A Composite Indicator to Compare the Performance of Male and Female Students in Educational Systems

Abstract

Composite indicators have proved to be a suitable tool for the evaluation of complex phenomena, by enabling a large amount of information to be concentrated in a unique value. In this paper, a methodology based on geometric aggregation and free-selection of weights is proposed for the evaluation of the educational systems of OECD countries. In an effort to carry out a global evaluation, not only is a group of indicators considered to measure the academic outcomes, but also a group of indicators that measure the social dimension of the educational system and the self-perceptions of the students regarding their academic stage. The features of the proposed methodology enable the results for male and female students to be compared separately, since not only identify the contribution of each aspect to the global indicator, but also ascertain the sources of the differences between the values obtained for the male and female subgroups.