Korea has smallest gender gap in academic effort attitudes among 61 countries, study finds

When a son underperforms academically, a common refrain is that he is smart enough — he just does not try hard enough. In the United States and across much of the Western world, boys consistently score lower than girls and drop out of school more often, a phenomenon researchers have come to call the "boy crisis."

Now, an analysis of more than 750,000 fifteen-year-olds across 61 countries has found that boys were less likely than girls to consider working hard at school important — and that the wider this gap, the more boys fell behind academically and the less likely they were to go on to university. South Korea had the smallest such gap of any country in the study.

Among American women born in 1985, 40 percent earned a university degree, compared with 30 percent of men. Across OECD member countries, women made up 54 percent of new university entrants in 2017.

The findings were published in PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 10, by a research team led by Clotilde Napp of France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). The team analyzed data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to examine gender differences in students' attitudes toward academic effort.

PISA is an OECD assessment administered every three years to measure the mathematics, reading and science proficiency of 15-year-olds worldwide. The research team compared how strongly boys and girls agreed with the statement "It is important to work hard at school," drawing on PISA survey data from 2012 and 2018.

Boys agreed with the statement less than girls did. While the gap itself was not large, it was consistent across 60 of the 61 countries studied. The pattern held regardless of household income, parental education level, grade retention or single-parent household status.

Norway had the largest gender gap, while South Korea had the smallest. South Korea did show a gap, but it was far less pronounced than in other countries. Regionally, the gap was smaller in East and Southeast Asia and Latin America, and larger in Nordic countries and the Middle East and Central Asia.

Countries with higher levels of economic and social development tended to show larger gender gaps. The research team said the findings reflected the so-called "gender-equality paradox" — the counterintuitive pattern in which more prosperous and gender-equal societies show greater divergence between boys and girls — now extending to academic attitudes as well.

Students who believed working hard was important tended to score higher. At the country level, nations with a larger gender gap in attitudes also saw boys fall further behind girls in reading scores, and boys made up a greater share of low-performing students.

Among university students aged 19 to 22 in countries with available data, men accounted for an average of 44 percent. South Korea was the only country where men made up more than half. Countries with a larger attitude gap had a lower share of male university students.

In countries with a larger attitude gap, boys were underrepresented in humanities and arts programs, but their share in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields showed no such correlation.

An earlier study found that boys were 1.75 times more likely than girls to say that studying hard would make them unpopular, and 1.5 times more likely to say it would invite ridicule.

However, this study analyzed students' self-reported attitudes rather than their actual effort. It was limited to 15-year-olds, and the researchers were unable to establish causation.

The research team noted that boys growing up in societies where few men attend university may come to feel that studying is of little use, leading them to place less value on school.

DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag316

Clotilde Napp, Gender differences in attitudes toward academic effort and boys' underachievement: A large-scale international study, PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 10, October 2026, pgag316.