When asked whether their parents were saving for college, 68 percent of boys responded in the affirmative, compared with only 53 percent of the girls.
Roger Young, a Baltimore-based senior financial planner with T. Rowe Price and parent of three children, said that researchers didn’t set out to explore the gender disparity in educational savings, but collected enough data to post statistically significant results for families with only boys or girls.
While the data seems to confirm some of the suspicions harbored by social activists and suggests some degree of gender discrimination in the way families save for college costs, other issues may underlie the savings discrepancy, says Hopkins.
“It’s possible some of this is explained by demographics,” he says. “If certainly families have one boy, they might not have another child. If the same families start out by having a girl, they may try again. That’s still tied to gender discrimination.”
Hopkins argues that parents may also be operating on assumptions that financial aid will be more available to young women.
Survey respondents also expressed more favoritism toward boys in terms of student loans, according to the report.
Parents of only boys in the survey were more willing to personally take on debt to send their sons to school, with 23 percent of all-boy parents willing to take on $75,000 in loans to send their sons to school, compared to just 12 percent of the parents of all girls.
Twenty-nine percent of the parents of all boys said they would let their children take on $50,000 or more in student loans, compared to only 17 percent of the parents of only girls.
“Previous studies have shown more women coming out of school with higher amounts of student loan debt than their male cohorts,” says Wright. “It impacts their ability to establish financial footing.”
Hopkins notes that, from an early age, women seem more inclined to pursue low-paying careers than men—a trend that makes it harder for them to pay off loans.