Gender Disparities in World Education

Inequality in delivery of education to women has historically been a consistent force: girls traditionally have had much less access to education than boys and, in some cultures, have been banned outright from schooling. However, starting in the 1940s, nations across the world began to focus on the mass education of all citizens, male and female. Although great achievements in gender parity are being reached worldwide, there are still more boys than girls enrolled in school and boys often achieve higher levels of education at higher rates than do girls. Additionally, more men than women are educated and literate, so gender parity is a serious concern for adult education also. However, boys in developed nations (particularly the U.S.) sometimes fare worse than girls in school. U.S. school-aged boys have greater discipline problems and more learning disabilities than girls, and U.S. men are awarded fewer bachelor's degrees than U.S. women. Because of these issues and the fact that millions of men worldwide are illiterate, the issue of gender parity must include equal educational opportunities for both genders.

Keywords Education for All (EFA); Extreme Poverty; Gender Equality; Gender Parity; Nongovernmental Organization (NGO); Permanently Literate; Primary Education; Secondary Education; UNESCO

Overview

Under the leadership of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), many nations around the world have embraced the global vision of education for all (EFA). EFA calls for all people in the world to have access to at least a primary education by 2015. In order for EFA to be a reality, UNESCO (2006) has established several goals that need to be met. One of them (Goal 5) is "gender parity," which UNESCO (2006) defines as the state of an equal number of girls and boys being enrolled in primary and secondary education at the same time. By 2005, UNESCO (2006) had planned to see gender parity accomplished in the world. UNESCO has revised this wish, hoping to see "gender equality" accomplished by 2015, which means that boys and girls will have equal access to education, equal achievement in education, and equal benefits from education. Cheung (2007) writes of both these goals and notes that "gender parity" is a more formal term, focused primarily on equal access to education, whereas the broader goal of "gender equality" requires that "discrimination between men and women should be obliterated" (p. 158).

UNESCO is not alone in focusing on educational inequality between the genders. Other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many charities, and numerous government leaders are focusing on the importance of education and helping open up more educational opportunities for both boys and girls.

Barriers to Female Education

Worldwide, fewer girls than boys receive an education, and illiteracy rates are higher among women than men. There are many reasons for this. First, many girls are hampered by gender prejudice and cultural mandates that keep women limited to a narrow life of raising children and keeping a home. There is a persistent, widespread belief in many parts of the world that the education of women is not that important. In addition, economic issues, such as extreme poverty or lack of educational resources, often prevent girls from being enrolled in school. Often girls are kept at home to help with household chores and assist their mothers, and many girls must seek employment to augment their family's income; both situations leave little time for education. Teenage girls and adult women are often married with children or single mothers and have additional responsibilities that can prevent them from seeking further education. These barriers to girls' education are particularly troubling because education remains one the most important tools girls and women have for improving their lives.

Proven Benefits of Education for Women in Developing Nations

Some of the benefits that education provides specifically to women are lower fertility rates and lower levels of both maternal and infant mortality. UNICEF (2011) states that worldwide, over 500,000 women die annually from the complications of pregnancy or childbirth and that about 80 percent of those deaths are the result of preventable conditions such as hemorrhage or sepsis. Education helps reduce these numbers and improve the health of women and their children: better educated women are more equipped to care for their children, and women with fewer children are able to devote more time and resources to a smaller number offspring.

Educational opportunities for women also result in enormous economic benefits, such as helping women raise themselves and their families out of poverty. Poverty, particularly extreme poverty, is a global crisis. According to the World Bank, in 2010, an estimated 2.4 billion people lived on less than $2 US per day (World Bank, 2013), a condition that prevents them from being able to meet basic needs. Education helps women become employable by equipping them for the job market, giving them the skills needed to open their own businesses, and helping break down the gender discrimination that prevents women from seeking employment.

Parity Includes Boys

However, the issue of gender parity cannot focus solely on girls and women. Mills (2000) stated that there has been a worldwide concern over how boys are faring in school in comparison to girls, particularly in industrialized nations. Some have argued that the decades of feminism and late-twentieth-century focus on women have actually worked to marginalize boys. According to UNESCO (2006), in some areas of the world, there are more girls than boys enrolled in school, and "almost everywhere, girls do better in school than boys." Boys and girls share many of the same benefits of and barriers to education, and care should be taken that both girls and boys have equal access to education so that, as Cheung (2007) writes, neither males nor females experience any form of gender discrimination.

Further Insights

Global Challenges for Girls & Boys

Although "the proportion of girls and boys in primary school over the last 40 years has risen in every region" (Unterhalter, 2007, p. 4), there are still millions of children around the world who are uneducated. Globally, girls do lag behind boys in educational opportunity and enrollment. UNESCO (2013b) reported that 21 percent of the 57 million children not enrolled in primary school are girls. Furthermore, in sub-Saharan Africa, where education achievement is quite low, 16.1 percent of primary school–aged girls were not enrolled in school in 2011 as compared to 13.7 percent of boys.

While boys and girls do face many of the same barriers to education, such as poverty and lack of resources, girls often have more challenges to overcome. Some of the barriers are cultural biases and work demands, but money is often the greatest factor preventing girls from being educated. Gene Sperling, the director for the Center for Universal Education has said that if school costs are involved and parents cannot afford to pay for the education of all their children, inevitably they will choose to educate their boys over their girls (cited in "Universal education," 2005). Archer (2006) bolsters this statement by arguing that "when countries abolish school fees it is girls who flood into school—in their millions" (p. 23). Unterhalter (2007, p. 7) adds that, aside from school fees, generally it costs families less to educate boys because their school clothes are not as expensive, and boys are usually more safely mobile in society and do not need extra transportation and supervision when traveling to school.

While broad cultural issues (such as a widespread belief that women should be restricted to home) affect educational chances for girls, there are other particular cultural issues that also prevent girls from being educated. In many cultures, a married woman is no longer tied to her parental family; thus, upon marrying off their daughters, parents are no longer able to benefit from their daughters' education as they would their sons' ("Universal Education," 2005). Unterhalter (2007) states that some cultures outright forbid girls from getting an education and that, generally, it is girls from the poorest communities who have the most severe education restrictions (p. 7).

Overcoming the Barriers

Many organizations, such as UNESCO, are working to overcome these barriers, and primary school enrollment is increasing. EFA is making encouraging strides around the world, and gender parity in education is becoming more of a reality for millions of children. However, several problems remain, particularly for girls. While gender parity and school enrollment is increasing in the primary levels, UNESCO (2013b) reports that primary school dropout rates remain discouragingly high, particularly in the regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia, where the dropout rate for students enrolled in primary school was about 33 percent in 2011. This is particularly troubling because primary education is vital; it allows people to be, in the words of UNESCO (2003), "permanently literate." Sadly many children, particularly girls, are not receiving a full primary education. Gender parity needs to be accomplished on all levels of education, not merely primary. Even for those children who complete a primary education, few pursue a secondary education. UNICEF (2007) reports that girls often drop out of school around the time they reach puberty.

Educating Adult Women

Gender parity in education also needs to focus on all age levels of women, not just young girls. Among adults, two out of every three illiterate persons in the world in 2011 were women (UNICEF, 2011; UNESCO 2013a). The challenge, UNICEF (2007) states, is that many nations are more willing to accept the idea of children's rights than women's rights, so the idea of educating women often encounters more resistance than the idea of educating girls. In particular, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is a sister treaty to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), but CRC is much more widely embraced than CEDAW. Although 186 nations had signed CEDAW by early 2010, UNICEF (2011; 2007) states that many of those nations have had reservations about different articles outlined in the treaty. UNICEF (2007) concludes that "a world fit for children is also a world fit for women. They are inseparable and indivisible—one cannot exist without the other" (p. 15). Mothers tend to be the first teachers that children have, and it is imperative that the rights and education of women be as vital a concern as schooling and gender parity among children.

Parity for Men & Women

Gender parity must also focus on making education accessible and of high quality for boys and men as well as girls and women. While boys universally have higher enrollment rates and greater educational achievement, there is evidence that boys are beginning to fall behind girls in industrialized nations.

Worldwide, there are millions of boys and men who are without access to education. UNESCO (2013a) found that there were 744 million illiterate adults worldwide in 2011 and that men represented one-third of that number. Boys and men without education face poor employment prospects, poverty, and a host of other severe problems, and it is crucial that gender parity in education be achieved for both females and males.

Issues

The Cost of School Fees

In the discussion of gender and the basic issue of how many girls versus boys are enrolled in school, cost is one of the greatest factors. As noted above, if cost is involved, parents will usually choose to educate their sons over their daughters. Archer (2006) states that in countries where school fees are present, children's educational process is hindered and "it is girls who are most systematically excluded" (p. 23). In fact, Unterhalter (2007) states that in the 1980s, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) were put in place to check public sector growth, and these changes usually resulted in school fees and a general decline of school systems. These factors lead to slower growth and sometimes decline in enrollment, especially among girls. In particular, gender gaps in the education systems of the Arab states, Africa, and South Asia were linked to these SAPs (pp. 4–5). As Archer (2006) and others have argued, making education free is one of the biggest steps toward achieving gender parity.

Cultural Influences

Gender parity in education is also assisted by the gender parity of a culture. Clemens (2004) says that when women are more active in the labor market of a particular region, gender parity in education is achieved more quickly. Also, he argues that higher rates of fertility and larger families surprisingly increase the chances of girls being educated, perhaps because more children mean more help for chores and less time individual children need to spend on household activities (p. 21). This is contrary to other research, which argues that lower fertility rates increase children's chances of being educated.

Cheung (2007) states that there are three main influential factors in a culture's gender parity. First is the culture's acceptance of gender equality; a culture may naturally harbor a mindset that men and women are equal, and this is usually evidenced by equal opportunities for both sexes. Second, government changes often happen that push forward gender equality issues. UNESCO's EFA agenda is one example of how a government can change the educational focus of a nation. Third, changes in educational curriculum also can effect positive change on a culture's view of education; an increased educational focus on gender often leads to greater opportunities for women and girls.

Economic Influences

While many people may praise worldwide government action as the catalyst behind increasing gender parity, Clemens (2004) says that the educational goals of a nation may not have as much an impact on education changes as other factors. The economic health of a nation is one factor: if there is a low demand for educated workers, a government will have trouble encouraging the spread of education, since people will thus be investing in something that ultimately has a low payoff. Furthermore, Clemens (2004) argues that parental income and educational levels are much greater factors in children's education than policy changes: better educated and better paid parents are more aggressive about seeking education for their children. In practical terms, what this means for gender parity is that governments will have a hard time encouraging parents to educate their daughters if job prospects (especially for women) remain low and parents themselves go largely uneducated. This is why it is crucial that world leaders focus on education for both genders of all ages because educating the parents improves the chances that children will be educated.

Why Boys are Falling behind in Industrialized Countries

Both Weans (2005) and Vail (2006) agree, with other researchers, that the issue of the "boy crisis" has much more to do with class and race than gender. Weans (2005) speaks of an "anti-intellectualism" often found in African American culture, an attitude stemming from a belief that striving in school is giving into the pressures of Caucasian culture. Because of this, African American males that succeed in school often face derision from their peers.

Mills (2000) says that, in discussing boys' achievements in education, researchers have tended to lump all boys into one category and say that boys universally are falling behind in school. In counterpoint, Mills (2000) states that in Australia, typically it is indigenous boys or boys from working-class homes who have the most difficulty in school, and he notes that in the UK, US, and Australia, both boys and girls from working-class backgrounds are usually the ones most disadvantaged by the school system. Mills (2000) argues that class and the social view of class often have a greater bearing on a child's educational achievement than gender.

Still, there is cause to say that boys are not performing as well in school as girls, and Gool et al. (2006) have said that there are several factors that influence the education of girls and boys. Culturally, boys are taught to be more competitive and individualistic, while girls are taught to be cooperative and sensitive. Boys tend to prefer a more competitive learning environment, while girls learn best in a cooperative, shared learning environment. Likewise, male teachers tend to be assertive, while female teachers are more sensitive. What often happens in the classroom is that a teacher's instruction style (usually female) is not as preferable to the male students who make up a good percentage of the class. UNESCO (2010) reports that, globally, female teachers widely outnumber male: in 2008, just over 60 percent of primary school teachers and 51 percent of secondary school teachers were female.

However, this gender gap among teachers is not universal. In the Arab states in 2008, for example, male and female primary school teachers were nearly equal in number (UNESCO, 2010). Globally speaking, the gender disparity among teachers lessens among the higher grade levels. Overall, although the gender of the teacher may influence boys' and girls' educational experience, it is only one of numerous factors, all of which need careful consideration and study.

As world leaders focus on establishing new educational opportunities and improving existing educational structures, the focus must be on providing equal access to free, high-quality education that allows all students to learn, no matter what gender, age, or learning style. Gender parity in education must be accomplished in order to empower people’s lives, eliminate discrimination, and find security and purpose in the world. Barriers to education for girls as well as boys need to be removed.

Terms & Concepts

Education for All (EFA): This is a broad goal upheld by the United Nations and promoted by UNESCO; it states that everyone in the world should have access to a primary education by the year 2015.

Extreme Poverty: Defined as people living on less than two US dollars a day, a sum too low to allow people to provide for basic needs.

Gender Equality: A broader term than gender parity meaning that both girls and boys have equal access to high-quality primary education and can achieve similar levels and benefits of education.

Gender Parity: An equal number of girls and boys enrolled in primary and secondary school. However, this does not mean that all boys and girls are enrolled, but merely an equal amount of them.

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs): This is a term for organizations that are maintained by citizens for the purpose of promoting a common goal, such as reducing discrimination or ending hunger.

Permanently Literate: The state of having enough education to be literate and to be self-equipped to continue the educational and learning process.

Primary Education: Equates to the first six years of schooling (grades 1–6)

Secondary Education: Equates to seventh- to twelfth-grade learning levels.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

Ogunjuyigbe, P. O., Ojofeitimi, E. O., & Akinlo, A. (2006). Science education in Nigeria: An examination of people's perceptions about female participation in science, mathematics and technology. Journal of Science Education & Technology, 15 (3/4), 277–284. Retrieved October 23, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Education Abstracts. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22808734&site=ehost-live

Sikora, J., & Pokropek, A. (2012). Gender segregation of adolescent science career plans in 50 countries. Science Education, 96 , 234–264. Retrieved October 7, 2014, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=71543964&site=ehost-live

Stromquist, N. (2006). Gender, education and the possibility of transformative knowledge. Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education, 36 , 145–161. Retrieved October 23, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22088963&site=ehost-live

Unterhalter, E. (2005). Fragmented frameworks? Researching women, gender, education, and development. In A. Sheila & E. Unterhalter (Eds.), Beyond Access: Transforming Policy and Practice for Gender Equality in Education (pp.15–35). Oxford, England: Oxfam.

Unterhalter, E., Challender, C., & Rajagopalan, R. (2005). Measuring gender equality in education. In A. Sheila & E. Unterhalter (Eds.), Beyond Access: Transforming Policy and Practice for Gender Equality in Education (pp. 60–79). Oxford, England: Oxfam.

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