David Autor and co-authors write,
Although family disadvantage is strongly correlated with schools and neighborhood quality, the SES gradient in the sibling gender gap is almost as large within schools and neighborhoods as it is between them.
Read the whole paper, which focuses on the question of why males from low-income families do poorly–even more poorly than females from low-income families. I view the quoted sentence as throwing some cold water on Raj Chetty’s view that neighborhoods make a big difference.
d[gender gap]/d[SES] = constant would be interesting, but isn’t it true that the better neighborhoods’ schools also have a smaller gender cap at low SES levels?
i.e. something like:
M = 2N + 2S
F = 3N + S
would have d[M – F]/dS = 1 (a constant) and the gap would be 0 at N=S=1
where N = neighborhood, S = SES (normally higher S higher N)
Why boys suffer more in poor-neighborhood schools:
1. wider XY variance / greater XX robustness
2. males are (perceived as and really are) more violent, so get expelled from nicer neighborhoods ASAP. this alone could explain the wider gap in the worse-neighborhood schools were all those kids land. at the bottom-tier schools, even if these kids are not violent, mostly-female teachers feel physically menaced, and ignore them or push them into another classroom in the same school.
3. sometimes a particular child (one out of a family of otherwise normal siblings) is a bad seed – more often XY. really bad kids tend to decrease parents’ SES as they lose jobs, split up, move to a new neighborhood after kid is expelled, etc. this doesn’t necessarily undermine the “near constant gradient of gap” measurement.
4. the obvious environment * sex interactions the authors looked for (gang and fight opportunities targeted at boys, schools hostile to poor boys, etc)
And still, like Chetty, all seem to avoid examining how initial motivations are formed and, for example, how they may (probably do) form differently by gender in differing environments.
There may be some “follow up” of the effects of subsequent environments on the developments of motivations – but that usually is obscured by the “objectives” of work like that of Chetty.
Which is NOT to denigrate that work – just that it takes us by different routes to different places in understanding our social order and the relationships within it.
To Chetty’s credit, his 2015 version of his giant Equality of Opportunity study of two generations of tax returns comes up with some plausible findings about which counties are good and bad for boys from below median income families. I wrote in Taki’s Magazine earlier this year:
A close reading of the new 2015 paper by Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates,” reveals much that is plausible. For example, the effect of local culture, such as gangs, can be different on boys and girls. Chetty and Hendren write:
“This suggests that there are pockets of places across the U.S., like Baltimore MD, Pima AZ [Tucson], Wayne County (Detroit) MI, Fresno CA, Hillsborough FL [Tampa], and New Haven CT, which seem to produce especially poor outcomes for boys.”
New Haven County is a fine place to live if you have daughters and you are a Tiger Mother professor at Yale Law School, but it’s a terrible place to move to if you have poor black sons. Chetty has no data on what percentage of boys who were moved to Baltimore, Detroit, or New Haven weren’t earning much in 2011-12 because they were in jail, but it’s obviously a considerable risk.
In contrast, Tucson, Fresno, and Tampa were all home construction boomtowns that got wiped out by the bursting of the Housing Bubble in 2008, a memorable cataclysm whose effects on his data Chetty doesn’t seem to have pondered.
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#ixzz3pecFJiTe
“A surprising
implication of these findings is that, relative to white siblings, black boys fare
worse than their sisters in significant part because black children—both boys and
girls—are raised in more disadvantaged family environments.”
Sorry Arnold, but I’m not reading 70 more pages of that.