Series WP-15-16 Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes

U.S. women graduate from high school at higher rates than U.S. men, but the female-male educational advantage is larger, and has increased by more, among black students and students of low socioeconomic status (SES) than among white and high-SES students. The authors explore why boys fare worse than girls in low-SES households—both behaviorally and educationally—by exploiting matched birth certificates, health, disciplinary, academic, and high school graduation records for more than 1 million children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002. They account for unobserved family heterogeneity by contrasting outcomes of opposite-sex siblings linked to birth mothers by using administrative records. Relative to their sisters, boys born to low-education and unmarried mothers, raised in low-income neighborhoods, and enrolled at poor-quality public schools have a higher incidence of truancy and behavioral problems throughout elementary and middle school, exhibit higher rates of behavioral and cognitive disability, perform worse on standardized tests, are less likely to graduate high school, and are more likely to commit serious crimes as juveniles. The authors argue that the family disadvantage gradient in the gender gap is a causal effect of the postnatal environment: Family disadvantage has no relationship with the sibling gender gap in neonatal health, measured by birth weight, APGAR scores (a test given right after birth to quickly assess a baby’s health), prenatal-care adequacy, congenital anomalies, maternal health, and labor and delivery complications. Although family disadvantage is strongly correlated with schools and neighborhood quality, the SES gradient in the sibling gender gap is almost as large within schools and neighborhoods as it is between them. A surprising implication of these findings is that, relative to white siblings, black boys fare worse than their sisters in significant part because black children—both boys and girls—are raised in more disadvantaged family environments. Acknowledgments: We thank Josh Angrist, Marianne Bertrand, John Ham, Louis Kaplow, Mikael Lindahl, Jeremy Majerovitz, Richard Murnane, Jessica Pan, Kjell Salvanes, Till von Wachter, and numerous seminar participants at the NBER Education Program, CESifo Program on the Economics of Education, MIT, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Miami University, National University of Singapore, Queens University, Simon Fraser University, University of Quebec at Montreal, University of Toronto, Uppsala University, Washington University in Saint Louis, and the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation 60th Anniversary Conference on Inequality and Health for valuable suggestions that helped to improve the paper. Autor acknowledges support from the Russell Sage Foundation (Grant #85-12-07). Figlio and Roth acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Education Sciences (CALDER grant), and Figlio acknowledges support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Wasserman acknowledges support from the NSF Graduation Research Fellowship and the National Institute on Aging, Grant Number T32AG000186. We are grateful to the Florida Departments of Education and Health for providing the de-identified, matched data used in this analysis. The conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of the Florida Departments of Education and Health or those of our funders.