American girls’ performance at school has suffered a bigger blow from the Covid-19 pandemic than that of their male peers, according to a new analysis.
reported on Monday that Since 2019, girls’ average test scores have dipped below those of boys in all 15 of the exam datasets examined by The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper reported Monday.
While both genders suffered some “learning loss,” girls appeared to have been hit harder – sometimes by a marginal amount, and sometimes substantially.
More alarming is that recent research by the University of Arkansas (PDF link) suggests that this pattern holds true across 70 other countries, even adjusting for demographic differences between each population.
The reasons for the drop are unclear, but experts suggested that troubled boys may have absorbed more attention from teachers because they tend to act out more, or that girls may have taken on more caregiving or household responsibilities during Covid, diverting their energy for and attention to their studies.
“This not only will hurt girls now; it will change college enrollment, it will change the talent pool that we have,” study co-author Harry Patrinos told the Journal.
According to the newspaper, both genders saw worse test results in 2024 than in 2019, with the girls’ gap larger in every dataset studied.
Math, reading, and science were particularly affected, reversing a previous trend of girls being level with or ahead of boys in test results.
Erica Thomas, a mother of three boys and a girl in Maryland, said her daughter lost more ground than her sons during the pandemic, perhaps because her continued good behavior led to teachers overlooking her problems.
“If my child was wild and throwing desks around the room, somebody would pay attention to them,” Thomas told the Journal.
