When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment

Analysis of almost three million children captures when ‘mathematical gender gap’ first emerges and could help focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind

Around the world, teenage boys outperform girls on mathematics tests, and men are more likely to pursue related careers — despite baby boys showing no superior sense of numbers or grasp of logic. Now, a gigantic study of schoolchildren in France pinpoints that this ‘mathematical gender gap’ appears during the first year of school. The finding could help to focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind.

Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months (see 'Watch the mathemtics gender gap emerge'). A more dramatic gap in mathematical performance emerges after 12 months of school, according to the analysis, published on 11 June in Nature¹.

“This paper suggests that the gender inequalities in children’s maths performance aren’t innate or inevitable,” says psychologist Jillian Lauer at the University of Cambridge, UK. “If we want to stop girls from falling behind, we need to focus on their early experiences at school.”

The study authors make a host of suggestions for how to do this — including providing support to children to reduce anxiety around maths; teachers encouraging participation from girls as often as boys during class; and encouraging curiosity and problem-solving outside the classroom.

“Ethically speaking, we cannot do nothing when we see these results,” says study author and neuroscientist Pauline Martinot at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris.

The latest study is more comprehensive than previous ones that found a similar gender gap in the first year of school. It covers four cohorts: all children who started their first year of school in France in 2018, 2019, 2020 or 2021. This amounts to almost three million five-, six- and seven-year olds. It confirms the finding across the whole country: the gap emerged in all cohorts, socioeconomic groups, regions of France and types of school.

This “startling” universality suggests that policies aimed at reducing the gap have to target everyone, says economist Andrew Simon at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “The policy can’t be limited to a certain group if you really want to fix it.”

Power of big data

The study uses the power of big data to show that it is the start of formal education — not age — that triggers the gap. In France, children start school the September of the calendar year that they turn six. The researchers compare children who were born just a few days apart but are in different school years. The gender gap is present for boys and girls born in December entering their second year of school, the researchers report, but is absent among their peers born days later, in January, who have just started school.

The lack of average differences between the performance of boys and girls at the beginning of the first year suggests that the causes lie in the environment children experience once they start school, rather than innate differences in interest or ability, say researchers.

“There might be some biological factor that we haven’t been able to clearly link to maths or spatial reasoning,” says Lauer. “But this paper suggests that their experiences with the world are mattering more than anything else.”

As babies and very young children, girls and boys display very similar grasp of numbers and logic. “We all have this common core knowledge of mathematics,” says Martinot.