In 2006, I began collecting links to research and opinion pieces on gender in education.
The short version:
girls begin to outscore boys in the earliest years of primary school
the gender gap widens through primary and secondary school
In Australia, of every 100 children who enter university blah blah…
this pattern recurs across many OECD countries
gender differences in educational attainment point to a future in which high-skill, high-wage workers will be predominantly female and low-skill, low-wage workers predominantly male.
An excellent overview.
And:
many parents are ignorant of this landscape
policy work in Australia in this area is either non-existent or ineffective
Women completely dominate higher education in the USA
The American Enterprise Insitute summarised US Department of Education 2012 statistics which show:
- For the seventh year in a row starting with the Class of 2006, women in 2012 earned more college degrees than men at every level:
a. Associate’s degrees: 160 women for every 100 men (625,548 vs. 391,990).
b. Bachelor’s degrees: 134 women for every 100 men (1,025,729 vs. 765,317).
c. Master’s degrees: 150 women for every 100 men (452,038 vs. 302,191).
d. Doctor’s degrees: 106 women for every 100 men (87,451 vs. 82,611).
the gender gap in education - trends, causes and policy implications
Tuomas Pekkarinen
Summary
One of the most striking trends in education in the past two or three decades has been the rapid increase in female educational attainment. From the cohorts born in the 1950’s and onwards, women quickly caught up with men in educational investment.
Furthermore, it is clear that the growth in the educational attainment of women has not stalled at gender parity. At the moment, female educational attainment clearly dominates male educational attainment in a majority of industrialized countries. This is true for several measures of attainment. Women are in a clear majority among secondary school graduates, among students enrolled in tertiary education, and among tertiary graduates. Furthermore, judging from recent trends, it seems likely that the gender gap in educational attainment will keep on widening in favor of women in the future.
These trends imply a dramatic change in the composition of the skill supply in industrialized economies. Whereas in the post World War II industrialized world, men were substantially overrepresented among highly skilled workers, this will not be true in the coming decades. And this change happens at a time when educational investments are becoming more and more important for labor market outcomes.
In particular, the recent trend of employment polarization will likely lead to more pronounced differences between the labor market fortunes of high and low-skilled workers. Gender differences in educational attainment imply that these highly rewarded high-skill workers will be predominantly female and increasingly disadvantaged low-skill workers will be predominantly male. The gender gap in educational attainment can therefore have far reaching labor market implications.
An excellent overview.
The paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications.
I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries.
These gaps reflect male overrepresentation among secondary school dropouts and female overrepresentation among tertiary education students and graduates. Existing evidence suggests that this pattern is a result of a combination of increasing returns to education and lower female effort costs of education.
A widening gender gap in education combined with recent wage and employment polarization will likely lead to widening inequalities and is linked to declining male labor force participation.
The paper discusses evidence on educational policies that both widen and reduce gender gaps in educational outcomes