Do Girls Like Reading More Than Boys?

There is increasing concern about boys falling behind in school. Girls outperform boys (on average) at the elementary, middle, and high school level and enroll in college at much higher rates. Girls especially outperform boys in reading assessments, and have for a long time.

One explanation for this outperforming is that girls are doing more reading in school. Or, similarly, that the reading environment in school is more conducive to girls — the materials or the structure, or something else. It is also possible that girls somehow prefer reading, and school plays a relatively small role.

This new paper aims to use non-self-reported data to measure how much boys and girls are reading. The researchers have data on about 2,600 Danish fifth-graders, whose time reading is measured by a commonly used reading app. The app is used in school but is accessible outside of school.

What the authors find is that during school hours, reading time is similar for boys and girls. But when they look at time outside of school, girls are reading about 25 more minutes per day on average on school days and an average of 10 minutes more on non-school days. In other words: the female reading advantage looks to them like it is driven at least in part by girls reading more for leisure than boys do.

A notable fact is that this difference appears even between boys and girls who are academically strong. It just seems like girls enjoy reading books more.

Some academic work is about drawing causal conclusions and designing policies. Other work is about better understanding the world; this is more in the latter category. To the extent that there is a big-picture takeaway, it may be that in school, reading supports aren’t likely to be especially important for closing the gender reading gap.