Fig. 3.

Implications for the Gender Gap in High School.

Note: The graphs depict an extrapolation of the intermediate attendance and test score results for high school dropout (panel (a)) and high school graduation (panel (b)). We first estimate the relationship between high school dropout or graduation and a cubic polynomial in attendance, reading test scores and math test scores in grades 5 to 8, additionally controlling for gender, SES, race/ethnicity, month-of-birth dummies, year-of-birth dummies, birth order dummies and an interaction between SES and Boy. We compute marginal effects of attendance, reading scores and math scores on the two high school outcomes, separately at each decile (10 to 90) of these independent variables’ distributions. Separately, we compute unconditional quantile effects of Boy × SES for 10 to 90 deciles from our main specifications as described in Figure 2. This figure plots the implied effects of a one-SD change in the SES index (1.51) on high school dropout or high school graduation, operating through the differential effect of SES on boys relative to girls (Boy × SES interaction) at each decile of the distribution of intermediate inputs. Each bar represents the decile-specific effect of a one-SD change in SES obtained by multiplying the marginal effect of a given intermediate input (attendance, mathematics or reading) and the Boy × SES coefficient for this input. Attendance is depicted using medium orange color, mathematics is depicted using dark navy color, and reading is depicted using light maroon color. The dashed lines represent the contribution of family SES to the gender gap through its average effect on attendance (medium orange), mathematics (dark navy) and reading (light maroon). For high school graduation, the implied contributions of the mean effects are 1.35, 0.38 and 0.10 for attendance, mathematics and reading, respectively. For high school dropout, the implied contributions of the mean effects are −1.07, −0.18 and −0.05 for attendance, mathematics and reading, respectively. SEs are obtained by bootstrapping the procedure 200 times.