Sex difference in reading

There is a clear gender gap regarding literacy.  Boys score much less than girls in reading. This starts in the first grades at school, and boys do not really catch up. One decade of data collection by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on 15 year olds in 75 countries shows that boys scored higher than girls n mathematics. But across countries, boys scored much lower than girls in reading. The sex difference in reading was three times as large as in mathematics.

Yesterday’s newspaper (NRC Handelsblad, p. 8) reported on further research by Gijsbert Stoet, professor in psychology at the University of Essex. Together with his American colleague David Geary, he compared students from the PISA study in 2012 with participation in higher education in 2017. It showed that the lower the score in reading in 2012, the lower the number of high school students who continued their education at a university. He assumes that the declining percentage of boys in the student population (in OECD countries on average from 50 percent in the 1990 to 45 percent now is largely due to their decline in reading performance.

Why does all this matter for lifelong learning?  If we want to learn after the end of formal education, we have to do it in a much less structured environment than at school. It requires more initiative from the learner, and much of it would be in the form of reading, even if this is on the Internet. If you do not read well, you will have difficulties to access most of the lifelong learning programmes on offer.

In the Netherlands, about 10 percent of the population is functionally illiterate. Probably, this group is more than proportionally represented among people who easily lose their job and have to look for a new one. They would have to re-school themselves. This probably would require a fair amount of reading, which would be awkward for them. It is not only that they are not good in it, they probably also lack the motivation. Since they were not so good in related subjects in school, they would not be eager to engage in any text-based programme.

So many of those who need re-schooling most, are least capable (and willing) to do so. To remedy that, it is too late to offer programmes for people above 50. We have to start with kids of around 5.