CRIS SCIENTIFIC SEMINAR 2025 - 2026

 Talk with Romain Delès 

Associate Professor of Sociology, Junior Member of the IUF

& Michael Katsillis   - Postdoctoral Researcher

University of Bordeaux - Centre Émile Durkheim

The gender gap in mathematics is widely explained through gender-stratification theory: in national contexts that afford greater gender equality, girls expect improved prospects for social participation and entry into good jobs. These expectations heighten the perceived returns to mathematics and encourage greater investment, which, in turn, reduces the achievement gap. 

We argue that this opportunity-anticipation mechanism cannot fully account for gaps that emerge in early education and propose a competing explanation: gender socialization. In this view, domestic gender arrangements shape children’s early internalization of expectations about mathematics, net of women’s current labor-market opportunities. We therefore hypothesize that cross-national differences in domestic-sphere equality—e.g., the division of housework and childcare—predict math achievement gaps. To evaluate this claim, we extend prior work by incorporating domestic-sphere indicators alongside the public-sphere indices typically used in gender-stratification research.

We employ TIMSS 2019 data for Grades 4 (ages 9–10) and 8 (ages 13–14), focusing on European countries, to leverage rich EIGE/EQLS indicators of domestic equality (time, housework, & care distributions) alongside established public-sphere measures (i.e., the GGI, wage gap, women’s labor participation, political power). Our sample includes 20 countries at Grade 4 and 10 at Grade 8. We estimate conditional fixed effects logistic models with students nested within countries. 

Results show that domestic gender equality is a stronger and more consistent predictor of the math gender gap than public gender equality, particularly in Grade 4. Higher levels of domestic gender equality have stronger, more consistent associations with smaller gender achievement gaps. Moreover, domestic measures (notably housework distribution) typically subsume public measures when both are controlled for concurrently. These patterns are even more pronounced among Grade-4 students with high early-life parental involvement, consistent with a family-based socialization mechanism.

By contrast, we find no “smoking gun” for the anticipation mechanism posited by gender-stratification accounts: public-sphere gender equality interactions with student gender does not differ significantly between families with high parental expectations (i.e., more anticipatory) and others, suggesting the core mechanism assumed by gender-stratification theory, forward-looking opportunity calculations, do not drive the usual cross-national results attributed to that theory.

By Grade 8, some public indicators (e.g., the wage gap) begin to become more substantively important but domestic equality frequently persists, indicating that, even as anticipation mechanisms plausibly gain relevance, early socialization leaves a discernible, lasting imprint.

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