ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

Box 4-1: Gender Differences in Early Outcomes
and Responses to Investment
Early investments are critical for both boys and girls, but parental
and environmental inputs can differ for children of different genders,
leading to disparate outcomes. Boys in low-income households tend to
do worse on a myriad of health and human capital outcomes than similarly
situated girls, ranging from educational attainment to test scores to
crime involvement (Autor et al. 2015). A new working paper by Chetty
et al. (2016) shows that these gender gaps in the impact of childhood
disadvantage may be sustained through adulthood. Men who grew up
in high-poverty, high-minority areas work significantly less than women
from similar backgrounds, with the worst outcomes concentrated among
men who grew up in low-income, single-parent households.
Researchers have found that environmental, rather than biological,
factors drive this relationship. Autor et al. (2015) show that, though
children born into families of low socioeconomic status (SES) have worse
health than higher-SES newborns, birth outcomes are similar between
low-SES siblings of different genders. The authors suggest that the gaps
that emerge between low-SES male and female siblings later in childhood
are due to differences in their environment after birth, or differential
response to that environment.
Influences from both inside and outside of the home environment
may lead both genders to be more sensitive to certain aspects of
disadvantaged upbringing. Autor et al. (2015) suggest that gender gaps
in outcomes between low-SES siblings, where boys tend to do worse, are
related to home environment, partially through a lack of same-sex role
models (fathers are more likely to be absent than mothers) and relatively
smaller parental time investments as a result. They also posit that factors
outside of the home but that are associated with low-SES status, including
worse schools and neighborhoods, can have disproportionately
negative impacts on boys. For example, a new working paper by the
same authors shows that males on average benefit more from cumulative
exposure to high-quality schools than their female siblings (Autor et al.
2016). Additionally, the stress associated with poverty appears to have
more serious effects on males than on females (Bertrand and Pan 2013).
This may be in part because boys’ coping strategies tend to involve more
aggressive behavior and less interaction with prosocial adults (Coleman
and Hendry 1999). These differences in coping strategy may lead to different
outcomes for the genders in different types of early intervention.
As a consequence, the effects of policies that support investment
in children may vary for girls and boys. The policy section of this
chapter examines how and why program impacts may differ by gender.
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