Gender Equality and the Math Gender Gap

In their seminal article, Guiso et al. (2008) uncover a positive relationship between several measures of gender equality and the math gender gap (which tends to favor boys) by exploiting cross-sectional variation in PISA test scores from 39 countries – the majority of which belong to the OECD – at a given year (2003). Using five waves of PISA data spanning the period 2003-2015 and exploiting variation both across – and within – countries, we find that the positive association between the female-male gender gap in math test scores and several measures of gender equality vanishes in OECD countries once we account for country fixed effects. Interestingly, our analysis also uncovers a positive and statistically significant association between the math gender gap and several gender equality indicators for countries in the bottom quartile of per capita GDP. This association is robust to controlling for country-level time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity