Female students outperform male students in a range of indicators of academic performance.
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