Stanford Professor Says The Gender Gap in Test Scores Widened After Covid-19 at Ed School Talk

Standardized test scores for female students in low-income areas were disproportionately lower than male students after the Covid-19 pandemic, Stanford University professor Sean F. Reardon told attendees at a Harvard Center for Education Policy Research event on Tuesday.

Standardized test scores dropped nationwide after the pandemic, but Reardon’s research found that scores for female students fell significantly compared to their male peers — especially for those in low-income, under-resourced school districts.

Reardon’s team analyzed data from 7,000 school districts across the country in order to understand elements contributing to the change in the gender gap during the pandemic.

They focused on six key factors including the districts’ minority populations, socioeconomic status, and school resources. He said his project was prompted by a recent finding from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that female students had started to fall “substantially behind” their male peers.

Reardon noted that male students’ scores fell during the pandemic, but only by roughly half as much as their female peers. Girls outperformed boys in reading standardized tests in almost every school district in the country before the pandemic, but have seen lower scores in recent years, especially in math.

“You see this consistent pattern of everyone didn’t do well during the pandemic, but girls seem to have fallen behind substantially more,” Reardon said.

“Which suggests there’s something — not just a possible secular trend — but something specific about the pandemic that may have shaped these patterns,” he added.

Reardon’s team then pivoted to investigate the root cause of this trend. He argued that the decline in test scores could, at least partially, be due to a stronger enforcement of traditional gender roles during the pandemic. When younger children were quarantined at home, the expectation might have fallen on the daughters to look after their younger siblings, Reardon said.

Reardon argued that a “re-emergence” of traditional gender norms could put young girls’ academic engagement at risk.

“You might think maybe there’s a reversion to more traditional, stereotypical gender roles and expectations on the part of parents that might have fed into more of the caregiving kind of story, but might have also given girls a message that maybe math wasn’t as important as something like this,” he said.

Reardon also found higher rates of depression and anxiety in female students during the pandemic, and argued that girls could have been “differently sensitive” to the global crisis.

“People were sick, people were dying, family members unemployed. If girls are more attuned to that, or more affected by that, then that might have impacted their ability to focus on school.”

Reardon said that his research could be broadened in the future to evaluate the connection between societal norms and crises.

“We live in a world where there’s lots of, and a wide variety of, kinds of gender norms — expectations, behaviors, attitudes, discrimination, etc. — and then a giant crisis comes along,” he said. “How do those two things interact? Does one make the other worse or better, or what?”