Abstract
Females tend to perform worse than males on math and science tests, but they perform better on verbal reading tests. Here, by analysing performance during a cognitive test, we provide evidence that females are better able to sustain their performance during a test across all of these topics, including math and science (study 1). This finding suggests that longer cognitive tests decrease the gender gap in math and science. By analysing a dataset with multiple tests that vary in test length, we find empirical support for this idea (study 2).
Highlights
Females tend to perform worse than males on math and science tests, but they perform better on verbal reading tests
Despite the fact that gender gaps in math test scores have been found to narrow or even vanish over recent decades[4,9,14], they remain present in large-scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)[15]
For most of the noncognitive skills, we find gender differences that are consistent with the previous literature
Summary
Females tend to perform worse than males on math and science tests, but they perform better on verbal reading tests. By analysing performance during a cognitive test, we provide evidence that females are better able to sustain their performance during a test across all of these topics, including math and science (study 1). This finding suggests that longer cognitive tests decrease the gender gap in math and science. We study gender differences in the ability to sustain performance on a specific task: completing a cognitive test. Similar to many other cognitive tasks, the completion of a test requires time
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