?Una brecha que se amplia? Un analisis de la brecha de genero en las pruebas de salida del colegio en Colombia.

AuthorKarime Abadia, Luz
Pages5(27)

A Widening Gap? A Gender-Based Analysis of Performance on the Colombian High School Exit Examination.

Uma brechaque se amplia? Uma analise da brechade genero nas provas do ensino medio na Colombia

Introduction

In 2005, and in keeping with the United Nations Millennium Goals, Colombia determined to eliminate gender inequality at every level of instruction by December 2015 (PNUD, 2005). Colombia has achieved this objective for educational coverage in primary and secondary school (Delgado, 2014), but whether this goal has been achieved in terms of girls' versus boys' performance in the eleventh grade (i.e., before university-level education) remains in question. Thus, the equality of access to opportunities for higher education in Colombia also remains in question.

Gender inequalities in academic performance have important consequences for women's careers and their role in society. When women lack skills and knowledge in math and reading, they have lesser opportunities to attend college in areas such as science, technology, engineering, and math (stem). Thus, women are likely to have fewer opportunities in the future and earn lower incomes when compared to men with similar characteristics (Schroter & Nielsen, 2013). The under-representation of women in stem fields is in turn correlated with shortfalls in innovation, creativity, and competitiveness in business, limitations on their empowerment and leadership, limited access to positions of power, and reductions in the possibility of higher returns (Schroter & Nielsen, 2013; Castillo et al., 2014; Morales & Sifontes, 2014). Moreover, lower educational achievement of girls for reasons other than personal capacity can, in general, cause negative cycles because girls perform worse in societies that are less egalitarian in terms of gender (Baker & Jones, 1993; Guiso et al., 2008; Monte et al., 2008; Gonzales & De la Rica, 2012). This inequality may also lead to economic losses to modern societies (Pollitzer & Schrauder, 2015).

Colombia is perceived to have high gender inequality compared to other developed and developing countries. According to the Global Gender Gap Index 2014, Colombia scored 53rd among the 144 countries analyzed. Moreover, despite the evident gender gap on the labor market and in salaries (Hoyos et al., 1994; Abadia & De la Rica, 2011), little attention has been paid to the disparities that precede these inequalities, such as the educational gap. This research hopes to contribute to the understanding of the observed and adjusted academic gender gap--where the observed gap refers to the calculation of girls' scores minus boys' scores, while the adjusted gap also considers this difference, but is controlled for individual, family, school, and regional factors. Using the database of the Saber 11 exams, this research aims to address the following questions: How does the observed and adjusted gender gap change along the score distribution? In what Colombian regions is the observed gap greatest? What proportion of the adjusted gap is explained by differences in students' personal, family and school characteristics?

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the relevant literature for the development of this research document. Section 3 describes the Saber 11 database. Section 4 presents the descriptive statistics. Section 5 describes the methodologies used to measure and decompose the gap, and section 6 presents the results. Section 7 is a conclusion.

  1. Literature Review

    The literature regarding the existence of gender-based gaps in school performance, their causes, and their relation to the well-being of societies is diverse. There are two main schools of thought that explain why girls tend to obtain lower scores than boys in math and higher scores than boys in reading. One school of thought suggests that the difference in performance between genders is rooted in biology. Works such as those by Lawton and Hatcher (2005), Temple and Cornish (1993), (2002), Halpern (2004), Kucian et al. (2005), and Gallagher and Kaufman (2005), for example, suggest that these differences exist because males and females differ in terms of their visual-spatial abilities, cognitive patterns, and brain functioning. These theories do not fully explain gender differences, however, and they do not account for the absence of gender gaps in some countries and cultures.

    The second school of thought has been developed mainly within sociology and economics. This literature theorizes that gender gaps stem from differences in students' social or cultural characteristics. Authors such as Baker and Jones (1993), Riegle-Crumb (2005), Guiso et al. (2008), Hyde and Mertz (2009), Fryer and Levitt (2004), and Gonzales et al. (2012) claim that the performance of girls versus boys on school tests predicts better opportunities for women in more egalitarian societies. In less egalitarian societies, girls do not find it useful to put effort into achieving success in some areas of study because they do not expect to be able to participate in related work or public activities. These findings suggest that contextual factors in addition to biological aspects contribute significantly to the reasons for academic gender gaps.

    Because geographical regions are subject to different cultural factors, estimating the academic gender gap in different countries has received special attention in the literature. Guiso et al. (2008) reported that the gender gap on the math portion of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing instrument does not show up in countries with greater gender equality as measured by women's emancipation, rates of activity, and political empowerment. Also using PISA data, Gonzales et al. (2012) found that differences in the cultural and social rules among different regions of Spain are crucial determinants of gender-based test differences in test results. They found that girls perform better in math and reading in those regions where gender equality is encouraged, thus suggesting that cultural aspects are at least correlated with girls' performance.

    Similarly, the work of Dickerson et al. (2015) suggests that sociodemographic aspects of different geographical areas can affect the gender gap in school performance. The authors studied 19 countries in Africa and determined that boys scored higher in math on standardized tests to a significantly variable extent in different regions. The gender gap was greater in regions with a higher proportion of women with low education, higher fertility rates, and larger populations of practicing Muslims. The adjusted gap decreased significantly when taking these characteristics into account. They concluded that regional differences are more predictive of gender gaps than other characteristics such as parents' education or other variables such as school type.

    Some studies have focused on math tests to examine the size of the gap in relation to test score distributions. The results are mixed for the lower tail of the distribution but consistent for the upper tail of the distribution. The observed gap in math is greater in the upper tail of the distribution than in the average range (Hedges & Nowell, 1995; Guimares & Sampaio, 2008). In addition, other studies (Xie & Shauman, 2003; Penner & Paret, 2008; Ellison & Swanson, 2010) have found that, at least in the United States, there is a notable underrepresentation of girls in higher distribution percentiles, and girls with exceptional performance tend to attend elite schools.

    In Colombia, two studies have assessed the gender gap in academic performance. Icfes (2013) performed a descriptive analysis of the average observed gap on national tests (Saber 3, 5, 9, and 11) and international tests (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, hereafter TIMSS and PISA), and found that some motivational, cognitive, attitudinal, and school factors could be correlated to performance. In tests for all the different grades, girls consistently exhibit a disadvantage relative to boys in math, and in high school the difference is greater. Abadia (2017) estimated the academic gender gap of Colombian students using the PISA test, finding that the gap favored boys in math and girls in reading after adjusting for personal, family, and school characteristics. However, these two papers provide only estimates for the mean of the distribution.

    This paper augments the literature in several aspects. First, we contribute to the search for new and better methods to estimate the academic gender gap across the score distribution in a Latin American context. Second, unlike previous efforts to measure the relationship between the academic gender gap and its determinants, we quantify the gap using the Juhn, Murphy, and Pierce method to decompose the gap along the score distribution and determine the extent to which it is explained by personal, family, and school characteristics. Third, we use reliable data from almost the entire population of high school students in 2014, all of whom took the same exam on the same day. This provides reliable and generalizable estimates. Finally, this is the first study in Colombia to measure the academic gender gap using the state exit exam (Saber 11) and to perform a regional analysis.

  2. Data

    The Saber 11 test is a mandatory instrument designed to measure students' competencies in five subject areas. It is administered two months before students graduate from high school and it is used as a selection mechanism for higher education admissions and scholarships. We used cross-sectional data from the Saber test administered in 2014 by the Colombian Institute for the Promotion of Higher Education (Icfes). In addition to the scores, the database contains information about the socioeconomic characteristics of all students and their family, school, and regional characteristics. Unlike other tests such as PISA and TIMMS, Saber 11 is administrated to...

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