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Emergence of a gender gap in Italian reading acquisition: Evidence from primary school children
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Sendy Caffarra1, Elisa Bassoli1, Giuditta Smith1, Yagmur Ozturk2, Marilina Mastrogiuseppe3, Iliana I. Karipidis4,5,6; 1Department of Biomedic, Metabolic, and Neural sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2Department of Humanities, University of Trieste, Italy, 3National Research Council of Italy, Institute for Biomedical Research and Innovation, Italy, 4Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, University of Zurich, Switzerland, 5Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 6Competence Center of Language and Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Gender gaps in reading and math learning outcomes have been reported in developmental datasets covering primary education (OECD 2023; Reinhold, 2026). While this gap has been documented to rapidly emerge during the early years of primary school for math, scarce and inconsistent findings have been reported regarding its emergence for reading development (Borgonovi et al. 2018; Martinot et al. 2025; Steinmann & Strietholt, 2026). Here, we examine the emergence of a gender gap in single-word reading skills in Italian primary schools using a cross-sectional design. A sample of 959 primary-school children with no psychiatric, perceptual, or neurodevelopmental disorders were presented with a computerized lexical decision task measuring accuracy and speed of visual word and pseudoword recognition (Smith, Bassoli et al., 2026; Yeatman et al., 2021; 514 F, 6–11 y). Boys and girls did not differ significantly in age or non-verbal intelligence (t = 0.02, p = 0.99; t = 0.61, p = 0.54). In line with previous reports from the PISA study (OECD, 2015, 2020, 2023), boys were overrepresented among low performers in single-word reading. Overall frequencies for boys and girls differed significantly below the 5th and 10th percentiles (χ² = 6.13, p = 0.01; χ² = 10.00, p = 0.002). Moreover, among students below the 5th percentile, boys were overrepresented from the third grade onward (χ² = 7.12, p = 0.008), with a male-to-female ratio of 2.2 in grades three to five. An additional analysis of the size of the word superiority effect in reading (i.e., the speed advantage in recognizing words vs. pseudowords) also showed a significant interaction between gender and grade (F = 4.69, p = 0.03), indicating a larger lexicality effect for girls than for boys starting from the third grade (first grade: t = 1.30, p = 0.20; second grade: t = 0.52, p = 0.60; third grade: t = 2.63, p = 0.009; fourth grade: t = 2.24, p = 0.03; fifth grade: t = 2.53, p = 0.01). This effect held even after correcting for vocabulary size. These results indicate the gradual emergence of a gender gap in reading acquisition in Italian during primary education. From third grade onward, boys were increasingly overrepresented among low-performing readers and exhibited smaller lexicality effects than girls. Together, these findings identify early reading instruction until third grade as a critical window for timely intervention aimed at reducing gender disparities in reading.
Topic Areas: Reading, Language Development/Acquisition