Math gender gap according to socio-economic background in Italy: the better the condition the larger the gap?

Most of the studies on disadvantaged categories and their educational achievements focus the attention on students’ gender and socio-economic background taken separately. In line with some researchers (Tinklin et al.,2003; Strand, 2014) our aim is to consider these two sources of inequality together. In particular, the research questions are: 1) does gender gap increase in low SES (socio-economic status) families and decrease in more favourable social context? 2) if it is so, is this effect constant over time? 3) how much does the family economic and educational status worsen the basic gender gap? We used INVALSI data of Mathematics for students in 5th grade of the Italian school system. In the first part of the paper, we analysed the gender gap over time considering the last ten school years (from 2009/2010 to 2018/2019, the last available) and focus our attention on SES, mother’s education, cognitive “Parts” of (partitions of the whole test pertaining to the same cognitive domain: Numbers, Statistics, Shapes and Figures, Relations and Functions) and geographical macro-area where the schools are located. The second part of our study was centred on 2017/2018 data with the aim to deepen the study of gender gap considering other variables that could influence achievement, as nursery school frequency, anxiety before test and Math score in 2nd grade. The main result, observed in descriptive analysis and corroborated in the nested regression models, can be summarized by the expression “the better the condition the larger the gap”. In fact, it seems that the gender gap is wider where the conditions are more favourable (high socio-economic level, Norther regions in Italy, nursery school frequency) while in disadvantaged conditions the gap between girls and boys decreases.