Does school learning shape gender ideology? Academic performance and adolescents’ attitudes toward gender practices

Abstract

Despite research linking education to values, our understanding of the effects of academic learning on gender attitudes is still limited. Using sibling data collected over time, we investigate how learning in school, measured by achievement test scores, affects adolescents' views on gender issues both with and without direct implications for women's economic mobility. With fixed-effects models accounting for unobserved heterogeneity between high and low achievers, we show that the relationship between academic achievement and gender ideology is not spurious, but learning does not enlighten adolescents on all gender-related beliefs, either. Rather, school learning socializes both boys and girls into more liberal views on issues clearly related to women's economic opportunities. For views concerning dating practices or boy-girl interactions, which are irrelevant to the meritocracy-based mainstream values, academic performance has less consistent effects, with higher achievement scores sometimes associated with more conservative views among boys. Our results generally support the socialization and reproduction model of the role of school learning, although self-interest also explains high and low achievers' different attitudes on dating and other personal-realm gender practices.