Boys Outperform Girls in Middle School STEM, Reversing Gender Gap

KEY FINDINGS 

• Boys’ historic advantage in math and science, which had been eliminated by 2019, markedly returned during the post-COVID period. Similar patterns were not observed in reading, where girls continue to outperform boys. 

• High-achieving boys significantly outperformed high-achieving girls in math and science, but lowachieving boys underperformed low-achieving girls. 

• The share of girls enrolled in algebra in eighth grade dropped by two percentage points between 2019 and 2024 (from 26.4 to 24.5 percent), while the share of boys remained level at 24 percent. 

In the last two decades, the US has made remarkable strides in closing long-standing gender inequities in academic achievement in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. By 2019, data from an international math and science assessment, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), showed that the historic advantage eighth-grade boys held in math and science achievement had largely disappeared. However, new data suggest these hard-won gains may be unraveling. During the COVID-19 pandemic, girls showed substantially larger declines in math and science (both in the US and globally). The STEM gender gaps that took a decade or more to close were reopened in just a few years. 

 Relying on a single assessment given every four years obscures when these setbacks began, whether this pattern holds equally among low- and high-achieving students, and whether similar trends play out across other key indicators of STEM education (e.g., course enrollments). To better understand how STEM gender gaps have evolved during and after the pandemic, we first used five years of data from three national assessments (TIMSS, the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], and the MAP® Growth™ assessment from NWEA®) to estimate trends in gender gaps in eighth grade over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FULL REPORT