Reversing the Gap? Gender Differences in Reading and Math Achievement in 14 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Pearl Kyei, University of Pennsylvania

This paper explores gender gaps in reading and math for 6th graders in the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). The primary purpose of this analysis is to provide a cross-national comparison of gender differences in achievement and then to study the factors that affect the gender gap. The main variables of interest are student schooling history, household background and school characteristics. The second part of the paper uses hierarchical linear modeling to study the country-level factors driving the cross-national variation focusing on between-school differences in student socio-economic status composition and school quality. Preliminary results show that certain SACMEQ countries have successfully eliminated or reversed the overall gender gap in both reading and math achievement. They also indicate that the narrowing of the gender achievement gap is influenced by differences in schooling progress by gender and variation in school quality and socio-economic background.