Why are girls still falling behind in maths?
A study in France shows a striking gender gap within the first months of school.
FOR DECADES a big story in education has been the ascent of girls. They now outperform boys in most subjects, leave school with better grades and are more likely to get a university degree. But one subject remains a problem: across much of the world, girls lag behind in mathematics. That pushes girls away from certain careers and drags down their future earnings.
A new study from France shows just how early the problem starts. Published on June 11th in Nature, a scientific journal, it tracked the performance of 2.6m children who took the EvalAide, a half-yearly battery of tests. That gave the researchers a consistent measure of academic progress over one year from the start of school (around age six).
There was no clear difference at the beginning of the school year: there were slightly more boys among both the top and bottom performers, and girls clustered in the middle (see chart 1). But after just four months a gender gap emerged. By the next year there were twice as many boys as girls in the top 5%. This trend held steady across state and private schools, and in every academic year between 2018 and 2021. The gender gap was wider among children from higher-income families and, curiously, was especially pronounced in families where both parents are scientists.
What happened? Pauline Martinot, the lead author and a medical doctor with a background in neurodevelopment and global health, says the divergence is not driven by ability but by anxiety. Maths, she says, is usually taught and tested competitively and under time pressure—conditions that girls have been taught to fear. Other studies back this up. Women and girls often perform worse on timed or competitive maths tests.
Stereotypes that boys are naturally better with numbers can make the problem worse, by undermining teachers’ confidence in girls or girls’ confidence in themselves. Such assumptions can come from parents, too. Dr Martinot suspects the effect is strongest in well-off families where parents may be more involved in their children’s learning, and thus more likely to pass those views on.
The study is the first of its kind to show how quickly schooling introduces this divergence. And the findings have relevance beyond France. Of the 73 countries tracked by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, only 22 report better maths scores for girls than for boys.
Italy has the widest such gap in the rich world (see chart 2), which has prompted researchers there to look for solutions. One study in 2024 by economists at the University of Turin found that learning in small groups focused on solving problems together cut the gender gap by 40%. Crucially, girls’ scores improved without hurting those of boys. Different testing might also help. Women and girls often perform better on maths tests when competitive or time pressures are removed.
Whether collaborative learning beats more traditional methods is a hot debate in education circles. But the new study’s findings suggest that girls are not doomed to lag behind boys when it comes to numbers. Just four months of schooling can result in a striking gender gap. Using different methods, teachers might be able to close that gap in a similarly short amount of time.
© 2025, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
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