Girls Dominate, Boys Left Behind: Decomposing the Gender Gap in Education Outcomes in Jamaica

Nicholas Wright ()

No 2410, Working Papers from Florida International University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper utilizes administrative data to investigate the gender gap in high school performance on various high-stakes exams and the gender disparity in academic outcomes at the leading university in the Caribbean. The results show that female students outperformed their male peers, being 8.5 and 6.6 percentage points more likely to pass a generic subject in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) exams, respectively. These results are robust across subject type, school ownership, school rank, and subject difficulty. Additionally, more females are admitted to each degree program annually, and they continue to outperform males regardless of age, enrollment status, or admission scores. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition indicate that school attributes, subject-cohort composition, and subject choice explain up to 78% of the gender gap in CSEC and CAPE pass rates, while college readiness, college-level decisions, and field of study fully explain the gap in college GPA.

Keywords: Gender Achievement Gap; Academic Performance; High-Stakes Exam; STEM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J16 J24 N36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gen and nep-ure
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https://economics.fiu.edu/research/working-papers/2024/2410.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

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