Do Girls Really Outperform Boys in Educational Outcomes?

Perihan Saygin

No 14-05, Working Papers from University of Mannheim, Department of Economics

Abstract: The reversing gender gap observed in many countries led to a heated debate to explain the persistent gap in academia and other top fields despite the reversal. This paper aims at analyzing the gender gap in education outcomes from different evaluation and exam techniques and gender gap in outcomes of college applications using Turkish administrative data. In Turkey, university applications are centralized based on a standardized test. Assignments of applicants depend on an assignment score which is calculated as a weighted sum of standardized test score and high school GPA with a little contribution from the latter. I find considerable gender gap in favor of females in high school GPAs which is a long term evaluation of students based on every written exam during high school while the female outperformance is not as obvious in standardized test scores which comes from a stressful 3 hours multiple choice test. I also analyze the gender gap in college application outcomes and show that females are less likely to be assigned to a top major conditional on test scores. These findings contribute to the discussion of gender gap in performance in education suggesting that evaluation systems might have gender biased impacts on students and underrepresentation of females in top fields and/or universities can not be explained only by mean differences in test scores and test score distributions.

Keywords: gender gap; test scores; university entrance exam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 I20 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/35511/1/Perihan_Saygin_14-05.pdf

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