Mind the Gap: Evidences from Gender Differences in Scores in Brazil

There has always been a claim that: ”boys are good at counting, and girls are good at reading”. Analysis of the data on the gender differences in mathematics achievement up to the present indicates that females are not consistently under-performing relative to males. Guiso, Monte, Sapienza and Singales (2008) analyzed data for 40 different countries and showed that culture explains most of the difference in maths, at least. Also, the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of gender equality. In this paper we want to investigate the gender score gap using data from Entrance Test Scores for Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) in Brazil. Our results show that in fact, the gender gap in scores varies across subjects and also across quantiles of the conditional score distribution. Boys may show an advantage in Math, but the advantage is lower as we control for family background and academic variables. This shows that girls disadvantage in math may be in fact related to family background and cultural factors, confirming the results by Guiso, Monte, Sapienza and Singales (2008). Boys advantage vanishes when it comes to language, and to some extent to portuguese, confirming the results found on the international literature that girls out-perform boys in reading and writing.