Equity in education is defined as the guarantee that all students are provided with the opportunities to benefit from their educational system regardless of their gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and family background (OECD, 2014). In the last decades, investments have been made to identify and monitor educational gaps and to better understand the phenomenon of inequality across several groups, such as gender, SES, and immigrant background (e.g., Strello et al., 2023), and to identity the most urgent needs of intervention in diminishing educational inequality. However, these efforts have been predominantly based on achievement, although school adjustment is not defined only as achievement but instead as a child’s success in dealing with all struggles and tasks faced within the school environment (Ladd, 1989). Adding to the achievement components of schooling, there is also an affective component of school adjustment which, we argue, should not be ignored. Hence, the goal of this study is to give a cross-national overview of the affective gaps based on gender, SES, and immigrant status, by focusing on three indicators of math-specific affective adjustment – confidence, enjoyment, and value. We analyzed the TIMSS 2019 dataset for 8th-grade students in the math domain. Thirty-nine countries were considered, amounting to a total of 224.080 students. Using regression analysis, we estimated gaps throughout different groups – male versus female (i.e., gender), high SES vs. low SES, and native versus non-native (i.e., immigrant background), on three different math-related affective outcomes – confidence, enjoyment, and value, leading to a set of 9 regression analyses. Analyses were performed for each country considering student weights. Although not the focus of this investigation, achievement gaps were also assessed and controlled for. In what concerned gender, there seems to be a rather consistent affective gap benefitting boys, especially in their confidence towards mathematics, even when controlling for achievement. As for SES, results replicate those of achievement, in the sense that students with high SES score higher on math-related affective components of learning in the vast majority of countries – however, this gap diminishes significantly when controlling for achievement. Finally, when looking into immigrant status, results are rather mixed, especially for math confidence. As for enjoyment and math value, non-natives show a slight tendency for higher scores, and this tendency holds even while controlling for achievement. Detailed results, implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented and discussed in light of existing research, policies, and strategies regarding inequalities in education.

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