Gender peer effect in classroom: Evidence in Italian primary schools

This paper focuses on the mechanisms of gender interaction in classrooms in Italian primary schools, using the data of a standardized testing administered in the schooling year 2010/2011 to the entire student population. The Ministerial rules in Italy provide that primary schools should organize classes in a way to respect equal gender representation, nevertheless the gender composition of single classes often differs noticeably from the gender composition of grade enrollment, suggesting that students are sorted between classes not randomly. We explore attentively if there exist correlations between the proportion of girls and the observed characteristics of students, classes and schools, finding that such correlations are evident if we consider the proportion of girls in single classes at school level, and we find much less evidence of sorting of students between schools according to the gender composition of enrollment. Given these results, we use the proportion of girls in V grade as an indicator of the gender composition of peer groups (classrooms) neutralizing in this way the within-school sorting of students. Our main findings indicate that the number of girls in peer group influences positively test scores of both boys and girls in math and Italian language. This effect is stronger for the sample of girls. If we consider the sample of boys and girls together, the positive effect of gender composition is stronger for Italian language.