Gender Difference in Financial Literacy and Socialization: Comparing Italy to Spain

In all the surveys carried on financial literacy by OECD-PISA among 15-year-old students, Italy is one of the few countries that highlights a significant gender gap, with boys performing better than girls; in Spain, this is not the case. Previous studies show that, together with individual characteristics, opportunities, values, and information from family and the cultural context in which teenagers live may play a role in shaping this gender gap. This paper focuses on advancing the literature on the possible factors explaining the gender gap in financial literacy by adopting a perspective comparing the two countries. It relies on data from the 2018 OECD-PISA on financial literacy (the Italian sample includes 9,122 students; the Spanish one includes 4,100 students). We ran several multivariate analyses, and the outcomes indicate that the differences in the gender gaps in mathematics between the two countries partially explain differences in the gender gaps in financial skills, while the frequency of school activities directly or indirectly dealing with financial education compose a larger part of the explanation. No strong and direct effect of family influence in financial matters is observed.