organizational issues, such as poor learning conditions and organizational problems, exacerbate the gender gap between girls and boys. That is, boys’ achievement tends to be negatively impacted by challenging learning conditions to a greater extent compared to girls’ achievement. These findings are consistent with previous work on gender gaps in attitudes, showing that girls, in general, tend to report more positive attitudes toward learning (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). Previous research has also shown that social norms, gender stereotypes, and teacher/school expectations contribute to the performance gap between girls and boys (Stromquist 2007; Page and Jha 2009; Younger and Cobbett 2014; Jha and Pouezevara 2016). In other words, teachers and schools contribute to developing and reinforcing different expectations of appropriate behavior for both boys and girls, which can have the effect of hindering boys’ performance.

Building on the existing research, this paper examines the factors that contribute to the gender gap in student performance in Saudi Arabia. In particular, the paper investigates whether a range of student, family, class, and school variables can explain the achievement gap in mathematics and science between boys and girls at grades 4 and 8. The contribution of these variables in predicting overall Saudi student achievement in these two subjects is also examined. Data from both TIMSS 2019 and Saudi Arabia’s National Assessment of Learning Outcomes (NALO) 2018 were employed. Both TIMSS and NALO assess grades 4 and 8 students’ mathematics and science achievement, as well as collect a wide range of contextual information about students, their families, teachers, and schools.

This paper contributes to the current literature in two main ways. First, it addresses a need for more evidence about the factors associated with the achievement gap between boys and girls in the MENA region, and especially in Saudi Arabia. The paper explores the surprisingly large and consistent performance gap observed between boys and girls in the region. As shown in figure 1, boys in the region tend to achieve noticeably lower scores than girls in reading, mathematics, and science, with this difference being larger than those in most of the other countries participating in PISA 2018. A further feature of the paper is its examination of two large-scale assessments that have a shared focus on the same domains of study and the same grade levels in a complementary fashion, with data from NALO used to complement findings arising from the analysis of TIMSS data. This paper, therefore, provides important insights for policy makers, both in Saudi Arabia and in other countries in the region, regarding the factors that may contribute to the observed gender gaps in achievement across a range of subjects.

Secondly, Saudi Arabia offers a unique setting in which boys and girls attend separate schools on a universal basis starting from grade 1, being educated only by male and female teachers, respectively, in effect inhabiting parallel education systems, as shown in figure 2, which presents the distribution of grade 4 and grade 8 students in single-gender or mixed education among countries participating in TIMSS 2019.<sup>3</sup> Although gender-segregated schools are not uncommon in the MENA region, students do not usually attend single-gender schools until the end of primary education. The unique structure of the Saudi education system provides an opportunity to examine, in a multilevel framework, how variance in systemlevel factors applying only to boys or to girls contributes to the observed individual differences in achievement. This analysis exploits the existence of parallel gender-segregated school environments that operate within a shared overarching cultural context, where expectations and practices outside school also vary significantly between boys and girls. While this paper exploits this feature of the Saudi education system in its analysis, it also acknowledges potential difficulties in interpreting findings due to this extreme degree of separation as teacher and school characteristics are confounded with gender differences in learning outcomes. For example, any differences between girls’ and boys’ educational environments seen in these data are inseparable from the fact that the (male) teachers of boys have been trained and work

> 3 In 2019, Saudi Arabia announced that boys would start to be educated by female teachers in grades 1 through 3. These boys’ classes are kept separated from the girls’ classes. Currently, there are few girls’ schools offering boys’ classes with female teachers, though the intention is to increase the number.

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