Gender roles as indicator of academic failure

Recent empirical literature has highlighted that boys and girls show differences in academic performance. The present study intends to disentangle the contribution of some –less well-known– factors to that gender gap between boys’ and girls’ achievement in the fourth level of secondary education. To this aim we use recent methodological advances in decomposition techniques applied to a rich dataset with information not only on students’ personal characteristics and family environment, but also on real scores –as marked by teachers–, academic track elections and expectations for academic success. Not surprisingly, we observe that girls are more likely to get better marks than boys, whereas boys are more likely to get the worst grades and to fail. More interestingly, expectations and post-compulsory academic elections have been found to explain most of this gap in favor of girls, denoting that girls are more responsible in the achievement of their goals and present higher productivity in studying, while boys rely more on their innate skills to pass. This could be highlighting gender differential attitudes and roles towards academic achievement, what denotes the need to perform policy interventions to the extent that academic achievement will condition career progression.