Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences · Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment

Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment

Item

Title: Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment
Author: McDaniel, Anne; Buchmann, Claudia
Research Area: Class, Status and Power
Topic: Gender and Gender Inequality
Abstract: Just a few decades ago in most nations in the world, women completed far less schooling than men. Today, throughout much of the world, the reverse is true, and on average, women complete more years of schooling than men. This essay identifies important cross‐national trends in gender inequalities in educational attainment, outlines foundational and cutting‐edge research on the topic and suggests directions for future research. We examine US‐based explanations for the female‐favorable gender gap in educational attainment, and argue that the gender gap must be studied from a comparative and international perspective. While little is known about why women outpace men in education throughout the world, we recommend three potential avenues for future research: (i) the sources of girls' better average academic performance in school, (ii) boys' apparent greater vulnerability to resource deficits within families, and (iii) changing incentives for women and men to complete higher education. We conclude by discussing the potential consequences of the female advantage in educational attainment and the challenges of conducting cross‐national educational research.
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Identifier: etrds0142
extracted text: Gender Inequality in Educational
Attainment1
ANNE McDANIEL and CLAUDIA BUCHMANN

Abstract
Just a few decades ago in most nations in the world, women completed far less
schooling than men. Today, throughout much of the world, the reverse is true, and
on average, women complete more years of schooling than men. This essay identifies
important cross-national trends in gender inequalities in educational attainment, outlines foundational and cutting-edge research on the topic and suggests directions for
future research. We examine US-based explanations for the female-favorable gender
gap in educational attainment, and argue that the gender gap must be studied from a
comparative and international perspective. While little is known about why women
outpace men in education throughout the world, we recommend three potential
avenues for future research: (i) the sources of girls’ better average academic performance in school, (ii) boys’ apparent greater vulnerability to resource deficits within
families, and (iii) changing incentives for women and men to complete higher education. We conclude by discussing the potential consequences of the female advantage
in educational attainment and the challenges of conducting cross-national educational research.

INTRODUCTION
Just a few decades ago in most nations in the world, women completed
far less schooling than men. Today, the reverse is true and on average
women complete more years of schooling than men. In most industrialized
societies, women enjoy a growing advantage in college completion. This
essay describes gender differences in educational attainment on a global
level—that is, how much education males and females complete measured
either as years of schooling or degrees earned. It discusses recent developments in the literature focusing on international similarities and differences
in the female advantage in educational attainment, the sources of this trend
and its possible consequences. After outlining foundational research on
1. Portions of this essay were adopted in whole or in part from: McDaniel, A. (2012). Women’s advantage in higher education: Toward understanding a global phenomenon. Sociology Compass, 6/7, 581–595,
doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2012.00477.x.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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explanations for the female favorable gap in educational attainment, much of
which is US-based, the essay highlights cutting-edge international research
on the issue. Because little is known about why women’s educational
attainment now exceeds men’s throughout much of the world, the essay
considers important questions for future research and promising avenues to
advance understanding of gender inequalities in educational attainment in
the current era: (i) the sources of girls’ better average academic performance
in school, (ii) boys’ apparent greater vulnerability to resource deficits within
families, (iii) changing incentives for women and men to complete higher
education, and (iv) the potential consequences of the female advantage in
educational attainment for societies and individuals.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
CROSS-NATIONAL TRENDS IN THE GENDER GAP IN EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
During the 1970s in most nations in the world, women completed far fewer
college and university degrees than men. But today, women comprise more
than 50% of tertiary students in a majority of countries throughout the
world. The female advantage is most striking in industrialized societies.
For example, in the 27 member-nations of the European Union, 55% of all
students graduating from higher education are women (UNESCO, 2010).
In the United States, women now comprise 57% of students enrolled in
college (Snyder & Dillow, 2012). These high rates of college enrollment and
completion are especially striking when we consider that just 30 years ago,
women comprised less than half of the students earning college degrees in
Europe and the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, women’s enrollment
in higher education surpassed men’s in North America and Western Europe.
In the 1990s, women’s enrollment surpassed men’s in Latin America and the
Caribbean. In the past decade, women surpassed men in tertiary enrollment
in Central Asia. Currently, men’s and women’s tertiary enrollment rates
are roughly equal in East Asia and the Pacific as well as Middle Eastern
countries.
It is also noteworthy that the trend in rising female educational attainment
extends to most developing nations, where males once had substantial
enrollment and attainment advantages over females. In these world regions,
where the proportion of students going on to higher education is very
low, the female advantage is typically measured in years of primary and
secondary schooling completed. According to Grant and Behrman (2010),
in less developed countries there is a widespread female advantage in
educational attainment among those who ever enrolled in school and
“girls … progress through school on pace with or faster than boys and have

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equal or greater schooling attainment than boys” (pp. 85–86). Furthermore,
women are expected to widen their lead in educational attainment over men
well into the future. The OECD projects that by 2025 the share of women
enrolled in higher education will reach 60% in many nations, and over 70%
in the United Kingdom and Austria (Vincent-Lancrin 2008). In developing
countries, female advantages in schooling attainment among ever-enrolled
students are also expected to increase (Grant & Behrman, 2010).
On a global level, not only are women more likely to enroll in higher education and complete university degrees than men, they have made impressive
gains relative to men in earning graduate and professional degrees. In 2010,
women were awarded 60% of master’s degrees and 51% of doctoral degrees
in the United States (Snyder & Dillow, 2012). On a global level, women comprise 56% of all students enrolled in master’s degree programs and 44% of
all PhD-level students (UNESCO, 2010). Trends suggest that in the coming
decades women will reach parity with men or surpass them in doctoral programs globally.
US-BASED EXPLANATIONS FOR THE FEMALE ADVANTAGE IN EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
Because the female advantage in higher education on a global scale is such
a new phenomenon, there is little research on it to date. Most prior international research on gender inequalities in education has focused on how the
spread of mass schooling, support for women’s rights and more egalitarian
gender norms increased women’s participation in higher education (Bradley
& Ramirez, 1996; Schofer & Meyer, 2005). Because most of this research was
conducted before the reversal of the gender gap in educational attainment, it
does not examine the forces behind women surpassing men in educational
attainment cross-nationally. At the same time, a small but growing body of
literature on the female advantage in college completion in the United States
has emerged. This research on why women have come to outpace men in
higher education suggests fruitful areas for exploration including girls’ better
average academic performance in school, boys’ apparent greater vulnerability to resource deficits within families, and changing incentives for women
and men to complete higher education.
GENDER INEQUALITIES IN ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
Research in the United States demonstrates that females outperform and
outpace males at almost every point in the educational career. Girls have
long obtained better grades in schools in all subjects. Today, girls also take
more rigorous high school courses than boys. They have fewer behavioral

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problems and learning disabilities, better social skills and classroom behavior, and higher educational expectations than boys (Buchmann, DiPrete, &
McDaniel, 2008). While males continue to out perform females on standardized math tests and females outperform males on reading tests (Hedges &
Nowell, 1995), most scholars agree that gender differences in mental abilities
measured by test scores are too small to account for the growing female
advantage in college completion (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). Grades are a
far better predictor than test scores of the likelihood of completing college
and females’ superior academic performance in elementary and secondary
school is one important factor behind women’s higher college completion
rates (Buchmann & DiPrete, 2006).
MALE VULNERABILITY TO RESOURCE DEFICITS
An emerging line of research on educational outcomes suggests that males
may be more vulnerable than females to resource deficits. For example,
evidence indicates that growing up in homes with absent fathers or
less-educated parents is more detrimental to males’ than females’ educational outcomes (Buchmann & DiPrete, 2006). If, as gender role socialization
theories maintain, girls look more to their mothers and boys look more to
their fathers when developing educational aspirations and role models, it
makes sense that boys may suffer differentially from the absence of a father
in the household. Evidence from the United States suggest that men’s disadvantage in college completion emerged over time, in part due to the fact that
men from homes with absent fathers are less likely to complete college than
their similarly situated female counterparts (Buchmann & DiPrete, 2006).
Moreover, adolescent boys with no father present in the home have lower
achievement scores and more behavioral problems compared to boys with
two parents in the home (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). US-based evidence
also indicates that parents’ education and social class differently affect
the educational outcomes of sons and daughters. The female-favorable
gender gap in education is largest among those from working class and less
educated families (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013).
RISING INCENTIVES TO COMPLETE MORE EDUCATION
Education is often thought of as an investment decision, both for individuals
and countries. For countries, investing in education is believed to promote
economic and cultural development, especially in terms of worker productivity and economic output, but also in terms of health and political stability (Hannum & Buchmann, 2005). For individuals, investing in education
increases human capital, and the decision to invest in education is based on

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perceived returns to education (Becker, 1991). Yet, men’s and women’s incentives to pursue higher education differ, and these differences are related to
men’s and women’s rates of college completion.
Economic and societal changes during the twentieth century transformed
women’s labor market opportunities in the United States and other industrialized societies. Today, in the United States, nearly as many women as men
are represented in the workforce. Moreover, women have made substantial
gains in high-skill sectors of the economy, due both to the expansion of sectors such as health care and education which have been female dominated,
but also to their growing representation in previously male-dominated occupations in fields such as business, law, and science. These changes in the labor
market experiences of women, coupled with changes in marriage and family
life, have influenced their decisions acquire ever higher levels of education
(DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013).
Women’s wage returns to higher education have risen in the United States
in recent decades, but men’s returns have risen at a very similar rate. Therefore, wage returns alone cannot explain women’s advantage in college completion over men in the United States (Hubbard, 2011). At the same time,
one puzzling aspect of the reversal of the gender gap in college completion
is the slow pace of growth in men’s rates of college completion in the face
of rising returns to college for men. Of course, returns to education are not
limited to financial returns or labor market opportunities, and this is especially true for women. Women with a college degree in the United States
are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, have fewer children, and are
less likely to be single parents than women without a college degree. These
incentives may partly explain women’s rising rates of educational attainment
(DiPrete & Buchmann, 2006).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Little is known about shifting gender inequalities in educational attainment
in countries other than the United States or cross-nationally. The majority of
cross-national research on gender gaps in higher education was conducted
during the period when men outpaced women in educational attainment,
and is therefore out of date for most regions of the world (Kelly & Slaughter,
1991). Other cross-national research has examined why women and men tend
to complete different fields of study or the underrepresentation of women
in science related fields (Charles & Bradley, 2002, 2009), and has paid less
attention to the fact that on average, women now lead men in how much
schooling they complete. Growing interest in the female advantage in educational attainment in the United States has spurred some research on shifting gender gaps in educational attainment in other countries. Cutting-edge

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research on this issue examines female academic performance advantages
in secondary schools. Other research has begun to examine that factors that
might explain cross-national variations in gender gaps in educational attainment. A few important country-specific case studies examine the sources of
women’s advantage in higher education.
Research has begun to examine gender differences in academic performance, educational expectations, and other school-related behaviors from a
cross-national perspective, thanks to the growing availability of high-quality,
comparative cross-national datasets on secondary school students, such
as the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends
in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). These studies provide
insights into processes earlier in the life course that lead to gender inequalities in educational attainment later in life. For example, recent research finds
that boys outscore girls on math tests and girls outscore boys on reading
tests across countries (Marks, 2008), but there are important variations in
the size of the gender gaps on achievement tests. In countries with higher
levels of gender equality, the male advantage on standardized math tests
is smaller among high achieving secondary school students (Penner, 2008).
Cross-national research also suggests that females outperform males on
other educational measures. Females have more positive attitudes toward
school, spend more time on homework, and have higher educational expectations (McDaniel, 2010). Among students who graduate from secondary
school, females are more likely to continue on to higher education than
males in many countries (Ortega, 2008).
Other recent research examines broad trends and patterns in how structural
and institutional features of countries shape the gender gap in higher education enrollment and completion. McDaniel’s research on the gender gap in
tertiary enrollment in 75 countries finds that countries that have historically
supported women’s rights, experienced more rapid educational expansion,
and have low fertility rates tend to have larger shares of women than men
enrolled in tertiary education (McDaniel, 2014). In a study of 37 European
countries, McDaniel (2011) finds that women’s university completion is influenced by the size and expansion of the tertiary system and fertility norms,
while men’s university completion is influenced by labor market opportunities within countries. Men’s likelihood of completion is lower in nations
where men have alternative job opportunities, such as working in the industrial sector or in a trade union, and with high unemployment rates.
Other cutting-edge research tests the reach of the US-based finding that
men are more vulnerable to growing up in households with fewer resources
and low-educated parents. In England, Glaesser and Cooper (2012) find that
boys without highly educated parents are less likely to obtain secondary
school qualifications compared to similar girls. In Germany, Legewie and

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DiPrete (2009) find that among the cohort born between 1960 and 1982,
females either caught up with or overtook males in educational attainment
in families with low-educated fathers. In Norway, daughters earn a greater
benefit in terms of education than sons from having more educated mothers
(Ermisch & Pronzato, 2009). In seven European countries, Breen, Luijkx,
Muller, and Pollack (2009) demonstrate that women’s disadvantage in the
completion of higher education declined over the course of the twentieth
century, and this holds true for all social classes. Furthermore, in Italy and
Poland, daughters attained more education than sons whose fathers work
in middle-class occupations. McDaniel (2011) finds across 37 European
countries that men are less likely to complete university than women if their
parents had low levels of education.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Gender inequalities in educational attainment have been in flux in recent
decades, with women gaining advantages over men throughout much of the
world in ways that could not have been anticipated just two decades ago.
In light of these striking changes, the future promises to bring more change
than stability in this field of research. Here we discuss four areas of inquiry
that may prove particularly useful in advancing understanding of gender
inequalities in educational attainment. (i) How do gender inequalities in education develop earlier in the life course and how they are related to inequalities in educational attainment? (ii) Why do males’ educational outcomes
seem particularly vulnerable to resource deficits? (iii) How do the incentives
to complete more education shape males’ and females’ educational attainment rates? How might these incentives be changing throughout the world,
and across different countries? (iv) What are the broader societal level consequences of the growing female advantage in educational attainment?
First, because gender inequalities in educational attainment are due,
in part, to gender differences in earlier behaviors and experiences, more
research needs to examine how gender shapes children and adolescents’
educational experiences, orientations, performance, and achievement early
in the life course. The study of gender differences in early childhood must
be an interdisciplinary enterprise, with connected efforts in sociology,
psychology, biology, neuroscience, genetics, and other disciplines.
Second, while some evidence suggests that males’ educational outcomes
are more negatively affected than females by growing up in a resource-poor
environment, we do not have a clear understanding of why this occurs. Families play a crucial role in a child’s educational success. Parents interact with
sons and daughters in different ways and children are socialized according to
their gender, and there is evidence that this varies by class background (Raley

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& Bianchi, 2006). It is less clear whether families with fewer resources or
single-parent families socialize, support, or invest in sons and daughters differently or how such differences would affect educational outcomes. Future
research should examine how family environments and processes are related
to gender differences in educational attainment. Comparative research could
shed light on the degree to which patterns of male vulnerability to resource
deficits are similar across countries, or whether some countries or cultures
are better able to protect males from the negative effects of growing up in
resource-poor environments. Whenever possible, this research should attend
to vulnerable segments of the population and to males who may be at particular risk for poor performance and low educational attainment, including
immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and those from disadvantaged families.
Third, little is known about how incentives to attain high levels of education are related to gender inequalities in educational attainment across a wide
range of countries or how country-level variations in labor market structures and educational systems as well as variations in marriage and family
norms shape the educational decisions of men and women. For example, in
European countries where larger proportions of workers are found in the
industrial sector and belong to unions, men are less likely to complete higher
education than women (McDaniel, 2011). Countries with large industrial sectors provide high-paying manufacturing jobs that do not require a college
education, and men dominate these jobs. In addition, these occupations are
often part of male-dominated trade unions that not only provide high wages
and stable employment but also collectively organize and bargain. By providing well-compensated alternatives to jobs that require a college degree,
labor markets may provide disincentives for men to pursue higher education; women may be less likely to have access to such alternatives. Instead,
women are more likely to earn tertiary degrees and enter the service sector
in clerical or professional occupations (Charles & Grusky, 2004; McDaniel,
2011).
In most countries, women who pursue higher education often delay their
age of marriage and childbirth because completing a university degree interferes with the prime stage in the life course for beginning a family (Corijn &
Klijzing, 2001). As the average age of marriage for women rises and fertility
rates fall—due to contraceptive technologies and changing norms regarding
family formation and childbearing—women are able to devote more time
attaining higher education. Rising rates of divorce and the desire or necessity for women to be economically independent has also provided them with
greater incentives to complete a college degree. These changes are no doubt
related to women’s rising educational attainment. However, research has yet
to disentangle the causality behind these processes; that is, whether changes

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in marriage and family roles caused women to pursue higher education at
higher rates or if women pursued higher education causing marriage and
family roles to shift. The relationships between these factors are complex
and likely reciprocal. Future research should aim to parse out these relationships and elucidate if wage and nonwage returns to education have risen in
other countries for women as they have in the United States. Similar processes may be occurring in other countries, as dramatic changes in marriage
and family relationships could provide women with greater incentives to
complete higher education. The female-favorable trend in college completion may derive at least in part from responses to gender-specific changes in
the value of higher education.
Fourth, because the reversal of the gender gap in educational attainment
from a favoring of males to a favoring of females is so recent, little scholarship has considered or analyzed its potentially far-reaching consequences.
Shifting educational attainment rates for men and women could affect gender gaps in wages, labor force participation, and a host of other outcomes.
As women outpace men in the amount of education they receive, their representation in politics, business, and other powerful realms may rise as well
(Pettit & Hook, 2005; Paxton & Kunovich, 2003). The rising proportion of
college-educated women relative to men could alter trends in marriage as
more women marry men with less education, delay marriage, or forego marriage altogether. These changes, in turn, may have an impact on family formation and parenting. The coming decades should prove informative as to
whether women will be able to translate their advantage in higher education
to greater equality more generally. It will also be important to pay attention
to how men’s lower rates of college completion affect their life outcomes.
Clearly, understanding the causes and consequences of the growing female
advantage in college completion is an important task for social scientists.
The dearth of high-quality, comparative data poses an important challenge
to researchers studying gender inequalities in higher education from an
international perspective. While cross-national datasets for students in elementary and secondary schools (e.g., TIMSS and PISA) are widely available,
to the best of our knowledge, little comparative data exists for students in
higher education for a large sample of countries. This makes it difficult for
researchers to study the educational experiences of college and university
students cross-nationally or the pathways students take in and out of higher
education. This means that scholars interested in studying cross-national
variations in gender disparities in educational attainment will need to
compile such data from individual country-level sources or international
organizations such as UNESCO. Further complicating this goal is the fact that
reliable, valid, and harmonized measures of educational attainment are difficult to assemble because education systems vary widely across countries. In

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1976, UNESCO introduced the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) with the goal of harmonizing countries’ coding of their educational data (UNESCO, 1997). Today, many cross-national surveys code their
educational data using ISCED, including the European Social Survey, the
European Labor Force Survey, and the PISA studies. But there are variations
in how countries translate educational outcomes the ISCED scale, which in
turn can reduce the explanatory power of education in statistical analysis
(Schneider, 2009). This poses a challenge to researchers trying to understand
broader patterns of gender inequalities in educational attainment.
As we move forward, scholars should adopt a more holistic view of gender
inequality—one that does not exclusively focus on women or men, but both.
In doing so, we can improve our understanding of the gender inequalities in
education more generally. Comparative research provides a useful lens from
which to view the impact of individuals’ decisions within structural contexts
or institutions as well as refine theories developed in a single context, such
as the United States (Buchmann, 2010). Therefore, future research should
interrogate gender gaps in higher education globally by focusing on both
individuals’ decisions and national characteristics that shape or constrain
those decisions in order understand the forces behind gender disparities in
educational attainment. We have much to learn about the nature, causes, and
consequences of the changing gender gaps in education across the life course.
The rapidly shifting terrain of gender inequalities in educational attainment
raises important questions for researchers, policy makers, and educators who
want to understand how to improve the educational performance and attainment of all youth.

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UNESCO (2010). Global education digest 2010. Montreal, Canada: UNESCO Institute
for Statistics.
Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2008). The reversal of gender inequalities in higher education:
An ongoing trend. Higher education to 2030, volume 1: Demography. Paris, France:
OECD.

FURTHER READING
Buchmann, C., DiPrete, T. A., & McDaniel, A. (2008). Gender inequalities in
education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 319–337. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.34.
040507.134719
DiPrete, T. A., & Buchmann, C. (2013). The rise of women: The growing gender gap in
education and what it means for American schools. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
McDaniel, A. (2012). Women’s advantage in higher education: Toward understanding a global phenomenon. Sociology Compass, 6(7), 581–595. doi:10.1111/j.17519020.2012.00477.x
Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2008). The reversal of gender inequalities in higher education:
An ongoing trend. In Higher education to 2030, volume 1: Demography. Paris, France:
OECD.

Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment

13

ANNE McDANIEL SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Anne McDaniel is the Associate Director of Research in the Center for the
Study of Student Life at the Ohio State University. Her research interests
include stratification, sociology of education, gender, and comparative
sociology. Her current work focuses gender inequalities in higher education
in the United States and cross-nationally, including the female advantage
in college completion and female underrepresentation in science. Her work
has been published in Comparative Education Review, Demography and Annual
Review of Sociology. She holds a BA and PhD from the Ohio State University.
CLAUDIA BUCHMANN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Claudia Buchmann is professor of Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the
Institute of Population Research at the Ohio State University. Her research
focuses on stratification and education in the United States and internationally and her work on gender, race, and class inequalities in higher education
has been published in numerous journals and edited volumes. Buchmann
has served as deputy editor of the American Sociological Review and as chair
of the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association. She holds a BA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
MA and PhD degrees from Indiana University. She taught at Duke University
before moving to the Ohio State University in 2004.

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