Contextualising Gender Gaps: The Moderating Role of Social Context on Gender Educational Inequality in European Primary Schools

Abstract Despite trends of improvement in girls’ educational achievement over the last decades, gender gaps in mathematics to the detriment of girls persist in most European countries, while boys continue to perform worse in reading. The aim of this paper is to understand how different social contexts moderate gender gaps in mathematics and reading in primary school. Using data from the international assessments TIMSS-2019 and PIRLS-2021, we compare gender ratios across the performance distribution in 27 European countries. Then, we estimate multilevel linear regression models to identify the moderators of the gender slopes at the student, school and country levels. Our results confirm that the degree of gender equality is positively related to girls’ maths performance, even in a relatively restricted context such as the European one. Only school and country average reading achievement is associated with better boys’ relative performance and a closing reading gender gap. Finally, we detect contextual effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on the gender gap in mathematics at the school and country levels. Possible mechanisms of these contextual effects are discussed.