Gender and Students’ Achievements: Evidence from PISA 2015

Abstract

This study’s objective is to examine school performance gaps according to gender on a global scale. After exploiting
the data of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of 2015, we can see inequalities of students’
achievements between countries and within every country, by mobilizing a multilevel modelling. Resorting to this
type of modelling has allowed more robustness, as opposed to the OLS estimator, which doesn’t take data hierarchy
into consideration. Our results generally reveal that gender has a significant impact on school performance. Thus,
girls perform a lot better than boys when it comes to reading, while boys perform better than girls in mathematics
and science. Our thinking and analysis are made in the context of the verification of hypotheses on a global scale, in
order to draw innovative and coherent conclusions. This contribution can also be a line of research to verify other
hypotheses that are linked to the deciding factors of inequalities of students’ achievements.