Girls fell further behind in math during, after pandemic - Harvard Gazette

"And scholars are only now beginning to understand the differential effects. Sean Reardon, a renowned sociologist of education and inequality at Stanford, brought one such pattern to campus last week: Girls' math scores suffered more than boys' during and after the pandemic, and lower-income girls now face steeper "gender gaps" in math than do those in more affluent communities, all for reasons that are less than completely clear."

"That project has established a clearinghouse of American education data, bearing on segregation and inequality of opportunity as well as COVID-related learning loss. And, even with the peak of the pandemic still in recent memory, the amount of data available is massive, Reardon noted, because of its granularity. At each of 7,000 school districts across 41 states, he said, "We might have up to 336 observations: 14 years, six grades, two subjects, two genders [under study]." In the end, that means the analysis weighed roughly 320 million test scores altogether."

Girls' math scores declined more than boys' during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, with particularly large declines among lower-income girls. Lower-income girls now face steeper gender gaps in math compared with girls in more affluent communities. A nationwide dataset encompassed up to 336 observations per district across 7,000 school districts in 41 states, totaling roughly 320 million test scores. The dataset is skewed by geography, test type, and data availability and requires advanced statistical methods. Emotional, family, and social disruptions appear likelier causes of the gendered declines than school closures alone.

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