A Decomposition of Student Achievement Gap by Gender in China: Evidence from Random Class Assignment

TY - JOUR

T1 - A Decomposition of Student Achievement Gap by Gender in China

T2 - Evidence from Random Class Assignment

AU - Luo, Rundong

AU - Tenga, Kuan

AU - Xu, Lei

AU - Zhu, Yu

N1 - Funding Information: Rundong Luo is funded by a grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72073082 ). All remaining errors are ours. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Elsevier Ltd Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - Using random class assignment in the China Education Panel Survey, we study the gender achievement gap of lower secondary students in China. Girls outperform boys in Chinese and English by around 0.5 SD, holding all factors including hukou status, cognitive ability and schools attended constant. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition reveals that most of the gender gap cannot be explained by observables regardless of the subjects and this is contrary to cognitive scores. Quantile decomposition results indicate that the unexplained “girl premium” is largely monotonically decreasing in the conditional quantiles of the exam score distribution for all subjects, being particularly large at the lower tails, but vanishes altogether at the top decile in Math.

AB - Using random class assignment in the China Education Panel Survey, we study the gender achievement gap of lower secondary students in China. Girls outperform boys in Chinese and English by around 0.5 SD, holding all factors including hukou status, cognitive ability and schools attended constant. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition reveals that most of the gender gap cannot be explained by observables regardless of the subjects and this is contrary to cognitive scores. Quantile decomposition results indicate that the unexplained “girl premium” is largely monotonically decreasing in the conditional quantiles of the exam score distribution for all subjects, being particularly large at the lower tails, but vanishes altogether at the top decile in Math.

KW - Blind-Oaxaca decomposition

KW - Gender education gap

KW - Hukou

KW - Quantile decomposition

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85098106859

U2 - 10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101721

DO - 10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101721

M3 - Article

SN - 0883-0355

VL - 106

JO - International Journal of Educational Research

JF - International Journal of Educational Research

IS - 2021

M1 - 101721

ER -