Gender Differences in the Effects of Socioeconomic Background

Recent Cross-Nation al Evidence

Gary N. Marks

Australian C ouncil fo r Ed uc atio n Research and M elbourne

Institute of Applied Eco nomic and Soc ia l Researc

According to traditional sex-role theory, parents are more concerned with the educational and socioeconomic success of their sons, since paid work in the labour market is the basis of their sons’ financial security. For their daughters, the expectation would be a short period in paid work followed by marriage and home duties. Gender role socialization would thus contribute to gender differences in educational choices and attainment and later influence occupational and other labour force outcomes (Connelltal., 1982). Since socioeconomically advantaged families have greater financial  and  other  resources  to  devote  to  their  sons’  educational  and labour force careers than less advantaged families, the educational and labour  market  outcomes  of  men  would  be  more  closely  tied  to  their socioeconomic origins than those for women.

Although early research on occupational mobility suggested that occupational background had a weaker relationship with occupational destinations  among  women  than  men  (for  a  summary  of  this  research,  see Glenn and Albrecht, 1980) this is not true of educational outcomes, at least for  the  US  during  the  1960s  and  1970s.  In  the  Wisconsin  longitudinal study of high school seniors, socioeconomic background had a greater influence  on  educational  attainment  (measured  by  years  of  education) among  women  than  men  (Alexander  and  Eckland,  1974;  Sewell  and Hauser, 1976: 13; Sewell and Shah, 1967; Sewell et al., 1980). Similarly, analysing other US data, Treiman and Terrell (1975) reported higher correlations between occupational background and educational attainment among women than men.

A variant of sex-role theory is the same-sex socialization model, which contends that children are particularly influenced by the same-sex parent because  they  see  the  same-sex  parent  as  more  similar  to  themselves (Mischel, 1970). The same-sex socialization model can be used to account for a range of gender-specific behaviours including children’s play, house- hold chores, aggression and occupational aspirations. Raley and Bianchi (2006)  summarize  the  child  development  literature  as  showing  that  ‘a gendered self-concept emerges through a mix of social learning, biological predispositions, and gender role modelling processes that take place within the family and that result in schemas for appropriate male and female behavior and choices’. For male children and adolescents, their most visible adult role model is usually their father, so they will be more influenced by their father’s occupation and education. Therefore, according  to  the  same-sex  socialization  model,  their  educational  outcomes should  be  more  consistent  with  their  father ’s  educational  and  occupational attainment rather than their mother ’s. Similarly, daughters’ educational  attainment  should  be  more  closely  aligned  to  their  mothers’ socioeconomic characteristics than those of their fathers. Korupp (2000:37) provides a stronger version of the same-sex socialization model:

Here the leading hypothesis is that compared with the father the mother ’s educational and occupational status is important only for the daughter and compared with the mother, the father ’s socioeconomic influence is important only for the educational attainment of the son.

Early studies tended to support a weaker version of the same-sex socialization model in that the socioeconomic characteristics of either parent influenced the educational attainment of their children (of either sex) but the effects of the same-sex parents’ characteristics were stronger. For the US, Treiman  and  Terell  (1975)  reported  stronger  effects  of  father’s  education than mother’s education on their son’s education; and stronger effects of mother’s education than father’s on their daughter’s education. Similarly, Ofek and Santos (1979) found that women’s educational attainment was more influenced by their mother’s education than their father’s.

However, later studies were less consistent  with the same-sex socialization model. Reeder and Conger (1984) concluded that among daughters, father’s education was more important than mother’s, but mother’s occupation was more important than father’s. Consistent with the same-sex socialization model, Crook (1995) found in that in Australia mothers’ characteristics influenced their daughters’ education more than their sons’ but concluded that ‘parents are no more likely to influence the educational and occupational attainment of their like-sexed than their opposite-sexed children’. In a three-country study of Germany, the Netherlands and the US, Korupp (2002) did not find strong evidence for the same-sex socialization model. She concluded, ‘little  support  is  found  to  underline  the  expectation  of  a  sex-role  model regarding the educational attainment of children’ (Korupp, 2000: 53).

Cross-national studies of student achievement provide a strong empirical basis to assess the appropriateness of sex-role theory and the same- sex  socialization  model  to  students’  educational  performance.  In  the studies  reviewed  above,  education  is  measured  by  years  of  education, which has different meanings between countries. Furthermore in countries with highly tracked systems, it obscures the great variation in student  performance  between  students  in  different  tracks  with  the  same number of years of education. In contrast, in cross-national studies of student achievement educational performance is based on students’ scores in standardized tests. Test score is a much finer measure of educational performance than years of education. Furthermore, the measures of socio- economic background, father ’s and mother ’s occupation and education, are measured in the same way across countries whereas single-country studies often have quite different measures.

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to address two specific research questions: (1) Are there gender differences in the influence of socioeconomic background on students’ educational performance? and (2) Is student performance influenced more by the socioeconomic characteristics of the same-sex parent? These research questions are addressed using student  achievement  data  from  a  large  number  of  countries  that  include detailed measures of fathers’ and mothers’ occupation and education. It may be the case that the same-sex socialization role is more applicable for parental education than parental occupation or vice versa. Two internationally comparable measures of educational performance are analysed: reading and mathematics. The same-sex socialization model may be more apparent for mathematics than for reading. For example, men may attach more importance to their sons’ performance in mathematics than their daughters’,  so  their  socioeconomic  characteristics  have  a  larger  impact among boys for mathematics.

The two general  research  questions  are  disaggregated  into  seven testable  hypotheses.  They form  a  hierarchy  from  the  most  aggregated measure of socioeconomic background down to hypotheses about its four components, father ’s and mother ’s occupation and education.

  According to sex-role theory:

1.  The effect of the family’s socioeconomic level on student performance is stronger among boys.

  According to the same-sex socialization model:

2.1  The effect of father ’s socioeconomic characteristics on student performance is stronger among boys.

2.2  The  effect  of  mother ’s  socioeconomic  characteristics  on  student performance is stronger among girls.

3.1  The effect of father ’s occupational status on student performance is stronger among boys.

3.2  The effect of mother ’s occupational status on student performance is stronger among girls.

3.3  The effect of father ’s educational attainment on student performance is stronger among boys.

3.4  The effect of mother ’s educational attainment on student performance is stronger among girls.

Dat a an d Measures

The data analysed are from the OECD’s 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study that examined student achievement in reading, mathematics  and  science  among  over  172,000  15-year-old  students in 6000 schools in 32 countries. Participating countries include the OECD countries (except Turkey), and several non-OECD countries: Brazil, Latvia and Russia. Within each country, a two-stage sampling procedure was employed: first randomly selecting schools with probabilities proportional to size, and second, randomly selecting 15-year-old students within selected schools.  In some countries,  schools  were  stratified  by  type  or location. Details on the sampling and response rates for both schools and students can be found in the initial and technical reports (OECD, 2001, 2002). Japan was excluded from these analyses because there were too much missing data on parental occupation and education. Liechtenstein was also excluded because of the small sample size.

 

Measur es

The outcome measures  investigated  are  reading  and  mathematics achievement scores. Item response theory (IRT) modelling was used to create scores standardized to an international (OECD) mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100. Students’ scores are in the form of five plausible values rather than a single score. Details on the plausible values are available from the PISA technical report (OECD, 2002).

Students’ gender was elicited by a simple question asking if the student was a boy or a girl. If missing, the gender of the student was usually ascertained by the sampling frame. In the constructed measure of gender, girls were assigned a score of 1 and boys 0.

Information on parents’ occupation was obtained by two questions, asking students their mother ’s and father ’s main job and what they did in  their  main  job.  The  information  on  parental  occupation  was  coded according to the International Standard Classification of Occupation 1988 (ISCO-88), as provided by the International Labour Office. ISCO-88 is a four-digit hierarchical coding schema comprising 390 different occupational  categories.  Each  ISCO-88  occupational  category  is  assigned  an occupational  status  score  from  the  International  Socioeconomic  Index (ISEI). Ganzeboom and Treiman (1996) provide details on its construction and list ISCO-88 occupational titles with their respective ISEI scores. Information on the educational attainment of each parent was elicited by two questions. The first asked for the level of school education completed. A follow-up question was then asked about whether the parent had obtained any post-secondary qualifications. The responses to these questions were classified according to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) schema (OECD, 1999).

The resulting measure of parental educational attainment comprised seven  categories:  no  schooling,  primary  school,  middle  secondary school,  higher  secondary  school  (non-academic),  higher  secondary school (academic), tertiary education (non-academic) and tertiary education  (academic).  Scores  for  each  category  were  constructed  through optimal scaling techniques estimating scores that maximize the relationship  between  parents’  education  and  student  achievement  across  the three domains within countries. This was done because the ordinal and cardinal relationships between the categorical measure of parental education and student achievement differ between countries.

Family socioeconomic status comprises  four  variables:  father’s  and mother’s occupational status and educational attainment. Father’s socioeconomic characteristics comprise two variables, father’s occupational status and father’s education.  Similarly, mother’s socioeconomic characteristics comprise mother’s occupational status  and  education.  The  composite measures of family’s, father’s and mother’s socioeconomic characteristics were constructed using the sheaf variable technique (see Whitt,  1986), which maximizes the combined relationship of the constituent variables  with  the  dependent  variable.  The  resultant  single  sheaf  variable explains  exactly  the  same  amount  of  variance  as  do  the  constituent variables in a parallel OLS regression analysis. The sheaf variables used the ISEI indices for the measures of parental occupation and the optimal scaled measures of  parental  education.  These  resultant  measures  were centred at the country means and standardized with a mean of 0 and a standard  deviation  of  1.  The sheaf variables were  constructed  within countries, not across the pooled data set.

In  the  tables  of  results  the  regression  coefficients  for  socioeconomic background variables reflect the average change in student achievement score  for  a  one  standard  deviation  change  in  the  corresponding  independent variable. The coefficients for gender are estimated on the difference in achievement (in reading or mathematics) of girls compared to boys.  The interaction  terms  between  the  measures  of  socioeconomic background and gender are estimates of the difference in the effect of the measure of socioeconomic background on achievement for girls compared to boys. If the coefficient is negative then the effect of the measure of socioeconomic background on student achievement is weaker among girls compared to boys. If it is positive then the effect is stronger among girls than boys.

The standard  errors  associated  with  the  regression  coefficients  have been adjusted to take into account the cluster design of the sample and sample stratification (if employed). Each regression coefficient and associated standard error was calculated by averaging the results obtained from separate analyses of the five plausible values. The OECD’s (2002) PISA weights were employed but adjusted to the original sample sizes rather than countries’ populations of 15-year-olds.

The  composite  variables  comprised  only  variables  with  non-missing data. For example, mother ’s socioeconomic characteristics comprised only  mother ’s  education  for  cases  where  data  on  mother ’s  occupation was missing. For the analyses that included the four separate measures of father ’s  and  mother ’s  occupation  and  education,  missing  cases  were deleted list-wise. Other approaches to handling missing cases were experimented with but did not substantially change the results.

Result s

Gender Diff erenc es in t he Effe cts o f F ath er’s andMoth er’s Characte ris tics

The  estimates  for  father ’s  and  mother ’s  socioeconomic  characteristics, gender and the gender interactions are presented in Table 2 for reading and  Table  3  for  mathematics.  These analyses provide  support  for  the same-sex socialization model but only in a limited number of countries.

The effects of father’s socioeconomic characteristics on reading achievement  are  significantly  weaker  among  girls  in  five  countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark and France. For Norway, the interaction term was significant at the .05 < p < .10 level. The effects of mother’s occupational and  educational  characteristics  are  significantly  stronger  (at  the conventional level) among girls in only three countries: Australia, Canada and France. In Denmark, the effect is significant at the .05 < p < .10 level.

So only in Australia, Canada, Denmark and France are gender differences in the effects of father’s and mother ’s characteristics on reading achievement consistent with the same-sex socialization model.

For mathematics, the effects of father’s socioeconomic characteristics are significantly weaker among  girls  in  Austria,  Belgium,  Denmark, Ireland and Latvia (Table 3). At the more generous level of statistical significance, the effect of father’s characteristics was also weaker among girls in the Czech Republic. In Austria, Belgium and Denmark the magnitude of the difference between boys and girls in the effect of father ’s socioeconomic characteristics is relatively large: over 10 score points. Contrary to the  same-sex  socialization  hypothesis,  in  Poland  the  effect  of  father ’s socioeconomic characteristics was substantially stronger among girls, but not at the conventional level of statistical significance. In no country was the  effect  of  mother ’s  socioeconomic  characteristics  on  mathematics achievement  significantly stronger  (at  conventional  levels  of  statistical significance) among girls.

 

Gender Diff erences in t he Effe cts of F ath er’s andMoth er’s Occupationa l S tatus and Educa tion

The effects of father’s and mother ’s occupational status and education, gender and the gender interactions on student achievement are presented in  Table  4  for  reading  and  Table  5  for  mathematics.  There  are  four interaction terms, one each for father ’s and mother ’s occupational status and education.

The effects of father’s occupational status on reading (Table 4) were significantly stronger among boys in six countries: Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Hungary. (In Switzerland the effect was significant at the .05 < p < .10 level.) In several of these countries, the gender difference  was  fairly  substantial  around,  or  above,  10  score  points.  The effects of mother’s occupational status were significantly stronger among girls in only four countries: Canada, France, Hungary and Norway. The effect for Denmark was significant at the less demanding .05 > p > .10 level.

In no country was the effect of father’s education on reading significantly stronger among boys compared to girls at conventional levels of statistical significance.  In  Belgium  and  France,  the  effect  was  consistent  with  the same-sex socialization model but significant only at the .05 > p > .10 significance level. Contrary to the same-sex socialization model, the effects of father’s education were significantly stronger among girls in Luxembourg and in Germany at the less demanding significance level. Mother’s education had significantly stronger effects among girls only in Iceland.

For performance in mathematics (Table 5), the effect of father ’s socio-economic status was significantly stronger among boys in five countries: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands. The effect was significant at the .05 > p > .10 level in Finland and Luxembourg. There was no significant difference between boys and girls in the magnitude of the effect of mother’s occupational status on mathematics score in any of the countries examined.

The effects of father’s education on mathematics score were consistent with the same-sex socialization model in only three countries: Belgium, Denmark and Latvia but only at the .05 > p > .10 significance level. Again, only in Iceland was the effect of mother’s education significantly stronger among girls.

Key Words:

gender role – гендерные роли

sex-role theory - традиционные представления о том, что является уделом женщины и мужчины

socialization - социализация

socioeconomically advantaged families - социально и экономически благополучные семьи

occupational mobility – профессиональная мобильность

 longitudinal study - лонгитудинальное исследование (длительное и непрерывное)

educational attainment – уровень образования

gender-specific behaviours особенности поведения, обусловленные полом

biological predispositions – биологическая предрасположенность

testable hypotheses - проверяемые гипотезы

hierarchy - иерархия

aggregate measure - комплексный показатель, совокупный показатель

OECD countries – страны организации экономического сотрудничества и развития

randomly selecting - отобранные в произвольном порядке

response theory – теория отклика

standard deviation – допустимое /стандартное/ среднеквадратическое отклонение

plausible values – правдоподобное значение

PISA - Международная программа по оценке образовательных достижений учащихся

follow-up question - уточняющий вопрос

primary school- начальная школа

middle secondary school - младшие классы средней школы

higher secondary school (non-academic) – старшие классы средней школы (нетрадиционной)

higher secondary school (academic),

tertiary education (non-academic) - высшее образование

tertiary education (academic) - высшее образование (классическое)

cluster design – кластерного вида

results obtained – полученные результаты

data on sth. is missing – отсутствуют данные по, отсутствует информация о

gender interactions – взаимодействие между полами

Summ ary

This article examines two related questions: (1) Are there gender differences in the influence of socioeconomic background on students’ educational performance? and (2) Is student performance influenced more by the socioeconomic characteristics of the same-sex parent? Seven hypotheses are derived and tested using data from 30 countries on student performance in reading and mathematics. There is little or no gender difference in the effects of socioeconomic background on educational performance in almost all countries examined. In no country are all the hypotheses relating to the same-sex socialization model supported, although there is a tendency for father’s socioeconomic characteristics and father’s occupation to have a stronger impact  among  boys  in  some  countries.  There were  very  few  instances  where mother’s characteristics were stronger among girls. In sum, there is only limited evidence to support the same-sex socialization model for educational performance.

Table  6  summarizes  the  results  for  countries  for  the  seven  hypotheses tested. It can be concluded that the effect of socioeconomic background on educational performance is no stronger among boys than girls. The only exception was Belgium, where the difference was not statistically significant at conventional levels.

In no country are all the hypotheses derived from the same-sex socialization model supported. Nevertheless, in about half the countries examined, aspects of the same-sex socialization model are supported to some degree: the effects of occupational status or education of the same-sex parent, usually the father, tend to be stronger. However within countries there  is  a  lack  of  consistency  across  measures  of  socioeconomic  background  and  between  achievement  in  reading  and  mathematics.  When occupational and educational data are combined, the effects for father’s characteristics on educational performance are stronger among boys and mother ’s characteristics stronger among girls in only a limited number of countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark and France. Even in these countries, the hypotheses are not always supported for both reading and mathematics.  Therefore, there is  not  strong  support  for  the  model. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the same-sex socialization model is more appropriate in more traditional, or less modern, societies or that it is more appropriate for performance in mathematics than reading.

The  effects  of  father ’s  occupational  status  are  consistent  with  the same-sex socialization model in a greater number of countries and the coefficient tends to be larger than is the case for mother ’s occupational status or the educational attainment of either parent. So studies in these countries in which the measure of socioeconomic background is based solely on father ’s occupation may show that the effect of socioeconomic background is stronger among boys, implying that the reproduction of socioeconomic  inequalities  is  stronger  among  males.  However, more comprehensive measures of socioeconomic  background  would  show such a conclusion is not warranted.

In summary, gender differences in the effects of parental socioeconomic characteristics on student achievement are in a number of instances consistent with the same-sex socialization  model.  However,  in  the  great majority of countries there is little or no gender difference in the effects of father ’s  and  mother ’s  socioeconomic  characteristics  on  their  sons’  and daughters’ educational performance

Примеры вопросов преподавателя :

What theories are examined in the article?

Data from what countries are the results based on?

What conclusion does the author draw?

What is your opinion on the issue?