Gender gaps in cognitive and social‐emotional skills in early primary grades: Evidence from rural Indonesia

This paper examines the magnitude and source of gender gaps in cognitive and social‐emotional skills in early primary grades in rural Indonesia. Relative to boys, girls score more than 0.17 SD higher in tests of language and mathematics (cognitive skills) and between 0.18 and 0.27 SD higher in measures of social competence and emotional maturity (social‐emotional skills). We use Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to investigate the extent to which gender differences in early schooling and parenting practices explain these gender gaps in skills. For cognitive skills, differences in early schooling between boys and girls explain between 9% and 11% of the gender gap whereas differences in parenting practices explain merely 3%–5% of the gender gap. This decomposition result is driven largely by children living in villages with high‐quality preschools. In contrast, for social‐emotional skills, differences in parenting styles toward boys and girls explain between 13% and 17% of the gender gap, while differences in early schooling explain only 0%–6% of the gender gap.     

Gender differences in self-presentation: A comparison of the roles of flatteringness and intimacy in self-disclosure to friends

This study examines the role of self-flattery in the disclosure of young adults to their best and less close, same- and cross-sex friends. One hundred eighty-five college students participated by filling out an anonymous questionnaire that asked about their disclosure of 55 topics to each of four friends. In addition, each subject indicated (1) how self-flattering they perceived such disclosure to be and (2) how intimate they believed each topic to be. The results indicate that both the degree of flatteringness of a topic and its intimacy strongly affect tendency to disclose, with intimacy being the larger of the two influences. These effects of these factors were not uniform with respect to subject’s gender, friend’s gender, and friend’s closeness, but instead interacted with them.