gender gaps

Two of my colleagues [and co-authors] at Dauphine, Elyès Jouini and Clotilde Napp, published a paper in Science last week (and an associated tribune in Le Monde which I spotted first) about explaining differences in national gender inequalities in maths (as measured by PISA) in terms of the degree of overall inequality in the respective countries. Gaps in the highest maths performer sex ratio. While I have no qualm about the dependency or the overall statistical cum machine learning analysis (supported by our common co-author Jean-Michel Marin), and while I obviously know nothing about the topic!, I leisurely wonder at the cultural factor (which may also partly explain for the degree of inequality) when considering that the countries at the bottom of the above graphs are rather religious (and mostly catholic). I also find it most intriguing that the gender gap is consistently reversed when considering higher performer sex ratio for reading, because mastering the language should be a strong factor in power structures and hence differences therein should also lead to inequalities…