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During the height of the Ebola crisis in September 2014 there were 21 confirmed cases of the virus and 8 deaths in Nigeria. The African nation has the continent’s largest population, a high poverty rate, and the government spends relatively little on health care. At the time many were worried about a scenario where the virus spread throughout Nigeria. But, the Nigerian Minister of Health Onyebuchi Chukwu disagreed with that assessment. He commented to Forbes, “Nigeria will be as clean as any other country as far as Ebola virus disease is concerned.” His comments were proven to be accurate in the coming months. There were a variety of factors that contributed to Nigeria’s success at combating the disease. One important factor was the use of mobile electronic health records programs.

How mobile fights disease

1. Training Healthcare Workers

Training health care providers was a priority at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak. A survey found that 85 percent of health care workers in the country believed you could avoid Ebola by abstaining from handshakes or touching. Correcting these myths about the disease was a critical part of the response effort, especially for health care workers.

2. Rapid Deployment

One of the virtues of mHealth is its speed and flexibility. Mobile allows officials to quickly disseminate the latest information to front line health care workers. Increasing the speed of communication is a general boon to any large public health response.

3. Virtual Records

Ebola Treatment Units (ETU) greatly benefitted from using digital rather than paper records. Paper records cannot be removed from an ETU. Deborah Theobald co-founder of Vecna Technologies that created the mHealth platform in Nigeria has pointed out that, “If the patient is isolated, so is their paperwork”. Electronic records are easy to share and also lower the risk of infection for health care workers.

Mobile health policy challenges

Despite the potential benefits of mHealth, barriers in some countries prevent the full positive impact of these technologies from coming into effect. Many developing nations lack the electrical infrastructure that is necessary to power mobile devices. Health care regulations are often too overly bureaucratic and burdensome. This makes it difficult for innovators to develop and equip workers with mobile tools and applications. It often takes an emergency situation like the Ebola crisis to make substantive changes. Success in the long term is only possible if leaders create an environment that is more hospitable to mHealth.

Mobile interventions have also demonstrated potential to address important public health issues. Recently experts gathered at the Brookings Institution to discuss how mHealth can improve health outcomes. Apps like Mobile Midwife and Text4Baby can encourage healthy pregnancies by providing valuable tips to expecting mothers. Mobile health platforms are successful because they directly inform caregivers. The proliferation of mobile phones through the developing world presents a health opportunity to communicate with the people who need help.

It’s easy to imagine a future in a decade or less when most people will have a smartphone. In our recent paper Pathways to Smarter Digital Financial Inclusion, we explore the benefits of extending financial services to the mass of lower-income people in developing countries who are currently dubious of the value that financial services can bring to them, distrustful of formal financial institutions, or uncomfortable with the treatment they expect to receive.

The report analyzes six inherent characteristics of smartphones that have the potential to change market dynamics relative to the status quo of simple mobile phones and cards. 

Customer-Facing Changes:

1. The graphical user interface.
2. The ability to attach a variety of peripheral devices to it (such as a card reader or a small printer issuing receipts).
3. The lower marginal cost of mobile data communications relative to traditional mobile channels (such as SMS or USSD).

Service Provider Changes:

4. Greater freedom to program services without requiring the acquiescence or active participation of the telco.
5. Greater flexibility to distribute service logic between the handset (apps) and the network (servers).
6. More opportunities to capture more customer data with which to enhance customer value and stickiness.

Taken together, these changes may lower the costs of designing for lower-income people dramatically, and the designs ought to take advantage of continuous feedback from users. This should give low-end customers a stronger sense of choice over the services that are relevant to them, and voice over how they wish to be served and treated.

Traditionally poor people have been invisible to service providers because so little was known about their preferences that it was not possible build a service proposition or business case around them. The paper describes three pathways that will allow providers to design services on smartphones that will enable an increasingly granular understanding of their customers. Each of the three pathways offers providers a different approach to discover what they need to know about prospective customers in order to begin engaging with them. 

Pathway One: Through Big Data

Providers will piece together information on potential low-income customers directly, by assembling available data from disparate sources (e.g. history of airtime top-ups and bill payment, activity on online social networks, neighborhood or village-level socio-demographic data, etc.) and by accelerating data acquisition cycles (e.g. inferring behavior from granting of small loans in rapid succession, administering selected psychometric questions, or conducting A/B tests with special offers). There is a growing number of data analytics companies that are applying big data in this way to benefit the poor.

Pathway Two: Through local Businesses

Smartphones will have a special impact on micro and small enterprises, which will see increasing business benefits from recording and transacting more of their business digitally. As their business data becomes more visible to financial institutions, local firms will increasingly channel financial services, and particularly credit, to their customers, employees, and suppliers. Financial institutions will backstop their credit, which in effect turns smaller businesses into front-line distribution partners into local communities.

Pathway Three: Through Socio-Financial Networks

Firms view individuals primarily as managers of a web of socio-financial relationships that may or may not allow them access to formal financial services. Beyond providing loans to “creditworthy” people, financial institutions can provide transactional engines, similar to the crowdfunding platforms that enable all people to locate potential funding sources within their existing social networks. A provider equipped with appropriate network analysis tools could then promote rather than displace people´s own funding relationships and activities. This would provide financial service firms valuable insight into how people manage their financial needs.

The pathways are intended as an exploration of how smartphones could support the development of a healthier and more inclusive digital financial service ecosystem, by addressing the two critical deficiencies of the current mass-market digital finance systems. Smartphones could enable stronger customer value propositions, leading to much higher levels of customer engagement, leading to more revelation of customer data and more robust business cases for the providers involved. Mobile technology could also lead to a broader diversity of players coming into the space, each playing to their specific interests and contributing their specific set of skills, but together delivering customer value through the right combination of collaboration and competition.

How can countries support innovative approaches to facilitating access to and usage of formal financial services among low-income and other marginalized groups while mitigating the risk of misuse within the financial sector?

As part of the Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP), the FDIP team recently hosted a roundtable to examine this central question. The objective of the roundtable was to identify and discuss salient challenges and opportunities for financial services providers, government entities, and consumers with respect to balancing anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance — a critical component of financial integrity and stability — with inclusive financial access and growth.

We explore several key questions and themes that emerged from the roundtable below.

Do areas of synergy exist between financial inclusion and AML/CFT efforts?

• AML/CFT requirements and financial inclusion have sometimes been perceived as being in tension with one another — for example, stringent “know your customer” (KYC) requirements associated with AML processes can restrict formal financial access among marginalized groups who are unable to fulfill the KYC documentation requirements. However, the objectives of AML/CFT (ensuring stability and integrity within the financial sector) and financial inclusion (providing access to and promoting usage of a broad range of appropriate, affordable financial services) can be mutually reinforcing.
• By moving individuals from the shadow economy into the formal financial system, greater opportunities emerge for introducing underserved populations to a broad suite of formal financial services, and ensuring those services are accompanied by suitable consumer protections. Thus, financial inclusion, financial integrity, and financial stability can act as complementary objectives.
• The 2012 Declaration of the Ministers and Representatives of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recognized financial exclusion as a money laundering and terrorist financing risk in approving FATF’s 2012-2020 Mandate. This mandate affirmed FATF’s 2011 guidance on AML and terrorist financing measures and financial inclusion, which stated that “[i]t is acknowledged at the same time that financial exclusion works against effective AML/CFT policies. Indeed the prevalence of a large informal, unregulated and undocumented economy negatively affects AML/CFT efforts and the integrity of the financial system. Informal, unregulated and undocumented financial services and a pervasive cash economy can generate significant money laundering and terrorist financing risks and negatively affect AML/CFT preventive, detection and investigation/prosecution efforts.”

What are key challenges and concerns with respect to balancing financial inclusion with financial integrity?

• Awareness of financial inclusion issues is not universal among individuals who work in the regulatory, compliance, and law enforcement spheres of the financial ecosystem. Engagement among these groups is critical for promoting knowledge-sharing with respect to financial integrity and inclusion.
• Although FATF and other standard-setting bodies (SSBs) have increasingly adopted recommendations favoring proportionate, risk-based approaches to AML/CFT (as evidenced by the 2013 FATF Guidance on Financial Inclusion), regulators often pursue more conservative approaches than SSB guidelines recommend. These conservative approaches may constrain access to and usage of formal financial services among marginalized groups.
• Combating the potential use of low-value transfers within countries and across borders for terrorist financing purposes is a salient concern for the law enforcement community when considering proportionate AML/CFT approaches.

How does the digital component fit into these issues?

• As its name suggests, FDIP is interested in exploring the evolving role of digital technology within the financial services ecosystem. As discussed in the 2015 FDIP Report, digitization of financial services can be more cost-effective for public and private sector providers to manage and safer for consumers than carrying or storing cash.
• For example, a 2013 report found that the Mexican government saved about $1.3 billion annually by centralizing and digitizing payments for wages, pensions, and social transfers. A 2014 report by the World Bank Development Research Group, the Better Than Cash Alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation highlighted several countries, including South Africa, where disbursing social transfers electronically cost significantly less than manual cash disbursement.
• Digital financial services can also promote women’s economic empowerment, as these services are often more private and convenient to access than traveling to a “brick and mortar” financial service provider. Given that as of 2014 there was a 9 percentage point gap between the number of men and women with accounts in developing economies (with women disproportionately excluded from account ownership), facilitating access to formal financial services among the 42 percent of women globally who do not have an account will be a major factor in advancing financial inclusion.
• With respect to financial integrity in particular, digital identification mechanisms such as biometric IDs can help lower access barriers to financial services while ensuring that providers have the information they need to promote security and stability in the financial ecosystem. In its June 2011 guidance, FATF recognized the use of non-documentary methods of identification verification — for example, a signed declaration from a community leader coupled with a photo taken by a mobile phone — for advancing access to formal financial services among underserved groups.
• The Aadhaar initiative in India, which the FDIP team referenced in a previous post, is currently the largest biometric identification program in the world. The unique 12-digit ID enables individuals to meet KYC requirements and has been used as a financial account among those who do not have an account with a financial institution. Another innovative digital initiative is underway in Tanzania, where the government is working in concert with mobile carrier Tigo and UNICEF to provide birth certificates via mobile phones.

What are critical questions and areas of opportunity for fostering financial inclusion and integrity moving forward?

• How can regulators and providers ensure sufficient privacy protections are in place for customers when advancing financial inclusion efforts, particularly through digital channels?
• Through what mechanisms can government entities and non-government financial services providers best mitigate the risks of centralizing sensitive customer data?
• Could an industry utility that facilitates a common solution to AML systems serve as a feasible solution for harmonizing standards?
• What is the proper role of private solutions in the AML/CFT and financial inclusion spaces?
• Could identification verification applications be developed using blockchain technology?
• In what ways can social networks be leveraged with respect to digital identity initiatives and financial inclusion?

The recent gyrations in the Chinese interbank market underscore that the chief risk to global growth now comes from China. Make no mistake: credit policy will tighten substantially in the coming months, as the government tries to push loan growth from its current rate of 20% down to something much closer to the rate of nominal GDP growth, which is about half that. Moreover, in the last few months of the year the new government will likely start concrete action on some long-deferred structural reforms. These reforms will bolster China’s medium-term growth prospects, but the short-term impact will be tough for the economy and for markets.

The combination of tighter credit and structural reforms means that with the best of luck China could post GDP growth in 2014 of a bit over 6%, its weakest showing in 15 years and well below most current forecasts. A policy mistake such as excessive monetary tightening could easily push growth below the 6% mark. Banks and corporations appear finally to be getting the message that the new government, unlike its predecessor, will not support growth at some arbitrary level through investment stimulus.

The dire performance of China’s stock markets in the past two weeks reflects this growing realization among domestic investors, although we suspect stocks have further to fall before weaker growth is fully discounted.

Slower growth… but no Armageddon

But the China risk is mainly of a negative growth shock, not financial Armageddon as some gloomier commentary suggests. Financial crisis risk remains relatively low because the system is closed and the usual triggers are unavailable. Emerging market financial crises usually erupt for one of two reasons: a sudden departure of foreign creditors or a drying-up of domestic funding sources for banks. China has little net exposure to foreign creditors and runs a large current account surplus, so there is no foreign trigger. And until now, banks have funded themselves mainly from deposits at a loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) of under 70%, although the increased use of quasi-deposit wealth management products means the true LDR may be a bit higher, especially for smaller banks. The danger arises when banks push up their LDRs and increasingly fund themselves from the wholesale market. So a domestic funding trigger does not exist—yet.

The People’s Bank of China clearly understands the systemic risk of letting banks run up lending based on fickle wholesale funding. This is why it put its foot down last week and initially refused to pump money into the straitened interbank market. Interbank and repo rates have dropped back from their elevated levels, but remain significantly above the historical average. The message to banks is clear: lend within your means. This stance raises confidence that Beijing will not let the credit bubble get out of control. But it also raises the odds that both credit and economic growth will slow sharply in the coming 6-12 months.

If the economy slows and local stock markets continue to tumble, doesn’t this mean the renminbi will also weaken sharply? Not necessarily. Beijing has a long-term policy interest in increasing the international use of the renminbi, which can only occur if the currency earns a reputation as a reliable store of value in good times and bad. Allowing a sharp devaluation now runs against this interest, and also would be a sharp break from a long-established policy of not resorting to devaluation to stimulate growth, even at moments of severe stress (as in 1997-98 and 2008-09). So while our call on China growth has been marked down, our call on the renminbi has not.

Short-term pain is better than long-term stagnation

From a broader perspective, the biggest China risk is not that the country suffers a year or two of sharply below-trend growth. If that slowdown reflects more rational credit allocation and the early, painful stages of productivity-enhancing reforms, it will be healthy medicine. And even a much slower China will still be growing faster than all developed markets and most emerging ones.

The real risk is rather that the new government will show a lack of nerve or muscle and fail to push through financial sector liberalization, deregulation of markets to favor private firms, and fiscal reforms to curtail local governments’ ability to prop up failing firms, overspend on infrastructure, and inflate property bubbles. The old government wasted the last three years of its term doing none of these things despite the obvious need. The new leaders are talking a better game, but they have a year at most to articulate a clear reform program, begin implementation (liberalizing interest rates and freeing electricity prices would be a good start), and ruthlessly removing senior officials who stand in the way. If they fail to deliver, then the short-term slowdown could become a long and dismal decline.

After a recent talk about my ISIS book, one of the audience members asked, “What can I read to help me not hate Islam?” I don’t think it’s a scholar’s job to persuade others to love or hate any culture. But the question was sincere, so I suggested some books that have helped me better understand Islam. I also put the question to Twitter. Below is some of what I and others came up with.

Two cautions before we dive in: First, the list is obviously not exhaustive and I’ve left out overly apologetic books—in my experience, they only increase the skeptical reader’s suspicion that she’s being suckered. Second, people on Twitter gave me great suggestions but I’ve only included those I’ve read and can vouch for:

Muhammad and the Quran: Two of the best books you’ll ever read about Muhammad and the Quran are also the shortest: The Koran: A Very Short Introduction and Muhammad, both by Michael Cook. He writes with great wit and deep scholarship.

Other scriptures: Most non-Muslims are unaware that Islamic scripture is more than the Quran. It includes a vast collection of words and deeds attributed to Muhammad by later authors. These scriptures are sort of like the Gospels, and Muslim scholars fight over their authenticity like Christian scholars debate about the accuracy of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These extra Islamic scriptures contain most of the teachings that make modern people (Muslims included) uncomfortable about Islam. One of the world’s experts on these scriptures, Jonathan Brown, has written a terrific book about them, Misquoting Muhammad.

Rumi: The medieval mystic’s poems about life and death are beautiful and moving, no matter your belief system. I loved his poems so much as an undergrad that I went on to study Middle Eastern languages just so I could read his work in the original. I’m glad I first viewed Islam through the eyes of Rumi and not a group like ISIS. Neither is solely representative of Islam but both draw heavily on its scriptures and reach such different conclusions.

The Bible: Many people recommended reading the Bible to decrease hate of Islam. The nerd in me leapt to the least obvious conclusion, “Ah, good idea! Reading some of the rough stuff in the Hebrew Bible is a good way to put a kindred ancient religion like Islam in perspective.” But they meant something a little less complicated:

@will_mccants @jenanmoussa Read the bible and learn to love and not to hate. :-)

— Dirk Lont (@Denkkracht1) December 12, 2015

It’s a worthy perspective today no matter your faith.

Part I of the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education. 

Girls score higher than boys on tests of reading ability.  They have for a long time.  This section of the Brown Center Report assesses where the gender gap stands today and examines trends over the past several decades.  The analysis also extends beyond the U.S. and shows that boys’ reading achievement lags that of girls in every country in the world on international assessments.  The international dimension—recognizing that U.S. is not alone in this phenomenon—serves as a catalyst to discuss why the gender gap exists and whether it extends into adulthood.

Background

One of the earliest large-scale studies on gender differences in reading, conducted in Iowa in 1942, found that girls in both elementary and high schools were better than boys at reading comprehension.^[i] The most recent results from reading tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show girls outscoring boys at every grade level and age examined.  Gender differences in reading are not confined to the United States.  Among younger children—age nine to ten, or about fourth grade—girls consistently outscore boys on international assessments, from a pioneering study of reading comprehension conducted in fifteen countries in the 1970s, to the results of the Program in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) conducted in forty-nine nations and nine benchmarking entities in 2011.  The same is true for students in high school.  On the 2012 reading literacy test of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), worldwide gender gaps are evident between fifteen-year-old males and females.

As the 21^st century dawned, the gender gap came under the scrutiny of reporters and pundits.  Author Christina Hoff Sommers added a political dimension to the gender gap, and some say swept the topic into the culture wars raging at the time, with her 2000 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.^[ii] Sommers argued that boys’ academic inferiority, and in particular their struggles with reading, stemmed from the feminist movement’s impact on schools and society.  In the second edition, published in 2013, she changed the subtitle to How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men.  Some of the sting is removed from the  indictment of “misguided feminism.”  But not all of it.  Sommers singles out for criticism a 2008 report from the American Association of University Women.^[iii] That report sought to debunk the notion that boys fared poorly in school compared to girls.  It left out a serious discussion of boys’ inferior performance on reading tests, as well as their lower grade point averages, greater rate of school suspension and expulsion, and lower rate of acceptance into college.

Journalist Richard Whitmire picked up the argument about the gender gap in 2010 with Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind.^[iv] Whitmire sought to separate boys’ academic problems from the culture wars, noting that the gender gap in literacy is a worldwide phenomenon and appears even in countries where feminist movements are weak to nonexistent.  Whitmire offers several reasons for boys’ low reading scores, including poor reading instruction (particularly a lack of focus on phonics), and too few books appealing to boys’ interests.  He also dismisses several explanations that are in circulation, among them, video games, hip-hop culture, too much testing, and feminized classrooms.  As with Sommers’s book, Whitmire’s culprit can be found in the subtitle: the educational system.  Even if the educational system is not the original source of the problem, Whitmire argues, schools could be doing more to address it. 

In a 2006 monograph, education policy researcher Sara Mead took on the idea that American boys were being shortchanged by schools.  After reviewing achievement data from NAEP and other tests, Mead concluded that the real story of the gender gap wasn’t one of failure at all.  Boys and girls were both making solid academic progress, but in some cases, girls were making larger gains, misleading some commentators into concluding that boys were being left behind.  Mead concluded, “The current boy crisis hype and the debate around it are based more on hopes and fears than on evidence.”^[v]

The analysis below focuses on where the gender gap in reading stands today, not its causes.  Nevertheless, readers should keep in mind the three most prominent explanations for the gap.  They will be used to frame the concluding discussion.

Biological/Developmental:  Even before attending school, young boys evidence more problems in learning how to read than girls.  This explanation believes the sexes are hard-wired differently for literacy.

School Practices: Boys are inferior to girls on several school measures—behavioral, social, and academic—and those discrepancies extend all the way through college.  This explanation believes that even if schools do not create the gap, they certainly don’t do what they could to ameliorate it. 

Cultural Influences: Cultural influences steer boys toward non-literary activities (sports, music) and define literacy as a feminine characteristic.  This explanation believes cultural cues and strong role models could help close the gap by portraying reading as a masculine activity. 

Table 1-1 displays the most recent data from eight national tests of U.S. achievement.  The first group shows results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long Term Trend (NAEP-LTT), given to students nine, 13, and 17 years of age.  The NAEP-LTT in reading was first administered in 1971.  The second group of results is from the NAEP Main Assessment, which began testing reading achievement in 1992.  It assesses at three different grade levels: fourth, eighth, and twelfth.   The last two tests are international assessments in which the U.S. participates, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which began in 2001, and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), first given in 2000.  PIRLS tests fourth graders, and PISA tests 15-year-olds.  In the U.S., 71 percent of students who took PISA in the fall of 2012 were in tenth grade. 

Two findings leap out.  First, the test score gaps between males and females are statistically significant on all eight assessments.  Because the sample sizes of the assessments are quite large, statistical significance does not necessarily mean that the gaps are of practical significance—or even noticeable if one observed several students reading together.  The tests also employ different scales.  The final column in the table expresses the gaps in standard deviation units, a measure that allows for comparing the different scores and estimating their practical meaningfulness.

The second finding is based on the standardized gaps (expressed in SDs).  On both NAEP tests, the gaps are narrower among elementary students and wider among middle and high school students.  That pattern also appears on international assessments.  The gap is twice as large on PISA as on PIRLS.[vi]  A popular explanation for the gender gap involves the different maturation rates of boys and girls.  That theory will be discussed in greater detail below, but at this point in the analysis, let’s simply note that the gender gap appears to grow until early adolescence—age 13 on the LTT-NAEP and grade eight on the NAEP Main.

Should these gaps be considered small or large?  Many analysts consider 10 scale score points on NAEP equal to about a year of learning.  In that light, gaps of five to 10 points appear substantial.  But compared to other test score gaps on NAEP, the gender gap is modest in size.  On the 2012 LTT-NAEP for nine-year-olds, the five point gap between boys and girls is about one-half of the 10 point gap between students living in cities and those living in suburbs.[vii]  The gap between students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch and those who are not is 28 points; between black and white students, it is 23 points; and between English language learners (ELL) and non-ELL students, it is 34 points. 

Table 1-1 only shows the size of the gender gap as gauged by assessments at single points in time.  For determining trends, let’s take a closer look at the LTT-NAEP, since it provides the longest running record of the gender gap.  In Table 1-2, scores are displayed from tests administered since 1971 and given nearest to the starts and ends of decades.  Results from 2008 and 2012 are both shown to provide readers an idea of recent fluctuations.  At all three ages, gender gaps were larger in 1971 than they are today.  The change at age nine is statistically significant, but not at age 13 (p=0.10) or age 17 (p=.07), although they are close.  Slight shrinkage occurred in the 1980s, but the gaps expanded again in the 1990s.  The gap at age 13 actually peaked at 15 scale score points in 1994 (not shown in the table), and the decline since then is statistically significant.  Similarly, the gap at age 17 peaked in 1996 at 15 scale score points, and the decline since then is also statistically significant.  More recently, the gap at age nine began to shrink again in 1999, age 13 began shrinking in the 2000s, and age 17 in 2012.

Table 1-3 decomposes the change figures by male and female performance.  Sara Mead’s point, that the NAEP story is one of both sexes gaining rather than boys falling behind, is even truer today than when she made it in 2006.  When Mead’s analysis was published, the most recent LTT-NAEP data were from 2004.  Up until then, girls had made greater reading gains than boys.  But that situation has reversed.  Boys have now made larger gains over the history of LTT-NAEP, fueled by the gains that they registered from 2004 to 2012.  The score for 17-year-old females in 2012 (291) was identical to their score in 1971.

The United States is not alone in reading’s gender gap.  Its gap of 31 points is not even the largest (see Figure 1-1). On the 2012 PISA, all OECD countries exhibited a gender gap, with females outscoring males by 23 to 62 points on the PISA scale (standard deviation of 94).   On average in the OECD, girls outscored boys by 38 points (rounded to 515 for girls and 478 for boys).  The U.S. gap of 31 points is less than the OECD average.

Finland had the largest gender gap on the 2012 PISA, twice that of the U.S., with females outscoring males by an astonishing 62 points (0.66 SDs).  Finnish girls scored 556, and boys scored 494.  To put this gap in perspective, consider that Finland’s renowned superiority on PISA tests is completely dependent on Finnish girls.  Finland’s boys’ score of 494 is about the same as the international average of 496, and not much above the OECD average for males (478).  The reading performance of Finnish boys is not statistically significantly different from boys in the U.S. (482) or from the average U.S. student, both boys and girls (498). Finnish superiority in reading only exists among females.

There is a hint of a geographical pattern.  Northern European countries tend to have larger gender gaps in reading.  Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway have four of the six largest gaps.  Denmark is the exception with a 31 point gap, below the OECD average.   And two Asian OECD members have small gender gaps.  Japan’s gap of 24 points and South Korea’s gap of 23 are ranked among the bottom four countries. The Nordic tendency toward large gender gaps in reading was noted in a 2002 analysis of the 2000 PISA results.^[viii]  At that time, too, Denmark was the exception.  Because of the larger sample and persistence over time, the Nordic pattern warrants more confidence than the one in the two Asian countries.

Back to Finland.  That’s the headline story here, and it contains a lesson for cautiously interpreting international test scores.  Consider that the 62 point gender gap in Finland is only 14 points smaller than the U.S. black-white gap (76 points) and 21 points larger than the white-Hispanic gap (41 points) on the same test.  Finland’s gender gap illustrates the superficiality of much of the commentary on that country’s PISA performance.  A common procedure in policy analysis is to consider how policies differentially affect diverse social groups.  Think of all the commentators who cite Finland to promote particular policies, whether the policies address teacher recruitment, amount of homework, curriculum standards, the role of play in children’s learning, school accountability, or high stakes assessments.^[ix]  Advocates pound the table while arguing that these policies are obviously beneficial.  “Just look at Finland,” they say.  Have you ever read a warning that even if those policies contribute to Finland’s high PISA scores—which the advocates assume but serious policy scholars know to be unproven—the policies also may be having a negative effect on the 50 percent of Finland’s school population that happens to be male?

One of the solutions put forth for improving boys’ reading scores is to make an effort to boost their enjoyment of reading.  That certainly makes sense, but past scores of national reading and math performance have consistently, and counterintuitively, shown no relationship (or even an inverse one) with enjoyment of the two subjects.  PISA asks students how much they enjoy reading, so let’s now investigate whether fluctuations in PISA scores are at all correlated with how much 15-year-olds say they like to read.

The analysis below employs what is known as a “differences-in-differences” analytical strategy.  In both 2000 and 2009, PISA measured students’ reading ability and asked them several questions about how much they like to read.  An enjoyment index was created from the latter set of questions.^[x]  Females score much higher on this index than boys.  Many commentators believe that girls’ greater enjoyment of reading may be at the root of the gender gap in literacy.

When new international test scores are released, analysts are tempted to just look at variables exhibiting strong correlations with achievement (such as amount of time spent on homework), and embrace them as potential causes of high achievement. But cross-sectional correlations can be deceptive.  The direction of causality cannot be determined, whether it’s doing a lot of homework that leads to high achievement, or simply that good students tend to take classes that assign more homework.  Correlations in cross-sectional data are also vulnerable to unobserved factors that may influence achievement.  For example, if cultural predilections drive a country’s exemplary performance, their influence will be masked or spuriously assigned to other variables unless they are specifically modeled.^[xi]  Class size, between-school tracking, and time spent on learning are all topics on which differences-in-differences has been fruitfully employed to analyze multiple cross-sections of international data.

Another benefit of differences-in-differences is that it measures statistical relationships longitudinally.  Table 1-4 investigates the question: Is the rise and fall of reading enjoyment correlated with changes in reading achievement?  Many believe that if boys liked reading more, their literacy test scores would surely increase.  Table 1-4 does not support that belief.  Data are available for 27 OECD countries, and they are ranked by how much they boosted males’ enjoyment of reading.  The index is set at the student-level with a mean of 0.00 and standard deviation of 1.00.  For the twenty-seven nations in Table 1-4, the mean national change in enjoyment is -.02 with a standard deviation of .09. 

Germany did the best job of raising boys’ enjoyment of reading, with a gain of 0.12 on the index.  German males’ PISA scores also went up—a little more than 10 points (10.33).  France, on the other hand, raised males’ enjoyment of reading nearly as much as Germany (0.11), but French males’ PISA scores declined by 15.26 points.  A bit further down the column, Ireland managed to get boys to enjoy reading a little more (a gain of 0.05) but their reading performance fell a whopping 36.54 points.  Toward the bottom end of the list, Poland’s boys enjoyed reading less in 2009 than in 2000, a decline of 0.14 on the index, but over the same time span, their reading literacy scores increased by more than 14 points (14.29).  Among the countries in which the relationship goes in the expected direction is Finland.  Finnish males’ enjoyment of reading declined (-0.14) as did their PISA scores in reading literacy (-11.73).  Overall, the correlation coefficient for change in enjoyment and change in reading score is -0.01, indicating no relationship between the two.

Christina Hoff Sommers and Richard Whitmire have praised specific countries for first recognizing and then addressing the gender gap in reading.  Recently, Sommers urged the U.S. to “follow the example of the British, Canadians, and Australians.”^[xii]  Whitmire described Australia as “years ahead of the U.S. in pioneering solutions” to the gender gap.  Let’s see how those countries appear in Table 1-4.  England does not have PISA data for the 2000 baseline year, but both Canada and Australia are included.  Canada raised boys’ enjoyment of reading a little bit (0.02) but Canadian males’ scores fell by about 12 points (-11.74).  Australia suffered a decline in boys’ enjoyment of reading (-0.04) and achievement (-16.50).  As promising as these countries’ efforts may have appeared a few years ago, so far at least, they have not borne fruit in raising boys’ reading performance on PISA.

Achievement gaps are tricky because it is possible for the test scores of the two groups being compared to both decline while the gap increases or, conversely, for scores of both to increase while the gap declines.  Table 1-4 only looks at males’ enjoyment of reading and its relationship to achievement.  A separate differences-in-differences analysis was conducted (but not displayed here) to see whether changes in the enjoyment gap—the difference between boys’ and girls’ enjoyment of reading—are related to changes in reading achievement.  They are not (correlation coefficient of 0.08).  National PISA data simply do not support the hypothesis that the superior reading performance of girls is related to the fact that girls enjoy reading more than boys. 

Let’s summarize the main findings of the analysis above. Reading scores for girls exceed those for boys on eight recent assessments of U.S. reading achievement.  The gender gap is larger for middle and high school students than for students in elementary school.  The gap was apparent on the earliest NAEP tests in the 1970s and has shown some signs of narrowing in the past decade.  International tests reveal that the gender gap is worldwide.  Among OECD countries, it even appears among countries known for superior performance on PISA’s reading test.  Finland not only exhibited the largest gender gap in reading on the 2012 PISA, the gap had widened since 2000.  A popular recommendation for boosting boys’ reading performance is finding ways for them to enjoy reading more.  That theory is not supported by PISA data.  Countries that succeeded in raising boys’ enjoyment of reading from 2000 to 2009 were no more likely to improve boys’ reading performance than countries where boys’ enjoyment of reading declined. 

The origins of the gender gap are hotly debated.  The universality of the gap certainly supports the argument that it originates in biological or developmental differences between the two sexes.  It is evident among students of different ages in data collected at different points in time.  It exists across the globe, in countries with different educational systems, different popular cultures, different child rearing practices, and different conceptions of gender roles.  Moreover, the greater prevalence of reading impairment among young boys—a ratio of two or three to one—suggests an endemic difficulty that exists before the influence of schools or culture can take hold.^[xiii] 

But some of the data examined above also argue against the developmental explanation.  The gap has been shrinking on NAEP.  At age nine, it is less than half of what it was forty years ago.  Biology doesn’t change that fast.  Gender gaps in math and science, which were apparent in achievement data for a long time, have all but disappeared, especially once course taking is controlled.  The reading gap also seems to evaporate by adulthood.  On an international assessment of adults conducted in 2012, reading scores for men and women were statistically indistinguishable up to age 35—even in Finland and the United States.  After age 35, men had statistically significantly higher scores in reading, all the way to the oldest group, age 55 and older.  If the gender gap in literacy is indeed shaped by developmental factors, it may be important for our understanding of the phenomenon to scrutinize periods of the life cycle beyond the age of schooling.   

Another astonishing pattern emerged from the study of adult reading.  Participants were asked how often they read a book.  Of avid book readers (those who said they read a book once a week) in the youngest group (age 24 and younger), 59 percent were women and 41 percent were men.  By age 55, avid book readers were even more likely to be women, by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent.  Two-thirds of respondents who said they never read books were men.  Women remained the more enthusiastic readers even as the test scores of men caught up with those of women and surpassed them.

A few years ago, Ian McEwan, the celebrated English novelist, decided to reduce the size of the library in his London townhouse.  He and his younger son selected thirty novels and took them to a local park.  They offered the books to passers-by.  Women were eager and grateful to take the books, McEwan reports.  Not a single man accepted.  The author’s conclusion? “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”^[xiv] 

McEwan might be right, regardless of the origins of the gender gap in reading and the efforts to end it.

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This week marks the release of the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education, the fourteenth issue of the series.  One of the three studies in the report, “Girls, Boys, and Reading,” examines the gender gap in reading.  Girls consistently outscore boys on reading assessments.  They have for a long time.  A 1942 study in Iowa discovered that girls were superior to boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills.^[i]  Girls have outscored boys on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessments since the first NAEP was administered in 1971. 

I hope you’ll read the full study—and the other studies in the report—but allow me to summarize the main findings of the gender gap study here.

Eight assessments generate valid estimates of U.S. national reading performance: the Main NAEP, given at three grades (fourth, eighth, and 12^th grades); the NAEP Long Term Trend (NAEP-LTT), given at three ages (ages nine, 13, and 17); the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), an international assessment given at fourth grade; and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment given to 15-year-olds.  Females outscore males on the most recent administration of all eight tests.  And the gaps are statistically significant.  Expressed in standard deviation units, they range from 0.13 on the NAEP-LTT at age nine to 0.34 on the PISA at age 15.

The gaps are shrinking.  At age nine, the gap on the NAEP-LTT declined from 13 scale score points in 1971 to five points in 2012.  During the same time period, the gap at age 13 shrank from 11 points to eight points, and at age 17, from 12 points to eight points.  Only the decline at age nine is statistically significant, but at ages 13 and 17, declines since the gaps peaked in the 1990s are also statistically significant.  At all three ages, gaps are shrinking because of males making larger gains on NAEP than females.  In 2012, seventeen-year-old females scored the same on the NAEP reading test as they did in 1971.  Otherwise, males and females of all ages registered gains on the NAEP reading test from 1971-2012, with males’ gains outpacing those of females.

The gap is worldwide.  On the 2012 PISA, 15-year-old females outperformed males in all sixty-five participating countries.  Surprisingly, Finland, a nation known for both equity and excellence because of its performance on PISA, evidenced the widest gap.  Girls scored 556 and boys scored 494, producing an astonishing gap of 62 points (about 0.66 standard deviations—or more than one and a half years of schooling).   Finland also had one of the world’s largest gender gaps on the 2000 PISA, and since then it has widened.  Both girls’ and boys’ reading scores declined, but boys’ declined more (26 points vs. 16 points).  To put the 2012 scores in perspective, consider that the OECD average on the reading test is 496.  Finland’s strong showing on PISA is completely dependent on the superior performance of its young women.

The gap seems to disappear by adulthood.  Tests of adult reading ability show no U.S. gender gap in reading by 25 years of age.  Scores even tilt toward men in later years. 

The words “seems to disappear” are used on purpose.  One must be careful with cross-sectional data not to assume that differences across age groups indicate an age-based trend.  A recent Gallup poll, for example, asked several different age groups how optimistic they were about finding jobs as adults.  Optimism fell from 68% in grade five to 48% in grade 12.  The authors concluded that “optimism about future job pursuits declines over time.”  The data do not support that conclusion.  The data were collected at a single point in time and cannot speak to what optimism may have been before or after that point.  Perhaps today’s 12^th graders were even more pessimistic several years ago when they were in fifth grade.  Perhaps the 12^th-graders are old enough to remember when unemployment spiked during the Great Recession and the fifth-graders are not.   Perhaps 12^th-graders are simply savvier about job prospects and the pitfalls of seeking employment, topics on which fifth-graders are basically clueless.

At least with the data cited above we can track measures of the same cohorts’ gender gap in reading over time.  By analyzing multiple cross-sections—data collected at several different points in time—we can look at real change.  Those cohorts of nine-year-olds in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, are—respectively—today in their 50s, 40s, and 30s.  Girls were better readers than boys when these cohorts were children, but as grown ups, women are not appreciably better readers than men.

Care must be taken nevertheless in drawing firm conclusions.  There exists what are known as cohort effects that can bias measurements.  I mentioned the Great Recession.   Experiencing great historical cataclysms, especially war or economic chaos, may bias a particular cohort’s responses to survey questions or even its performance on tests.  American generations who experienced the Great Depression, World War II, and the Vietnam War—and more recently, the digital revolution, the Great Recession, and the Iraq War—lived through events that uniquely shape their outlook on many aspects of life. 

The gender gap is large, worldwide, and persistent through the K-12 years. What should be done about it?  Maybe nothing.  As just noted, the gap seems to dissipate by adulthood.  Moreover, crafting an effective remedy for the gender gap is made more difficult because we don’t definitely know its cause. Enjoyment of reading is a good example.  Many commentators argue that schools should make a concerted effort to get boys to enjoy reading more.  Enjoyment of reading is statistically correlated with reading performance, and the hope is that making reading more enjoyable would get boys to read more, thereby raising reading skills.

It makes sense, but I’m skeptical.  The fact that better readers enjoy reading more than poor readers—and that the relationship stands up even after boatloads of covariates are poured into a regression equation—is unpersuasive evidence of causality.  As I stated earlier, PISA produces data collected at a single point in time.  It isn’t designed to test causal theories.  Reverse causality is a profound problem.  Getting kids to enjoy reading more may in fact boost reading ability.  But the causal relationship might be flowing in the opposite direction, with enhanced skill leading to enjoyment.   The correlation could simply be indicating that people enjoy activities that they’re good at—a relationship that probably exists in sports, music, and many human endeavors, including reading.

A key question for policymakers is whether boosting boys’ enjoyment of reading would help make boys better readers.  I investigate by analyzing national changes in PISA reading scores from 2000, when the test was first given, to 2102.  PISA creates an Index of Reading Enjoyment based on several responses to a student questionnaire.  Enjoyment of reading has increased among males in some countries and decreased in others.  Is there any relationship between changes in boys’ enjoyment and changes in PISA reading scores? 

There is not.  The correlation coefficient for the two phenomena is -0.01.  Nations such as Germany raised boys’ enjoyment of reading and increased their reading scores by about 10 points on the PISA scale.  France, on the other hand, also raised boys’ enjoyment of reading, but French males’ reading scores declined by 15 points.  Ireland increased how much boys enjoy reading by a little bit but the boys’ scores fell a whopping 37 points. Poland’s males actually enjoyed reading less in 2012 than in 2000, but their scores went up more than 14 points.  No relationship.

How should policymakers proceed?  Large, cross-sectional assessments are good for measuring academic performance at one point in time.  They are useful for generating hypotheses based on observed relationships, but they are not designed to confirm or reject causality.  To do that, randomized control trials should be conducted of programs purporting to boost reading enjoyment.  Also, consider that it ultimately may not matter whether enjoying reading leads to more proficient readers.  Enjoyment of reading may be an end worthy of attainment irrespective of its relationship to achievement.  In that case, RCTs should carefully evaluate the impact of interventions on both enjoyment of reading and reading achievement, whether the two are related or not.  

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And more from the Brown Center Report on American Education

Girls outscore boys on practically every reading test given to a large population. And they have for a long time. A 1942 Iowa study found girls performing better than boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills, and girls have outscored boys on every reading test ever given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This gap is not confined to the U.S. Reading tests administered as part of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that the gender gap is a worldwide phenomenon.

On March 26, join Brown Center experts Tom Loveless and Matthew Chingos as they discuss the latest Brown Center Report on American Education, which examines this phenomenon. Hear what Loveless's analysis revealed about where the gender gap stands today and how it's trended over the past several decades - in the U.S. and around the world.

Tune in below or via Spreecast where you can submit questions. 

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Check out Girls, Boys, and Reading on Spreecast.

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The Common Core State Standards have been adopted as the reading and math standards in more than forty states, but are the frontline implementers—teachers and principals—enacting them? As part of the 2016 Brown Center Report on American Education, Tom Loveless examines the degree to which CCSS recommendations have penetrated schools and classrooms. He specifically looks at the impact the standards have had on the emphasis of non-fiction vs. fiction texts in reading, and on enrollment in advanced courses in mathematics.

On March 28, the Brown Center hosted an online discussion of Loveless's findings, moderated by the Urban Institute's Matthew Chingos.  In addition to the Common Core, Loveless and Chingos also discussed the other sections of the three-part Brown Center Report, including a study of the relationship between ability group tracking in eighth grade and AP performance in high school.

Watch the archived video below.

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Check out Reading and Math in the Common Core Era on Spreecast.