Socioeconomic status and gender gaps in educational outcomes across the life course: New distributional evidence from linked census-administrative data

This study uses whole-of-population linked census-administrative data to examine gender gaps in educational outcomes from early primary school through early adulthood in Australia and to assess the contribution of socioeconomic factors to these gaps either at the mean and along the distribution of educational outcomes. Leveraging the richness and large size of the linked data and employing some of the most rigorous empirical approaches in the literature, including mother and twin fixed-effects models, we find that females outperform males as early as ages 5–6 across multiple developmental domains, and that this advantage persists through university. The gender gap in favour of females is larger among lower-performing students. We also find that boys benefit more than girls from growing up in more advantaged families, particularly among academically lower-performing boys. However, this advantage is observed only for outcomes measured in the early years of primary school. By contrast, for outcomes measured at the tertiary level, most indicators of socioeconomic advantage confer stronger benefits to females, especially among individuals at the lower end of the educational attainment distribution. Finally, having ruled out gender differences in birth weight—which favour males—we identify gender differences across siblings in school sector choice and early childhood health conditions, both favouring females, as potential mechanisms underlying these patterns.