write an article on women's education

The Unique Challenges Facing Women in Education

• Posted April 1, 2021
• By Jill Anderson
• Career and Lifelong Learning
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The pandemic has exposed many of the challenges facing women working in education. Yet, Jennie Weiner , Ed.M.'03, Ed.D.'12, an expert who studies how to create a more inclusive and equitable education field, acknowledges that many of the gender disparities in the education profession have long existed. Across the sector, women make up a majority of the education workforce but occupy barely a quarter of top leadership positions. This is not by accident, she says, but by systemic design.

“We've had a highly feminized profession, but feminized means both that women do the work, but also that it's devalued because it is women's work,” Weiner says, pointing to many issues that exist in education, such as underpaid teachers, buildings in disrepair, and even an “inverted” pyramid where men hold far more leadership positions than women.

“Many people would rather believe that hard work and being really good at what you do could outperform bias, and that's a lie. No matter how good you are, if we live in discriminatory system, that discrimination will raise its head," she says.

In this episode the EdCast, Weiner, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, breaks down the gender issues in the field and suggests ways to push toward equality.

Jill Anderson:    I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Jennie Weiner knows the pandemic has exposed gender inequities that don't often get talked about in education. It doesn't matter whether women work in early childhood, or higher education, or somewhere in between, these inequities play out similarly across the field. Jennie is an associate professor who studies how to make education more inclusive and equitable through educational leadership. Although females have long made up the bulk of the education workforce, they barely represent a quarter of top leadership roles. She says there's many reasons for how we've ended up with gender inequity in the field and society. I asked Jennie to tell me more about the unique challenges facing women in education.

Jennie Weiner:     There are a number of challenges facing women in leadership generally, and then within the context of K12 specifically. Some of these challenges exist outside of the role, which are really about how our society frames the role of women and socialize us to understand what women should and shouldn't be doing within the space. Right? So for example, the idea that we should be the primary caretakers for our young children, which, of course, then creates complications if you don't have paid family leave, or access to reliable, cheap, and effective care for your children, and are attempting to work full time. Which was true in our context of our society prior to the pandemic, but of course has been exacerbated by the pandemic. We also have issues around who becomes caretakers, even if you don't have children for elderly parents, or for other kind of tasks within the context of a family, or an extended family.

So you have all that external socialization. And then you also have, what I would say is role socialization in leadership specifically, which is the way leadership is constructed in our society, and in education specifically, still really focuses on this idea of a lone hero, or heroic person, and I would argue, a white man, with characteristics that are stereotyped as masculine characteristics. So being very strong, or ambitious, or innovative, or aggressive, right? And we see this through our political cycles and in other spaces. So what happens is women may not be considered the best candidates for these positions because they hold other kinds of stereotyped ideas, right? So if you are more communally oriented, which should be a stereotype female, you're softer, you're emotional, you may not be seen as having leadership potential, right? And there's a lack of female mentors and women who are in charge in the first place to tap people along the trajectory.

But also if you exhibit traditionally, or stereotypically male characteristics that are more aligned with leadership, let's say being quite aggressive, or being innovative, we know that women often get criticized for exhibiting those behaviors. So I talk a lot about this idea of a double bind. So you have these externalized pathway issues and things that keep women from having full access to leadership that exist because of, again, our societal structures, and who gets to do what roles, and why, and how we think about that. But then we also have these internalized structures about how we understand and perceive what leadership is, and hence, who should be able to do it, and be successful, and thrive in the role. So it's a lot to say the least.

Jill Anderson:     It is a lot. I think it's something that you can easily look at and see in K through 12.

Jennie Weiner:    Right.

Jill Anderson:    You look and you see a lot of females, predominantly females in education, but you don't often see them in roles of superintendency or principalship.

Jennie Weiner:     So right now about 83 to 86% range of teachers are women. About 54% of principals are women, predominantly in elementary schools, and that's not an accident because elementary schools don't have after-school activities to the same extent. There's also ideas about women and their ability to facilitate, let's say discipline for older boys, and what they can handle. Also, women's willingness to blend their life and home life with their work life. So if I am a mother, am I willing to bring my kids to a bunch of basketball games, or activities at school consistently? If I'm a man, am I willing to do that?

And then at the superintendent level, it's been around 23% since the last 15 or 20 years. So, if you inverse that it's even more bananas, right? So you have, what is that then? 16% or so of teachers are men, about 50% of them are principals, and about 74% are superintendents. So, it's jarring in either direction, but I sometimes ask people to think in the reverse, right? But you have this teeny tiny pool at the bottom of the pyramid for men who are situated in schools and they're overwhelmingly more than 75% of the superintendents, the people in charge.

Jill Anderson:    Right. And is it the same when you get into higher ed and you start looking at careers [crosstalk 00:05:16].

Jennie Weiner:    Yes.

Jill Anderson:     ... in academia, the same reflection.

Jennie Weiner:     Right. And I think what's important to remember too, is historically it was built this way on purpose, Michael Apple, a scholar who studies the history of the profession, talks a lot about the ways in which we had to fill these common schools with an available workforce, people who could read and didn't have a lot of other options, and that was primarily women. So we've had a highly feminized profession, but feminized means both that women do the work, but also that it's devalued because it is women's work.

So that helps to explain why we have, for example, still issues around teachers being substantively underpaid, why buildings are in disrepair, and why we say we value education, but we consistently underfund it, and do not treat teachers with the respect I think that they deserve. And I think it's partially because it's mostly women who do that work over time, but it's also why we've created elaborate evaluation techniques to watch these women who need to be controlled and evaluated and observed to ensure they're doing the right thing within the context of schools. But teaching itself has been really situated as primarily a profession of women, and also then around caretaking as a primary driver as opposed to let's say high skills, knowledge capabilities. And academia is the same way. So it was created primarily for men, and therefore not surprising that it's very hard to break in, or deconstruct those ways of thinking about the work.

Jill Anderson:    How has the pandemic really shifted this? Because this has been a long existing problem, but now we're hearing about it on so many levels and it's getting a lot of attention.

Jennie Weiner:     Yeah. We're looking at somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million women leaving the workforce between the beginning of the pandemic and February of this year. So just that number is just breathtaking. Now, why? And it's intricately related to the things that we're discussing, right? So if you have professions, and you have, let's say a heterosexual couple, one is a man and one is a woman, and they both were working prior to the pandemic, it is highly likely because of the way discrimination works that the woman was in a lower paid field, or if she was in the same field, she was in a position in which she made less money than her husband.

In addition, many of the caretaking responsibilities within the context of the home that are considered to be stereotype female work, childcare, cleaning, scheduling, cooking, are usually taken up by women. So then the school is closed, there's no caretaking, you have young children, somebody has to give up their work in order to make that happen. If this is the parameters under which we make decisions, who's more likely to leave? Clearly the spouse who makes less money is more comfortable, or has been socialized to take on those roles within the context of the house before. And we see that, right? In fact, we actually saw quite a few women who made more money, or had their own professions and jobs, even those women leaving in favor of staying home.

And then we also, of course, to talk about this without talking about races, not really appropriate because most of the women who lost their jobs are women of color who were also in service industries, primarily in work that was most risk for catching COVID, whether that be home health care, the service industries, restaurants, cleaning services. And now they're also home and are unable to work, or have to put themselves at risk to facilitate their child, and their family having enough money to survive. So it exposed, I think things that were already there, but that we just never talked about in the public space.

Jill Anderson:    There were mothers I know who were working in education, who were working as early childhood educators and decided to leave their jobs to be able to accommodate remote learning, or being home with their kids through this time. So definitely hearing that in my own world.

Jennie Weiner:     Yeah. I think what you're saying is really powerful too, which I think people don't talk about, which is, if you have a profession, both early childcare providers and let's say any kind of childcare provider, and educators who are not childcare providers, but children go to school, is predominantly female. We can imagine that many of them probably have young children themselves. And yet the rhetoric has really been to not discuss that as if these are separate identities. So we say, why aren't the teachers, or the childcare providers doing their job? They should be open, without paying any attention to, if I'm a teacher and I'm supposed to be attending to my class full time, and I have a three-year-old, who's taking care of my three-year-old?

Jill Anderson:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jennie Weiner:    And I just feel like in the public discourse around school opening, they're not opening the idea, or understanding that many of these are young women with families who are facing the same challenges that I'm facing is not discussed. And I would just put that to people about how that reinforces our lack of discussion about women's rights and gender equity within the context of our society when we do not attend to that as part of the problem of schools reopening.

Jill Anderson:    Well, since you've mentioned the, what you've just written about, which is your own experience, in a collection of essays being released looking at pandemic parenting, you talk about that experience of juggling the challenges of parenting while working in academia. So what has it been like for you?

Jennie Weiner:     Dislocating, discombobulating. So I have twin nine year old boys, both of whom have been home with me for over a year now, now they've had full-time learning, but not in person. I think one of the things that's been so terribly difficult is so much of the gymnastics that I've had to do over the course of my career to simply persist and thrive in a space that's not made for me. So to constantly be in spaces and having to make really tough choices about, should I go to a conference? And then when I get to the conference, people say, well, who is taking care of your kids? Or I'm missing something that's happening at home, and I'm feeling that's really difficult and hard. And I've made so many, what I perceive to be sacrifices in a system that is not made for working mothers, or for people from non-traditional backgrounds in that space. And then to be home all the time and feel like some of that is slipping away, my identity and my ability to thrive in my workspace just gone.

And even though I think externally there's a sense that everybody's going through it, and I should just not be so hard on myself, I don't believe that the system will actually excuse women who have taken this time. I think that I have a lot of fear that if I don't keep juggling and pretzeling, that's not something I'm ever going to be able to make up, because, again, I've had to fight so hard just to feel like I had a space at the table. It's difficult to lose something that you feel like you've fought so hard for.

Jill Anderson:    Yeah. You raised an interesting point because there have been some predictions made about how far this pandemic will definitely set women off course, and it's alarming. We're talking not just like, Oh, this is going to set women off by a couple of years, this is decades of setbacks from just this one year, year and a half, whatever it ends up being.

Jennie Weiner:     Yeah. Basically like 1970s or something, yeah.

Jill Anderson:    Which is crazy.

Jennie Weiner:    It is really crazy. I think it tells you how precarious everything was, and on whoms back the progress had it been made. So because there haven't been attention to, let's say structural and systemic changes to our policies, to issues a place like the ERA for example, the Equal Rights Amendment never passed. The fact that many black and brown women are in low wage jobs and we can't pass a decent minimum wage. The fact that we don't have universal childcare, or universal pre-K. So what happens? Well, women behind the scenes address all those issues behind the scenes. And so every success to a large degree has been on the backs of the people who have been discriminated against, we've elbowed, and we've worked, and we've suffered, and we've done what we needed to do, but individual hard work is not a way to fix systems of oppression, it helps, but you can see, right? Once that fell down and we didn't have any systems to support us, the marbles all fell out of the bag.

I only hope, perhaps, that people will remember and understand the veil is off, that depending on women to just do more is not a way to create a just society. And we have to fight for these kinds of systemic changes that are going to make things different regardless of what the future holds in terms of calamity, or change, or whatever the fact may be.

Jill Anderson:     We've heard a lot about the glass ceiling, especially even recently with Kamala Harris being elected, and a lot of us have heard of that term before, what is the glass cliff?

Jennie Weiner:    So the glass cliff was brought about by some research by Haslam and Ryan, and they're British researchers. And I read in the newspaper, there was an article about how the FTSE Index, their publicly traded companies, how women were in charge of all the ones that were doing poorly, and therefore women must be poor leaders. They did analysis, and basically what they found was that women were more likely to be leaders within the context of companies that were not doing well, but they were hired once they started to decline. So the idea is that women and people of color, people who are traditionally marginalized from those kinds of leadership opportunities, are given the opportunity to lead, but only when an organization is in decline. And now, of course, that comes with a bunch of other parameters, right? So usually that also means often that you have a highly activist board.

So women who end up taking these positions spend far more time catering and having to deal with activist board members than do men. Additionally, when women start to improve the organization, they're not given credit for that. Alternatively, if something that looks like it's doomed to fail, and then they take over fails, they're blamed, and most often a white man is put back into the position after them. I'm actually studying this within the context of education superintendents, but I noticed, for example, I work in Connecticut, there are very few black women principals in a place like Hartford, but when you look at where they're placed, they tend to be placed in most of the turnaround schools, which are the chronically underperforming schools. April Peter speaks about how they're positioned as cleanup women to come in and mop up and clean up the mistakes others have made, but instead of being lauded for that, even when they have success, they're vilified as being difficult, or hard to work with, or aggressive in ways that are not valued, even when they have success in addressing the problems of the organizations. So it's pretty tricky.

Jill Anderson:     What is the most important thing for a female in education leadership, whether it's K through 12, whether it's in academia?

Jennie Weiner:    I'm often in places with women leaders, I'm often asked to speak and I facilitate a women superintendents group for the state of Connecticut, I'm so proud and privileged to have that opportunity. I think one thing that often happens is people are upset by hearing these truths. At the same time, because we'd all rather believe, or many people would rather believe that hard work and being really good at what you do could outperform bias, and that's a lie. No matter how good you are, if we live in discriminatory system, that discrimination will raise its head. Now, of course, there's exceptions, there's always exceptions, but on average, across, right? Most women are not exceptions. So what's the benefit of doing it then?

Well, the other piece of this is, if you don't have language and understand that there is something systemic happening, then when someone says to you, you don't really have leadership capabilities, or you're not really leadership material, you might believe them. You may actually begin to feel that the problem is you, because you look around and you're not seeing that happening to other people, or nobody's talking about it. And you internalize those feelings of shame and ineffectiveness, and you lay the blame on yourself. And that is terrible. And it's going to get us to come together, it's not going to help facilitate change, it's not going to move us to press, and push, and fight for something better on the horizon for us and other generation of women leaders.

And so I think it's a misnomer to say that liberation comes without pain because facing her truths is painful. It is painful to see that I can't out run discrimination, but I cannot be free. I cannot be liberated if I don't see how the system operates, because individuals cannot by themselves change discriminatory systems, we need each other. And the only way we can find each other is if we own up and talk about these experiences and connect them to something larger than ourselves.

Jill Anderson:     But it doesn't feel like the conversation about gender bias happens as often, which is interesting in lieu of all of the information that we have about females in education.

Jennie Weiner:     I am concerned about the ways in which gender identity and other forms of identity have not been taken up as part of the larger conversation about DEI efforts, and I wonder how we can have an anti-racist society without addressing patriarchy and vice versa, because patriarchy and white supremacy are intricately linked and both need to be addressed simultaneously for justice to come forward. I do not place one above the other, but I do think we can do hard things and we should, and need to talk about them as intricately linked, and when we don't, we miss quite a bit of the conversation.

Jill Anderson:    To just backtrack on that, is that intersectional feminism?

Jennie Weiner:    Part of the critic of the feminist movement was that it was predominantly women like me, upper-middle-class white women, who did not attend to the fact that they have particular privileges regarding that status, right? I'm not a low wage earner. I have documentation, I have particular freedoms and abilities to assert myself in spaces without the same repercussions, and that needs to be owned and understood. So intersectionality is really, really linked with black feminist thought, critical thought, and legal work as well. But the idea is that we have to attend to multiple forms of identity at once, and how that discrimination manifests across the spectrum. So a really concrete example, I think that's useful to think about within the context of education is, we still have very low numbers, but only 6% of principals are black women, which is just crazy, and much of this is actually a result of what happened in the post-brown era when schools integrated and they fired in mass something like 40,000 black educators, because when they integrated schools, they shut down black schools and fired black teachers and administrators, and replaced them with white administrators and teachers, which many people don't talk about, but it's important to our legacy and why we are where we are.

So if I was somebody who was interested in trying to recruit more people of color and women into, let's say administrative ranks, the reasons why they are not accessing those historically are different. So if I try to just do it through a white lens, right? So I'm addressing gender, but if I only do it through a white lens, I may not be attending to the ways in which racial discrimination and this legacy is impacting black women's ability to access, feel successful, and how they're treated in the role, right? So the solutions may look different, and the ways in which I engage and think about them may look different because I understand that both of those things matter as do potentially other things that are the ways in which discrimination operates to allow them to have access and thrive in those positions. So I think the lack of attention to that is really, really problematic. And again, those are just a few, right? We could talk about LBGTQ. We know that immigration status, other things that bring about different ways of interacting with systemic oppression, and then, again, how we might attend to that and think about it if we really want things to change.

Jill Anderson:    So it feels so huge that it can almost feel like it's difficult to know how to take a step toward change. And so even in lieu of the pandemic, which is almost like this dark cloud lingering over it. So what about next steps?

Jennie Weiner:     On one hand you could say, I feel really overwhelmed because of all the things that you just said. On the other hand, you could say, wow, there's so much work to do, and there's so many different, based on my skills, capabilities, orientation, understandings, I could get involved at so many levels, right? I could get involved in my intimate relationship with my partner and discuss about the balance of work and why things are, and start begin to question that, and that would be, I think, a feminist action. There are ways to be engaged in sisterhood to support women in your place of work, for example, here's just a small one. You go to a meeting frequently and your female colleagues said something, and then five minutes later your male colleague says it and everyone says, Bill, that's a great idea. Thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of women, if they're listening to this, may have had that experience.

So you may be with women in your group and speak to them and say, whenever someone says something, we're going to amplify it. So now this time Jill says something wonderful, and then Bill says it, and Bill repeats it, and I said, yes, I loved it when Jill said it five minutes ago. These are small, but I think if we first name things as problematic and situated outside of ourselves, and two, come together around them, right? We can run for office, run for office, if you're listening, run for office, run for your school board, put that in your pocket, understand that issues around fair pay are feminist issues, issues around childcare are feminist issues. Access to healthcare is a feminist issue. Read, study, affiliate, fight.

I'm working really hard to try to imagine a future that doesn't look just like trying to get more women look like men, in the sense of, I don't want our future to have to be that women have to take on the attributes of men to feel successful and gain access. I want us to begin to think about a future that's not imagined, or created yet, but to do that, we have to talk to each other like we are now, and tell the truth about how we feel, and about what's hard about it, and that these things are happening to all of us, and that we're in solidarity, and I think that's where change starts to happen.

Jill Anderson:     Well, thank you so much, Jennie.

Jennie Weiner:     Thank you. It was so fun.

Jill Anderson:     Jennie Weiner, is an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Connecticut. She authored an essay in the forthcoming book, Pandemic Parenting: The Collision of Schoolwork and Life at Home . She will also teach in the upcoming Women in Education Leadership Program as part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, professional education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

An education podcast that keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and communities

Related Articles

Creating Trans-Inclusive Schools

Fugitive Pedagogy in Black Education

The Challenge to Ethnic Studies

• Chronicle Conversations
• Article archives
• Issue archives
• Join our mailing list

Education as the Pathway towards Gender Equality

About the author.

Amartya Sen, often referred to as the father of the concept of ‘human development’, reminds us of a quote by H.G. Wells, where he said that “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”. Sen maintains that “if we continue to leave vast sections of the people of the world outside the orbit of education, we make the world not only less just, but also less secure”. To Sen, the gender aspect of education is a direct link between illiteracy and women’s security.

Not being able to read or write is a significant barrier for underprivileged women, since this can lead to their failure to make use of even the rather limited rights they may legally have (to own land or other property, or to appeal against unfair judgment and unjust treatment). There are often legal rights in rule books that are not used because the aggrieved parties cannot read those rule books. Gaps in schooling can, therefore, directly lead to insecurity by distancing the deprived from the ways and means of fighting against that deprivation. 1

For Sen, illiteracy and innumeracy are forms of insecurity in themselves, “not to be able to read or write or count or communicate is a tremendous deprivation. The extreme case of insecurity is the certainty of deprivation, and the absence of any chance of avoiding that fate”. 2 The link between education and security underlines the importance of education as akin to a basic need in the twenty-first century of human development.

GENDERED EDUCATION GAPS: SOME CRITICAL FACTS

While a moral and political argument can continue to be made for the education of girls and women, some facts speak powerfully to the issue at hand. Girls accounted for 53 per cent of the 61 million children of primary school age who were out of school in 2010. Girls accounted for 49 per cent of the 57 million children out of school in 2013. In surveys of 30 countries with more than 100,000 out-of-school children, 28 per cent of girls were out of school on average compared to 25 per cent of boys. Completion of primary school is a particular problem for girls in sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia. 3

Surveys in 55 developing countries reveal that girls are more likely to be out of school at a lower secondary age than boys, regardless of the wealth or location of the household. Almost two thirds of the world’s 775 million illiterate adults are women. In developing regions, there are 98 women per 100 men in tertiary education. There are significant inequalities in tertiary education in general, as well as in relation to areas of study, with women being over-represented in the humanities and social sciences and significantly under-represented in engineering, science and technology.

Gender-based violence in schools undermines the right to education and presents a major challenge to achieving gender equality in education because it negatively impacts girls’ participation and their retention in school. In addition, ineffective sexual and reproductive health education inhibits adolescents’ access to information and contributes to school dropouts, especially among girls who have reached puberty.

The education of girls and women can lead to a wide range of benefits from improved maternal health, reduced infant mortality and fertility rates to increased prevention against HIV and AIDS. 4 Educated mothers are more likely to know that HIV can be transmitted by breastfeeding, and that the risk of mother-to-child transmission can be reduced by taking drugs during pregnancy.

Each extra year of a mother’s schooling reduces the probability of infant mortality by 5-10 per cent. Children of mothers with secondary education or higher are twice as likely to survive beyond age 5 compared to those whose mothers have no education. Improvements in women’s education explained half of the reduction in child deaths between 1990 and 2009. A child born to a mother who can read is 50 per cent more likely to survive past age 5. In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 1.8 million children’s lives could have been saved in 2008 if their mothers had at least a secondary education. In Indonesia, 68 per cent of children with mothers who have attended secondary school are immunized, compared with 19 per cent of children whose mothers have no primary schooling. Wages, agricultural income and productivity—all critical for reducing poverty— are higher where women involved in agriculture receive a better education. Each additional year of schooling beyond primary offers greater payoffs for improved opportunities, options and outcomes for girls and women.

In the varied discussions on the post-2015 education related agendas, there was strong consensus that gender equality in education remains a priority. Various inputs noted that inequalities in general, and particularly gender equality, need to be addressed simultaneously on multiple levels—economic, social, political and cultural. A response on behalf of the International Women’s Health Coalition maintained that “all girls, no matter how poor, isolated or disadvantaged, should be able to attend school regularly and without the interruption of early pregnancy, forced marriage, maternal injuries and death, and unequal domestic and childcare burdens”.

Other inputs highlighted the importance of ensuring access to post-basic and post-secondary education for girls and women. Referring to secondary education, the German Foundation for World Population noted that the “completion of secondary education has a strong correlation with girls marrying later and delaying first pregnancy.” While access to good quality education is important for girls and women, preventing gender-based violence and equality through education clearly also remains a priority.

Gender-based discrimination in education is, in effect, both a cause and a consequence of deep-rooted differences in society. Disparities, whether in terms of poverty, ethnic background, disability, or traditional attitudes about their status and role all undermine the ability of women and girls to exercise their rights. Moreover, harmful practices such as early marriage, gender-based violence, as well as discriminatory education laws and policies still prevent millions of girls from enrolling and completing their respective education. 5

Additionally, given the extensive and growing participation of women in income generating activities, education for girls and women is particularly important, especially in attempting to reverse gendered patterns of discrimination. Not only is it impossible to achieve gender equality without education, but expanding education opportunities for all can help stimulate productivity and thereby also reduce the economic vulnerability of poor households.

GENDER EQUALITY, EQUITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Equity is the strongest framing principle of a post-2015 rights-based agenda, and underlines the need to redress historical and structural inequalities in order to provide access to quality education at all levels. This heralds what was effectively one of the strongest themes that emerged in the post-2015 education consultations, i.e., a rights-based approach in which rights are indivisible. This implies that all aspects of education should be considered from a rights perspective, including structural features of education systems, methods of education, as well as the contents of the education curricula. Indeed, overcoming structural barriers to accessing good quality education is vital for realizing education rights for all.

In related post-2015 consultations, equity is affirmed as a fundamental value in education. Several inputs noted that inequality in education remains a persistent challenge. This is connected to a focus in the Millennium Development Goals on averages without an accompanying consideration of trends beneath the averages. Many contributions in the education consultation, as well as in the other thematic consultations, highlighted the lack of attention to marginalized and vulnerable groups.

Equal access to good quality education requires addressing wide-ranging and persistent inequalities in society and should include a stronger focus on how different forms of inequality intersect to produce unequal outcomes for marginalized and vulnerable groups. Post-2015 consultations suggest that overcoming inequality requires a goal that makes national governments accountable for providing minimum standards and implementing country specific plans for basic services, including education. Equity in education also implies various proactive and targeted measures to offer progressive support to disadvantaged groups.

Amartya Sen notes empirical work which has brought out very clearly how the relative respect and regard for women’s well-being is strongly influenced by their literacy and educated participation in decisions within and outside the family. Even the survival disadvantage of women compared with men in many developing countries (which leads to “such terrible phenomenon as a hundred million of ‘missing women’) seems to go down sharply, and may even get eliminated, with progress in women’s empowerment, for which literacy is a basic ingredient”.

In the summer of 2009, the International Labour Organization (ILO) issued a report entitled “Give Girls a Chance: Tackling child labour, a key to the future”, which makes a disturbing link between increasing child labour and the preference being given to boys when making decisions on education of children. The report states that in cultures in which a higher value is placed on education of male children, girls risk being taken out of school and are then likely to enter the workforce at an early age. The ILO report noted global estimates where more than 100 million girls were involved in child labour, and many were exposed to some of its worst forms.

Much of the research around women and education highlights the importance of investing in the education of girls as an effective way of tackling the gamut of poverty. This is in line with assertions made in numerous other references, which also point to a strong link between education, increased women’s (as opposed to girls’) labour force participation, the wages they earn and overall productivity, all of which ultimately yields higher benefits for communities and nations. In other words, it pays to invest in girls’ and women’s education.

GENDER SOCIALIZATION

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Western feminist stalwarts, such as Simone de Beauvoir, were elaborating the difference between biological ‘sex’ and social gender. Anne Oakley in particular, is known for coining the term gender socialization (1979), which indicates that gender is socially constructed. According to Oakley, parents are engaged in gender socialization but society holds the largest influence in constructing gender. She identified three social mechanisms of gender socialization: manipulation, canalization, and verbalization (Oakley, 1972). Oakley noted that gender is not a fixed concept but is determined by culture through the use of verbal and nonverbal signifiers and the creation of social norms and stereotypes, which identify proper and acceptable behavior. The signifiers are then perpetuated on a macro level, reinforced by the use of the media, as well as at the micro level, through individual relationships.

The concept entered mainstream lexicon on gender relations and development dynamics, and through criticism and counter criticism, ‘gender socialization’ itself became an important signifier. As a tool to highlight discriminatory practices, laws and perceptions (including stereotypes), gender socialization is often identified as the ‘root cause’ which explains various aspects of gender identities, and what underlies many gender dynamics.

In 2007, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) defined gender socialization as “[T]he process by which people learn to behave in a certain way, as dictated by societal beliefs, values, attitudes and examples. Gender socialization begins as early as when a woman becomes pregnant and people start making judgments about the value of males over females. These stereotypes are perpetuated by family members, teachers and others by having different expectations for males and females.”

There is, therefore, a clear interaction between socio-cultural values (and praxis) with gender socialization. This only partly explains why it is that in many developing societies there is a persistent prioritization of women’s ‘domestic’ roles and responsibilities over public ones. Most young girls are socialized into the ‘biological inevitability’ of their socially determined future roles as mothers. This is closely connected, in many relatively socially conservative contexts, with the need to ensure (the prerequisite of) marriage.

Most related studies maintain that women with formal education are much more likely to use reliable family planning methods, delay marriage and childbearing, and have fewer and healthier babies than women with no formal education. The World Bank estimates that one year of female schooling reduces fertility by 10 per cent, particularly where secondary schooling is undertaken.

In fact, because women with some formal education are more likely to seek medical care and be better informed about health care practices for themselves and their children, their offspring have higher survival rates and are better nourished. Not only that, but as indicated earlier, these women are less likely to undergo early pregnancy. Being better informed increases the chances of women knowing how to space their pregnancies better, how to access pre and post-natal care, including prevention of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and family planning in general. The World Bank estimates that an additional year of schooling for 1,000 women helps prevent two maternal deaths.

The World Bank, along with UNICEF and the United Nations Population Fund highlight in several of their reports the intergenerational benefits of women’s education. An educated mother is more likely, it is maintained, to attempt to ensure educational opportunities for her children. Indeed, the World Bank specifically notes that “ in many countries each additional year of formal education completed by a mother translates into her children remaining in school for an additional one- third to one-half year”. 6

In short, girls’ education and the promotion of gender equality in education are critical to development, thus underlining the need to broadly address gender disparities in education.

The rhetorical question that needs to be raised here is whether the consistent elements of gender socialization in the region, and the confusing messages for both sexes, can only lead to entrenching processes of gender inequality. At the very least, it is safe to argue that gender socialization, combined with the continuing discrepancies in education opportunities and outcomes not only provide a negative feedback loop, but effectively contribute to entrenching patriarchal norms.

Political events and the endorsement of political leadership are often catalytic, if not necessary determinants, of policy change. In fact, most education reform programmes are often linked to political dynamics. To date, such reforms are typically launched through a political or legal act. In most cases, countries prioritize aspects such as forging a common heritage and understanding of citizenship, instruction in particular language(s), and other means of building capacities as well as popular support for party programmes. All developing country governments have, at one time or another, put special effort into including girls in the education system. While there is a continuous role for policy makers and governments, it is increasingly clear that the socio-cultural terrain is where the real battles need to be waged in a studied, deliberate and targeted fashion.

Influencing the way people think, believe and behave; i.e., culture is the single most complicated task of human development. And yet, in policy and advocacy circles globally, this particular challenge still remains largely considered as ‘soft’ and, at best, secondary in most considerations. What is maintained here is that within the current global geopolitical climate, particularly where an increasing number of young men—and now also young women—are reverting to extremes such as inflicting violence, and where this is often exacerbated by socialization processes which often enforce certain harmful practices (e.g., early marriage) and outdated forms of gender identity and roles, then culture needs to be a high priority.

Needed cultural shifts require several key conditions. One of these is the importance of bridging the activism around gender equality and doing so by involving both men and women. While this still remains anathema to many women’s rights activists, it is nevertheless necessary that men become more engaged in gender equality work, and that women realize that their rights are incumbent on the systematic partnership with men and on appreciating the specific needs and challenges that young boys and men themselves are struggling with.

Another critical determinant of cultural change is that it has to be from within. Those who have worked with human rights issues more broadly have had to learn the hard way that any change that appears to be induced ‘from outside’, even if responding to a dire need and with perfectly sound reason, is destined for failure in many cases. Sustainable change has to be owned and operated locally. This points to the importance of identifying the ‘cultural agents of change’ in any given society, which include both its men and women activists, religious leaders, traditional and community leaders (in some cases these categories converge), media figures, charismatic community mobilizers, and especially youth themselves, who are the most critical agents of change.

At the same time, it is a fallacy to think that there can be no linkages whatsoever between local ownership and external dynamics. International, especially multilateral, development partners have an important role to play in facilitating the bridge building between and among the cultural agents of change themselves on the one hand, and between them and their respective policymakers on the other. But in this day and age of technology and increasing speed of technology, international development actors, as well as transnational academic actors, are already facilitating the building of bridges between youth. Some of this is already happening through a plethora of fora (including social websites), and the impact remains difficult to gauge.

All this points to the fact that education in the traditional sense of school enrolment, drop-out rates, curricula development, and structural dynamics thereof are in multiple stages of transition. It remains to be seen how, and in what way, new forms of education, knowledge acquisition, and information sharing will significantly change patterns of gender socialization itself. It is too soon to definitely assess the shifting sands we are standing on. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to either overestimate the power of entrenched patriarchy, or to underestimate the capacity of women and men to significantly refashion their realities. At the same time, the changes in the culture of international development goal setting are already producing critical insights and inputs which are shaping the agenda of global, regional and national dynamics for upcoming decades.

The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of any institution, Board or staff member.

1 UNICEF and UNESCO: The World We Want— Making Education a Priority in the Post-2015 Development Agenda: Report of the Global Thematic Consultation on Education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, 2013 . Available at http://www.unicef.org/education/files/ Making_education_a_Priority_in_the_Post-2015_Development_ Agenda.pdf.

3 “Making education a Priority in the Post-2015 Development Agenda: report of the Global Thematic Consultation on education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda”.

4 All the figures and data herein presented from UNESCO. 2011b. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2011. The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education, Paris and UNESCO . World Atlas of Gender equality in education. Paris, 2012.

5 UNESCO— http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-...

Alger, Chadwick. “Religion as a Peace Tool”, The Global Review of Ethnopolitics , vol.1,4: 94 -109. (June 2002).

Diamond, Larry (ed.). Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder and London, Lynne Rienner, 1994). Huntington, Samuel. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs , vol.72, No.3, Summer 1993, pp. 19 -23.

Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York , Henry Holt and Company, 2000).

Karam, Azza. Transnational Political Islam: Religion, Ideology and Power (London, Pluto Press, 2004).

Leftwich, Adrian (ed.). Democracy and Development: Theory and Practice (London, Polity Press, 1996).

Macrae, Joanna. Aiding Recovery? The Crisis of AID in Chronic Political Emergencies (London and New York, Zed Books in Association with ODI, 2001).

Pilch, John J. “Beat His ribs While He is young” (Sir 30:12): A Window on the Mediterranean World”, Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible and Theology, vol. 23, 3 (1993) pp 101-113.

Tynedale, Wendy. (ed.). Visions of Development: Faith-based Initiatives (UK: Ashgate, 2006).

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Arab Human Development Report (New York, 2002, 2004, and 2005).

UNESCO, “Key Messages and Data on Girls’ and Women’s education and literacy” (Paris, April 2012).

UNICEF and UNESCO, The World We Want—Making Education a Priority in the Post-2015 Development Agenda: Report of the Global Thematic Consultation on Education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, 2013 . Available at http://www.unicef.org/education/files/Making_education_a_Priority_in_the... . United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of World Population Report: Reaching Common Ground—Culture, Gender and Human Rights (2008).

Williams, Brett (ed.). The Politics of Culture (Washington D.C., The Smithsonian Institution, 1991).

World Bank MENA report: The Road Not Travelled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa , (Washington D.C. The World Bank, 2008).

The UN Chronicle  is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, the boundaries and names shown, and the designations used, in maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.

Cultural Diversity in the Digital Age: A Pillar for Sustainable Development

Two important issues affecting the protection and promotion of cultural diversity deserve our attention: the question of discoverability of local and national content, and the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

“Bee Engaged with Youth” to Safeguard Bees and Other Pollinators

As we celebrate World Bee Day on 20 May, let us remember how crucial it is to prioritize efforts to protect bees and other pollinators. FAO is committed to supporting youth, who have a key role to play in fostering the transformative changes and future initiatives and activities needed to save our bees and other pollinators.  

Digital Innovation—Key to Unlocking Sustainable Development 

Digital tools have the potential to accelerate human progress, but those who are not online are most at risk of being left behind.

Documents and publications

• Yearbook of the United Nations 
• Basic Facts About the United Nations
• Journal of the United Nations
• Meetings Coverage and Press Releases
• United Nations Official Document System (ODS)
• Africa Renewal

Libraries and Archives

• Dag Hammarskjöld Library
• UN Audiovisual Library
• UN Archives and Records Management 
• Audiovisual Library of International Law
• UN iLibrary 

News and media

• UN News Centre 
• UN Chronicle on Twitter
• UN Chronicle on Facebook

The UN at Work

• 17 Goals to Transform Our World
• Official observances
• United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI)
• Protecting Human Rights
• Maintaining International Peace and Security
• The Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth
• United Nations Careers

SDG 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

• By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and Goal-4 effective learning outcomes.
• By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and preprimary education so that they are ready for primary education.
• By 2030, ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university.
• By 2030, eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations.
• By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy.
• By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.
• Build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, nonviolent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all.
• By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship.
• By 2020, substantially expand globally the number of scholarships available to developing countries, in particular least developed countries, small island developing States and African countries, for enrolment in higher education, including vocational training and information and communications technology, technical, engineering and scientific programmes, in developed countries and other developing countries.
• By 2030, substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing States.

More girls than ever before are going to school. Not only do they learn to read and write, but each year that they remain in school after the primary level, reduces their chance of marrying at too young an age. It increases their prospects for employment, health and overall well-being. Girls and women have an equal right to a quality education and learning throughout all phases of their lives.

Despite progress, as many as 48.1 per cent of girls remain out of school in some regions. Gender gaps in primary and secondary enrolment rates have nearly closed, on average. Yet 15 million girls are not in primary school right now, compared to 10 million boys. In adolescence, higher numbers of girls often drop out of secondary school for reasons including early pregnancy and the expectation that they should contribute to household work.

UN Women acts to promote equality in education  through the revision of school curricula and policies to counteract gender discrimination, and equal access to vocational education and training as well as information technologies. Together with partners, we have worked on school curriculums and on virtual schools. 

From where I stand: "Changing the present, we are also changing the future" Lamija Gutić, 16, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, entered the world of coding in 2016, through IT Girls, and has learned to create websites and applications. In her country, like in many others, women and girls are often sidelined in the field of science and technology, and Gutić aims to challenge those stereotypes and dreams of a career in ICT.

Take five with Joy Chebet Bii: Why does digital literacy matter for women and girls? Joy Chebet Bii, 20, from Nairobi, Kenya, is a student of mathematics and computer science and a Mozilla Club captain. Through a partnership between UN Women and The Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Clubs teach web literacy skills to women and girls in Cape Town and Nairobi, and Joy uses her expertise to teach girls in Kibera, Nairobi, basic coding and digital literacy skills. 

Unlocking the potential of Afghan women Girls in Afghanistan are forbidden from attending school, and face harassment and violence when they try to access education or employment. An internship programme by UN Women aims to support female university graduates seeking to enter the job market, and helps them kickstart their careers.

• ‘One Woman’ – The UN Women song
• UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous
• Kirsi Madi, Deputy Executive Director for Resource Management, Sustainability and Partnerships
• Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, Deputy Executive Director for Normative Support, UN System Coordination and Programme Results
• Guiding documents
• Report wrongdoing
• Programme implementation
• Career opportunities
• Application and recruitment process
• Meet our people
• Internship programme
• Procurement principles
• Gender-responsive procurement
• Doing business with UN Women
• How to become a UN Women vendor
• Contract templates and general conditions of contract
• Vendor protest procedure
• Facts and Figures
• Global norms and standards
• Women’s movements
• Parliaments and local governance
• Constitutions and legal reform
• Preguntas frecuentes
• Global Norms and Standards
• Macroeconomic policies and social protection
• Sustainable Development and Climate Change
• Rural women
• Employment and migration
• Facts and figures
• Creating safe public spaces
• Spotlight Initiative
• Essential services
• Focusing on prevention
• Research and data
• Other areas of work
• UNiTE campaign
• Conflict prevention and resolution
• Building and sustaining peace
• Young women in peace and security
• Rule of law: Justice and security
• Women, peace, and security in the work of the UN Security Council
• Preventing violent extremism and countering terrorism
• Planning and monitoring
• Humanitarian coordination
• Crisis response and recovery
• Disaster risk reduction
• Inclusive National Planning
• Public Sector Reform
• Tracking Investments
• Strengthening young women's leadership
• Economic empowerment and skills development for young women
• Action on ending violence against young women and girls
• Engaging boys and young men in gender equality
• Leadership and Participation
• National Planning
• Violence against Women
• Access to Justice
• Regional and country offices
• Regional and Country Offices
• Liaison offices
• UN Women Global Innovation Coalition for Change
• Commission on the Status of Women
• Economic and Social Council
• General Assembly
• Security Council
• High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
• Human Rights Council
• Climate change and the environment
• Other Intergovernmental Processes
• World Conferences on Women
• Global Coordination
• Regional and country coordination
• Promoting UN accountability
• Gender Mainstreaming
• Coordination resources
• System-wide strategy
• Focal Point for Women and Gender Focal Points
• Entity-specific implementation plans on gender parity
• Laws and policies
• Strategies and tools
• Reports and monitoring
• Training Centre services
• Publications
• Government partners
• National mechanisms
• Civil Society Advisory Groups
• Benefits of partnering with UN Women
• Business and philanthropic partners
• Goodwill Ambassadors
• National Committees
• UN Women Media Compact
• UN Women Alumni Association
• Editorial series
• Media contacts
• Annual report
• Progress of the world’s women
• SDG monitoring report
• World survey on the role of women in development
• Reprint permissions
• Secretariat
• 2023 sessions and other meetings
• 2022 sessions and other meetings
• 2021 sessions and other meetings
• 2020 sessions and other meetings
• 2019 sessions and other meetings
• 2018 sessions and other meetings
• 2017 sessions and other meetings
• 2016 sessions and other meetings
• 2015 sessions and other meetings
• Compendiums of decisions
• Reports of sessions
• Key Documents
• Brief history
• CSW snapshot
• Preparations
• Official Documents
• Official Meetings
• Side Events
• Session Outcomes
• CSW65 (2021)
• CSW64 / Beijing+25 (2020)
• CSW63 (2019)
• CSW62 (2018)
• CSW61 (2017)
• Member States
• Eligibility
• Registration
• Opportunities for NGOs to address the Commission
• Communications procedure
• Grant making
• Accompaniment and growth
• Results and impact
• Knowledge and learning
• Social innovation
• UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women
• About Generation Equality
• Generation Equality Forum
• Action packs

This was the struggle for female education in the U.S.

Debate about “coeducation”—and the word itself—emerged only in the 1850s. Image:  Unsplash/Nikhita S

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Livia Gershon

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} SDG 05: Gender Equality is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:, sdg 05: gender equality.

• Between 1790 and 1870, girls in the US went from being illiterate to outperforming their male counterparts in schools
• From false accusations that learning algebra would harm their reproductive capabilities to gendered classes, this is the tale of women in education

With so many young women succeeding academically, education is becoming feminized, and boys are left out. Or at least, that’s the familiar complaint today, perhaps best known from Hanna Rosin’s 2010 article for The Atlantic , “ The End of Men .” The thing is, this phenomenon goes back at least 150 years , as the education historian David Tyack and political scientist Elisabeth Hansot explain in the journal Educational Researcher .

Tyack and Hansot write that there was a huge influx of girls into public elementary schools in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1790, US men were about twice as likely as US women to be literate. But by 1870, girls were surpassing boys in public schools. At the time, the change wasn’t the subject of much national debate. Rather, local school boards and parents quietly began including girls in common schools that had previously served only boys—a process that the education reformer Horace Mann called “smuggling in the girls.”

Have you read?

How to improve education for ethnic minority women, how education helps women to the top of the career ladder, the relationship between women’s education and fertility.

Debate about “coeducation”—and the word itself—emerged only in the 1850s. Tyack and Hansot write that this was directly related to increased mixing of children of different classes and ethnic groups in urban schools. One report of that era suggested that gender-segregated schools might be useful in shielding girls (presumably middle-class, native born white ones) from the “rude assaults” of boys from inferior social classes. These complaints had little effect. However, coeducation soon stirred up different public fears. Girls began to greatly outnumber boys in high schools, and women came to “monopolize” teaching jobs, especially in cities.

This led to rising worries about women usurping men’s roles. Girls’ success in school made it hard for traditionalists to keep making their old arguments that women were intellectually incapable. Instead, they began relying on new claims that education would harm their health and reproductive capacities. For example, the physiologist Edward H. Clarke made a much-publicized argument against admitting women to Harvard based on the idea that the energy required to learn subjects like algebra would flow from other bodily systems, harming their ovaries.

Meanwhile, Tyack and Hansot write, the popular press began to warn of a “boy problem.” Pointing out that boys were more often held back a grade, and less likely to finish elementary school or continue through high school, critics claimed that the female-dominated education system was ill-suited to masculine energy. A Columbia professor wrote that it was “little short of monstrous that boys during [adolescence] receive almost all their intellectual and moral impulses from women.”

School administrators sought ways to address these complaints. But they generally saw implementing gender segregation as impractical and undesirable. Hiring more male teachers was appealing, but few men were willing to work for the low pay schools offered. Ultimately, the solution many schools settled on, in the early twentieth century, was the creation of new, gendered classes. Boys got vocational classes, while girls got home economics and secretarial courses. Separate physical education classes stressed concerns about women’s health and biology, while encouraging boys to engage in vigorous physical activity.

As we can see today, these changes failed to permanently address worries about the relative success of girls at school.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

The Agenda .chakra .wef-n7bacu{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-weight:400;} Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

.chakra .wef-1dtnjt5{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;} More on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion .chakra .wef-17xejub{-webkit-flex:1;-ms-flex:1;flex:1;justify-self:stretch;-webkit-align-self:stretch;-ms-flex-item-align:stretch;align-self:stretch;} .chakra .wef-nr1rr4{display:-webkit-inline-box;display:-webkit-inline-flex;display:-ms-inline-flexbox;display:inline-flex;white-space:normal;vertical-align:middle;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:0.75rem;border-radius:0.25rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;line-height:1.2;-webkit-letter-spacing:1.25px;-moz-letter-spacing:1.25px;-ms-letter-spacing:1.25px;letter-spacing:1.25px;background:none;padding:0px;color:#B3B3B3;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;box-decoration-break:clone;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;}@media screen and (min-width:37.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:0.875rem;}}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:1rem;}} See all

How focused giving can unlock billions and catapult women’s wealth

Mark Muckerheide

May 21, 2024

Progress for women in the workplace stagnating in four key areas, global study reveals

The care economy is one of humanity's most valuable assets. Here's how we secure its future

This is how AI can empower women and achieve gender equality, according to the founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First

Kate Whiting

May 14, 2024

Here's how rising air pollution threatens millions in the US

5 conditions that highlight the women’s health gap

May 3, 2024

Girls' Education

Every day, girls face barriers to education caused by poverty, cultural norms and practices, poor infrastructure, violence and fragility. Girls’ education is a strategic development priority for the World Bank.

Ensuring that all girls and young women receive a quality education is their human right, a global development priority, and a strategic priority for the World Bank. 

Achieving gender equality is central to the World Bank Group twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. As the largest financing development partner in education globally, the World Bank ensures that all of its education projects are gender-sensitive, and works to overcome barriers that are preventing girls and boys from equally benefiting from countries’ investments in education.

Girls’ education goes beyond getting girls into school. It is also about ensuring that girls learn and feel safe while in school; have the opportunity to complete all levels of education, acquiring the knowledge and skills to compete in the labor market; gain socio-emotional and life skills necessary to navigate and adapt to a changing world; make decisions about their own lives; and contribute to their communities and the world.

Both individuals and countries benefit from girls’ education. Better educated women tend to be more informed about nutrition and healthcare, have fewer children, marry at a later age, and their children are usually healthier, should they choose to become mothers. They are more likely to participate in the formal labor market and earn higher incomes. A recent World Bank  study  estimates that the “limited educational opportunities for girls, and barriers to completing 12 years of education, cost countries between US$15 trillion1 and $30 trillion in lost lifetime productivity and earnings.” All these factors combined can help lift households, communities, and countries out of poverty.

The Challenge

According to  UNICEF   estimates, around the world, 129 million girls are out of school, including 32  million of primary school age, and 97 million of secondary school age. 

Globally, primary, and secondary school enrollment rates are getting closer to equal for girls and boys (90% male, 89% female). But while enrollment rates are similar – in fact, two-thirds of all countries have reached  gender parity in primary school enrollment  – completion rates for girls are lower in low-income countries where 63% of female primary school students complete primary school, compared to 67% of male primary school students.  In low-income countries, secondary school completion rates for girls also continue to lag, with only 36% of girls completing lower secondary school compared to 44% of boys. Upper secondary completion rates have similar disparities in lower income countries, the rate is 26% for young men and  21% for young women.

The gaps are starker in countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV). In FCV countries,  girls are 2.5 times  more likely to be out of school than boys, and at the secondary level, are 90% more likely to be out of secondary school than those in non-FCV contexts.  

Both girls and boys are facing a learning crisis. Learning Poverty (LP) measures the share of children who are not able to read proficiently at age 10. While girls are on average 4 percentage points less learning-poor than boys, the rates remain very high for both groups. The average of Learning Poverty in in low- and middle- income countries is 55% for females, and 59% for males. The gap is narrower in low-income countries, where Learning Poverty averages about 93% for both boys and girls.

In many countries, enrollment in tertiary education slightly favors young women, however, better learning outcomes are not translating into better work and life outcomes for women. There is a large gender gap in labor force participation rates globally. It is especially stark in regions such as South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, which have some of the  lowest female labor force participation rates  at 24% and 20% per region, respectively. These are appallingly low rates, considering what is observed in other regions like Latin America (53%) or East Asia (59%), which are still below rates for men. 

Gender bias  within schools and classrooms may also reinforce messages that affect girls’ ambitions, their own perceptions of their roles in society, and produce labor market engagement disparities and occupational segregation. When gender stereotypes are communicated through the design of school and classroom learning environments or through the behavior of faculty, staff, and peers in a child’s school, it goes on to have sustained impact on academic performance and choice of field of study, especially negatively affecting young women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

Poverty  is one of the most important factors for determining whether a girl can access and complete her education. Studies consistently reinforce that girls who face multiple disadvantages — such as low family income, living in remote or underserved locations or who have a disability or belong to a minority ethno-linguistic group — are farthest behind in terms of access to and completion of education.

Violence  also prevents girls from accessing and completing education – often girls are forced to walk long distances to school placing them at an increased risk of violence and many experience violence while at school. Most  recent data  estimates that approximately 60 million girls are sexually assaulted on their way to or at school every year. This often has serious consequences for their mental and physical health and overall well-being while also leading to lower attendance and higher dropout rates. An estimated  246 million children experience violence in and around school every year , ending school-related gender-based violence is critical. Adolescent pregnancies can be a result of sexual violence or sexual exploitation. Girls who become pregnant often face strong stigma, and even discrimination, from their communities. The burden of stigma, compounded by unequal gender norms, can lead girls to drop out of school early and not return. 

Child marriage  is also a critical challenge. Girls who marry young are much more likely to drop out of school, complete fewer years of education than their peers who marry later. They are also more likely to have children at a young age and are exposed to higher levels of violence perpetrated by their partner.  In turn, this affects the education and health of their children, as well as their ability to earn a living. Indeed, girls with secondary schooling are up to six times more likely to marry as those children with little or no education.  According to a recent report , more than 41,000 girls under the age of 18 marry every day. Putting an end to this practice would increase women’s expected educational attainment, and with it, their potential earnings. According to the report’s estimates, ending child marriage could generate more than US$500 billion in benefits annually each year.

COVID-19  is having a negative impact on girls’ health and well-being – and many are at risk of not returning to school once they reopen. Available  research  shows that prevalence of violence against girls and women has increased during the pandemic – jeopardizing their health, safety and overall well-being. As school closures and quarantines were enforced during the 2014‐2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, women and girls experienced more sexual violence, coercion and exploitation. School closures during the Ebola outbreak were associated with an increase in teenage  pregnancies . Once schools re-opened, many “visibly pregnant girls” were banned from going back to school. With schools closing throughout the developing world, where stigma around teenage pregnancies prevails, we will probably see an increase in drop-out rates as teenage girls become pregnant or married. As girls stay at home because of school closures, their household work burdens might increase, resulting in girls spending more time helping out at home instead of studying. This might encourage parents, particularly those putting a lower value on girls' education, to keep their daughters at home even after schools reopen. Moreover,  research  shows that girls risk dropping out of school when caregivers are missing from the household because they typically have to (partly) replace the work done by the missing caregiver, who might be away due to COVID-19-related work, illness, or death. Therefore, with the current COVID-19 pandemic, we might see more girls than boys helping at home, lagging behind with studying, and dropping out of school.

The World Bank is committed to seeing every girl prosper in her life. Our projects support the education of hundreds of millions of girls and young women across the world. Working through interventions in education, health, social protection, water, infrastructure, and other sectors, we are making an even stronger commitment to support countries in ensuring that every girl receives the quality education she deserves.

Our 180 projects are impacting more than  150 million girls and young women worldwide . Hundreds of millions more have been impacted over the past few decades. 

We tackle key barriers that girls and young women face when trying to obtain an education. Guided by evidence on what works for girls’ education, our projects use multi-pronged approaches across areas including:

1. Removing barriers to schooling

• Addressing financial barriers, through scholarships, stipends, grants, conditional cash transfers
• Addressing long distances and lack of safety to and from school by building schools, providing transportation methods for girls to get to school
• Addressing a lack of information about returns to girls’ education but running community awareness campaigns engaging parents, school leaders, and local community leaders
• Working with the community to address and inform on social and cultural norms and perceptions that may prevent girls’ education

2. Promoting safe and inclusive schools 

• By constructing and rehabilitating schools to create safe and inclusive learning environments, 
• Efforts at the community- and school-levels, and programs to engage the school (including teachers, girls, and boys) in reducing gender-based violence (GBV) and ensuring available mechanisms to report GBV
• Support for hygiene facilities and menstrual hygiene management for adolescent girls

3. Improving the quality of education 

• Investing in teacher professional development, eliminating gender biases in curriculum and teaching practices, and focusing on foundational learning
• Adapting teaching and learning materials, and books to introduce gender sensitive language, pictorial aspects, and messaging

4. Developing skills and empowering girls for life and labor market success 

• Promoting girls’ empowerment, skills development programs and social programs
• Prioritizing and promoting women in STEM subjects and careers in both traditional and non-traditional sectors
• Reducing barriers and providing incentives through scholarships for women to enroll in higher education and TVET programs
• Support for childcare programs for women and girls to join the labor market

For more information on our girls’ education investment and projects, please read  Count Me In: The World Bank Education Global Practice: Improving Education Outcomes for Girls and Women , which highlights our decades-long commitment to girls’ education, and showcases how Education GP projects are creating opportunities for girls around the world to succeed in their education and beyond.

The WBG supports girls’ education through a variety of interventions.  Our focus on girls’ education and wellbeing goes beyond school attendance and learning outcomes – we strive to ensure girls have safe, joyful, and inclusive experience with education systems that set them up for success in life and motivate them to become lifelong learners. This  approach , reflected in the current Education portfolio impacting at least 150 million girls and young women, prioritizes investments in four key areas listed below. 

1. Removing barriers to girls’ schooling

• Our projects providing stipends to improve primary and secondary school completion for girls and young women in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Sahel benefit close to half a million girls. 
• Our  Girls Empowerment and Learning for All Project in Angola  will use a variety of financial incentives to attract adolescent girls to schools, including scholarships, and new school spaces for girls. 
• The AGILE (Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment) project in Nigeria is providing conditional cash transfers to households for sending girls to school, removing cost barriers to their education. 
• The MIQRA (Mali Improving Education Quality and Results for All Project) has a school feeding and nutrition program targeted at retention and attendance for girls in schools.

2. Promoting safe and inclusive schools for girls

• In Tanzania, the Bank is supporting the training of a counselor in every school who will provide life-skills training in girls’ and boys’ clubs – which is important because closing gender gaps is not only about interventions for girls but also for boys. 
• In Nigeria, female counselors will provide life skills training to about 340,000 girls in safe spaces. Several of our other projects also support the construction of separate sanitary toilets for girls, as well as introducing GBV-reducing and reporting mechanisms in school systems. 

3. Improving the quality of education for girls (and boys)

• In Ghana, the Accountability and Learning Outcomes Project is conducting teacher training for gender-sensitive instruction, and aims to create guides for teachers to support gender sensitivity in classrooms. 
• In Honduras, the Early Childhood Education Improvement Project, will create a revised preschool curriculum that will include content on gender equity, inclusion, and violence prevention, as well as training for teachers, including training to combat GBV.
• The Girls Empowerment and Quality Education for All Project in Sao Tome & Principe is creating girls’ clubs after school, where they are also provided with life skills training, and counseling.

4. Developing skills for life and labor market success for young women

• The Nurturing Excellence in Higher Education Project in Nepal is focusing on increasing access to tertiary education for young women from low-income groups, and additional providing scholarships for the poorest applications, alongside communication and advocacy campaigns for more female enrollment in STEM subjects. 
• The ASSET (Accelerating and Strengthening Skills for Economic Transformation) project in Bangladesh is working to increase the participation of women in skills training programs, and conducting awareness and communications campaigns to address dropout.
• In Pakistan, the  Higher Education Development  project seeks to support women enrolled in STEM programs, with an aim to move them from 2-year to more comprehensive 4-year programs. 
• The  Higher Education Project  in Moldova and the Higher Education Modernization Project in Belarus will both support and finance activities to increase enrollment of women in STEM fields. The Côte d'Ivoire  Higher Education Development Support Project  provides scholarships for women in higher education, and extra tutoring support for females pursuing STEM subjects.
• Schemes to increase participation of girls in higher education. Through the Africa Centers of Excellence (ACE) project, the Bank has supported increased enrollment of females in masters and PhD programs. The number of female students in ACE centers was 343 in 2014 and is now 3,400 in 2020; a tenfold increase. The Bank is also building the pipeline of female students interested in computer science and engineering programs and retain them.  

The WBG works closely with governments and other development organizations on girls’ education issues to identify and advance interventions that improve girls’ education outcomes and provide resources to support countries implementing such initiatives. Partnerships both within and outside of the World Bank are critical to the Education GP’s work on girls’ education. The Education GP works with other global practices in the Bank to improve girls’ education—for example, collaborating with the Water GP for access to sanitation and hygiene in schools, with Social Protection and Jobs GP for challenges related to labor market transition, or Energy GP to improve school safety. 

The World Bank collaborates actively with many donors and organizations. As a signatory to the G7 Charlevoix Commitment, the Bank has already committed an estimated $2.5 billion to girls’ education in FCV countries as of September 2021—exceeding its pledge of $2.0 billion from 2018 to 2023. 

The Education GP: 

• is collaborating with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office FCDO (UK) about targets and high-level engagement with G7 donors, to support aid and financial commitment for girls’ education; 
• is a member of the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) Girls’ EiE Reference Group, which seeks to further research and advocacy for girls’ education in emergencies; 
• a member of the UNESCO Gender Flagship Reference Group and has provided technical contributions to the UNESCO-commissioned study (December 2020-July 2021); and 
• is working closely with the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) as the implementing agency for 54 percent of the total GPE grants of $3.62 billion, that support girls’ education.
• is a member of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), which comprises over 20 partners representing multilateral, bilateral, civil society, and non-governmental organizations.
• collaborated with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) to produce Economic Impacts of Child Marriage , a recent report detailing the effects of child marriage, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation , and GPE.

Girls’ education in conflict is most at risk: Here’s how to reach them

Why girls’ education should remain a priority

Closing the gap: Tackling the remaining disparities in girls’ education and women’s labor market participation

Empowering adolescent girls in Africa through education

STAY CONNECTED

Additional resources.

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

• Reference Manager
• Simple TEXT file

People also looked at

Editorial article, editorial: ways of seeing women’s leadership in education—stories, images, metaphors, methods and theories.

• 1 School of Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
• 2 Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
• 3 UCL Institute of Education, University College London, London, United Kingdom
• 4 School of Education, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

Editorial on the Research Topic Ways of Seeing Women’s Leadership in Education–Stories, Images, Metaphors, Methods and Theories

Introduction

Gender and educational leadership remains a focus for scholarly interest precisely because gender inequalities remain. That is the case 30 years on from the publication of seminal works that established gender and women in educational leadership as a focus for research ( Shakeshaft 1987 ; Blackmore 1989 ; Dillard 1995 ). Scholars continue to document women’s under-representation in leadership ( Alston, 2005 ). This Research Topic focuses on accounts of doing leadership (e.g. Cook ), as well as showing how their inclusion transforms leadership theory e.g. by incorporating gender, feminist, intersectionality and Afrocentric theories (e.g. Gullo and Sperandio , Tripses and Lazaridou , Malachias et al. , Williams ). Feminist epistemology ensures women’s experiences and ways of seeing are central to the research purpose and process; that women as leaders are not solely the object of the researcher’s gaze. In particular, feminist standpoint theory recognises there is epistemic privilege so that situated knowledge, what is known and the ways it can be known, is shaped by the positionality of knowledge producers. A reflexive approach prompts feminist researchers to reflect deeply on context, as well as their positionality, in relation to the focus of research. The theme of this Research Topic—“Ways of seeing women’s leadership in education: stories, images, metaphors, methods and theories”—reflects collective experiences from diverse perspectives. Earlier versions of these eighteen papers were first presented at the seventh Women Leading Education across Continents conference at the University of Nottingham, UK in the summer of 2019.

Papers draw on individual narratives, as autoethnographies (e.g. Fuller , Kappert , Williams ) and narrative inquiries (e.g. Cook , Reilly , Showunmi ). Annette Kappert complements her presentation of critical cultural autoethnographical stories of leadership with fictionalised stories and poetry using a historical lens to illustrate the value of conducting research into a female Black and Minority Ethnic educator’s personal and professional experiences; she “gives voice to previously silenced and marginalized experiences” ( Boylorn and Orbe 2014 p. 15).

Victoria Showunmi offers a view on narrative inquiries based upon leadership through a lens of gender, race and class. The paper takes the reader through a journey of difference as it navigates with the voices of women leaders across three countries. Elizabeth Reilly ’s work in the context of Rwanda explores and gives voice to Rwandan women leaders. The research draws on African feminist theories that explicitly challenge Western theories of gender and focus on “mov[ing] gender research towards post-colonial and indigenous approaches and the construction of knowledge derived from the experiences of girls/women in their specific locations and histories” that emphasize agency, resilience, and persistence ( Chilisa and Ntseane, 2010 p. 620).

Pontso Moorosi uses narratives to portray the construction of leadership identity by three women leaders in African schools. These women’s stories demonstrate how a leadership self-perception instils a sense of agency that facilitates leaderful actions to strengthen leadership identity. Women’s stories of leadership identity development are gendered and shaped by values instilled from childhood that shape their leadership dispositions. The paper highlights the intricate nature of self-perception, gender and leadership identity, arguing that these aspects cannot be left to chance if we are serious about leadership development and increasing the pool of women in leadership.

Sheralyn Cook explores the stories of two women’s professional and personal struggles turning around the New Zealand schools they led during turbulent times.

Images and Metaphors

Sharon Curtis’s paper positions the experiences of Black women leaders as a metaphorical visualisation of a single thread. A thread that manoeuvers and meanders apparently aimlessly, not through choice, but enforced by navigating a way through institutions and systems, fuelled with micro aggressions, convoluted racial barriers and obstacles placed in their paths and journeys as Black women reach for and sustain leadership positions.

Innovative work, exploring the metaphors and images used to describe leadership in a range of cultural contexts, reveals how differently we conceptualise women’s leadership across continents (e.g. Randell and Yerbury , Burkinshaw and White ). Shirley Randell and Hilary Yerbury attempt to break the mould, through the use of metaphors as a way to understand women’s leadership across two different continents. The paper draws on the notion that leadership is generally thought of as “a good thing”, as something important carried out by people with desirable attributes, such as courage and insight, or with attractive personalities and communication skills. However, using metaphors that highlight the obstacles women face, for example, the glass ceiling, glass cliff, sticky floors and the labyrinth is ubiquitous in educational leadership. Instead, they demonstrate women’s alternative use of metaphors from the natural world.

Paula Burkinshaw and Kate White explore the use of images and metaphors to describe doing leadership across two generations of women leaders in higher education in two different country contexts. This innovative approach draws from experiences of an older generation of women in top leadership in the UK and a younger generation in middle leadership in Australia. They established that the older generation of women leaders conforms to metaphors and images of masculinist leadership thereby maintaining the status quo, while the younger generation use more positive images of leadership to disrupt the status quo. They portray an alternative model of leadership constructed on re-negotiated terms that bear more prospects for equality.

Rosangela Malachias et al. innovative use of film narratives reveals women’s activist leadership as community educators and film-makers in the Baixada Fluminense region near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These stories: of a Black deaf woman teaching the history and culture of black deaf people; and “a young black woman, graffiti artist, filmmaker, actress, and pedagogical specialist with a master’s degree in Education” demonstrate that educational leadership can be found in communities even when there is limited recognition of it in the academy.

Pen Mendonça demonstrates the power of graphic illustration in articulating and exploring women’s leadership through values-based cartooning. She provides a powerful personal account of her work with women leaders working in higher education and with grassroots movements. Her use of visual methods is innovative in the field of women, gender and feminism in educational leadership. Both papers expand the field to consider the leadership of women’s leadership activism in education.

Kay Fuller has developed an intersectional life grid at 7 year intervals in her critical autoethnography to reveal reflexivities of complacency, reflexivities that discomfort and reflexivities that transform in a scholarly and professional career in educational leadership.

Historical research by Jenny Tripses and Angeliki Lazaridou make certain that women are written into the field to ensure we know “where we have come from, and where we are going”. In particular, they focus on the lives of two women with long-lasting and powerful legacies—one Greek, the other American—Aikaterini Laskaridou and Lydia Moss Bradley lived and worked in the 19th century.

Qualitative methods such as narrative inquiry (e.g. Cook , Moorosi ) and life story (e.g. Cunneen ) bring out the depth of emotions, feelings and images attached to the gendered stories of women’s lives. Analyses of quantitative data enable analysis of larger datasets about women’s ways of doing leadership (e.g. Calderone et al. , Reed and Reedman ).

Diane Reed and Ashley Reedman use quantitative methods to compare leader resilience by gender and age. Based on an on-going study that involves women and men, this innovative work shows that resilience increases with age for both genders. This work centres important life aspects such as well-being, resilient aging and quality of life. Increasingly, wellbeing is receiving attention as an important element to work-life balance for women in leadership and Reed and Reedman’s work is on point.

Gina Gullo and Jill Sperandio ’s paper investigates the career paths and perspectives of current and aspirant superintendents in Pennsylvania. The research uses a mixed method approach which includes both quantitative and qualitative tools. Initial findings suggest, that there are similarities and differences in career planning preferences by men and women aspirant superintendents indicates an understanding by women of the insider pathway potential to overcome bias regarding women in leadership roles. As this career path is frequently not an option, women must choose not to aspire or to prepare themselves for possible gender bias in hiring when applying as outsiders.

To illustrate how structural inequalities operate at multiple levels, scholars show how the use of gender (e.g. Gullo and Sperandio ), feminist (e.g. Calderone et al. , Tripses and Lazaridou ), critical race (e.g. Curtis ), intersectionality (e.g. Fuller, Showunmi ) and other social theories (e.g. Kappert ) enables us to think about and articulate our ways of seeing women’s leadership in formal and informal educational settings for learners of all ages.

Laura Burton’s et al. paper examines how ten Black female school leaders coped with gendered racism and the costs associated with doing so. Their use of adaptive and maladaptive strategies, more or less affirming, highlighted the ways both types of strategies were effective and enabled participants to persist and succeed in their leadership roles.

Calderone et al. draw on feminist life course theory to understand how women’s perspectives on the accessibility of the (United States) superintendency have shifted in recent times to become a largely contingent decision—a strategic, individual-level assessment focusing on the favourability of district work conditions to their success as leaders.

Patricia Williams draws on African-centred pedagogy, African womanism, and transformational leadership to explore her leadership practice in a Charter School in an autoethnographical account that locates her experience in a neoliberal context.

Collective Experience

Importantly, these papers document the collective experiences of women leading education across continents. Of course, there are accounts of similarities and differences among the women whose leadership stories are told. Collectively, the papers present women leaders in their heterogeneity. There are accounts of challenges faced and overcome; of resistance enacted and agency exercised against the backdrop of institutional, systemic and societal misogyny and racism. Importantly there are accounts of abundance in their cultural and leadership capital.

In this collection of papers, intercontinental perspectives are presented from South America ( Malachias et al. ), North America ( Burton et al. , Calderone et al. , Gullo and Sperandio , Reed and Reedman , Williams ), Europe ( Cunneen , Curtis , Fuller , Mendonça ), Africa ( Moorosi , Reilly ), Asia (see comparative scholarship) and Australasia ( Cook ). Cross-continental perspectives are found in comparative scholarship ( Burkinshaw and White , Randell and Yerbury , Showunmi , Tripses and Lazaridou ) and the transcontinental life histories of educational leaders ( Kappert ).

However, the underrepresentation of papers in this collection from South American, African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries, when scholars from those continents presented their research at the conference in 2019 reveals the persistence of coloniality in knowledge production and dissemination in the field of women, gender and feminism in educational leadership. It persists despite best efforts to decolonise the conference ( Fuller et al., 2020 ).

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The handling editor declared a shared committee (Women Leading Education Across Continents) with the authors at time of review.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Alston, J. A. (2005). Tempered Radicals and Servant Leaders: Black Females Persevering in the Superintendency. Educ. Adm. Q. 41 (4), 675–688.

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Blackmore, J. (1989) “Educational Leadership: A Feminist Critique and Reconstruction,” in Critical Perspectives on Educational Leadership . Editors J. Smyth (London: Falmer ).

Google Scholar

Boylorn, R. M., and Orbe, M. P. (Editors) (2014) Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life . Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press .

Chilisa, B., and Ntseane, G. (2010) Resisting Dominant Discourses: Implications of Indigenous, African Feminist Theory and Methods for Gender and Education Research, Gender and Education . 22 (6), 617–632.

Dillard, C. (1995). Leading with her Life: An African American Feminist (re)interpretation of Leadership for an Urban High School Principal. Educ. Adm. Q. 31 (4), 539–563.

Fuller, K., Moorosi, P., Shah, S., and Showunmi, V. (2020). Coming Full Circle: The Gender and Leadership Research Interest Group. Manag. Educ. 34 (3), 115–116.

Shakeshaft, C. (1987) Women in Educational Administration . Newbury Park, CA: Sage .

Keywords: women, gender, feminism, educational leadership, images and metaphors, methods, theories

Citation: Fuller K, Moorosi P, Showunmi V and Shah S (2021) Editorial: Ways of Seeing Women’s Leadership in Education—Stories, Images, Metaphors, Methods and Theories. Front. Educ. 6:781049. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.781049

Received: 22 September 2021; Accepted: 28 September 2021; Published: 05 November 2021.

Edited and reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Fuller, Moorosi, Showunmi and Shah. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Kay Fuller, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Ways of Seeing Women’s Leadership in Education: Stories, Images, Metaphors, Methods and Theories

Search Search

Why girls around the world are still denied an equal chance of education

Barriers to education, Child marriage, Children in conflicts, Children with disabilities, Education in emergencies, Girls' education, Right to education, Teachers and learning

Their News team

26 Jul 2017

Girls are still less likely to attend school than boys - and many of the obstacles behind this gender gap are examined in a United Nations report.

When the new century began 17 years ago, there was a major push to get girls around the world into education.

There have been some notable successes. Between 2000 and 2015, the gender gap in literacy narrowed dramatically and the number of girls going to primary school rose significantly.

But it hasn’t been enough. In more than half of all countries, there’s still a large gender gap when it comes to attendance at lower secondary school.

“Despite universal recognition of the right to education for everyone, girls are still more likely than boys never to attend school,” says a stark line from a United Nations report on girls’ education.

Girls’ education

“It is estimated that 15 million girls – mainly those living in poverty – will never set foot in a classroom, compared to 10 million boys.”

The gap is even wider in conflict zones, where girls are nearly two and a half times more likely to be out of school than boys.

The report, produced this month by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is titled  “Realisation of the equal enjoyment of the right to education by every girl” .

It highlights the obstacles to girls getting a quality education and puts forward a series of recommendations to remedy the issues. Here are some extracts that give a flavour of the report.

Girl students at Kapuri School in South Sudan (UN Photo / JC McIlwaine)

The obstacles to girls getting education

GENDER STEREOTYPES

“Gender stereotypes about the role of women as relegated to the family sphere underpin all obstacles to girls’ equal access to quality education. Girls are often socialised to assume domestic and care responsibilities, with the assumption that they will be economically dependent on men. The stereotype of men as breadwinners leads to the prioritisation of boys’ education.”

LEGISLATION, POLICIES AND BUDGETS

“Several states have laws and policies that curtail girls’ equal enjoyment of the right to education. Even apparently gender-neutral laws and policies can – often owing to prevailing social norms – result in girls being left out of school… These include laws and policies that allow child marriage, permit discriminatory school admission criteria, such as excluding pregnant girls, and restrict girls’ freedom of movement.”

“Girls are more likely to perform poorly at school and drop out when parents or guardians live in poverty and/or cannot afford to pay school expenses, such as school fees, textbooks, uniforms, transportation and lunches. This is compounded by gendered expectations related to domestic and care responsibilities, and parental biases towards boys’ education for them to have better career prospects.”

“When schools are far from homes, such as in rural and remote areas, the likelihood of girls’ non-attendance increases. Girls are also particularly affected when their freedom of movement is restricted… Girls in remote and rural settings also tend to drop out of school more regularly than other girls owing to often exacerbated expectations relating to childcare, seasonal work or fetching firewood and water.”

EDUCATION INFRASTRUCTURE

“Girls may be unwilling to attend school or discouraged from doing so by parents or guardians when schools do not provide water, safe and separate toilets/changing rooms nor take into account girls’ particular health needs. Their concentration and participation in class may also be negatively affected in those circumstances.”

Girls in a classroom at Bwerangula Primary School in Kitchanga, DRC (UN Photo / Eskinder Debebe)

“Prohibitive laws or regulations often deny pregnant girls access to school on the premise that girls stop being children once they become pregnant. They are also often not provided with adequate support and services during their pregnancy nor after they give birth.”

GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

“Girls are often subjected to gender-based violence on the way to/from and in school, including sexual harassment, assault, abduction, psychological attacks and bullying, perpetrated predominantly by male students, teachers and community members, but also by women and girls, often with impunity. Such violence may target girls who attend school or girls, parents and teachers who promote gender equality and girls’ right to education. “

CONFLICT AND SITUATIONS OF INSTABILITY

“Girls’ education is compromised when schools are targeted, looted and/or destroyed, closed owing to insecurity or occupied for military purposes or as shelters. Grave rights violations following the ‘normalisation of gender-based violence’ deter and prevent girls from attending school and may include targeted attacks, forced exclusion, forcible recruitment, abduction, sexual slavery, harassment and threats against girls by armed groups and criminal gangs.”

Recommendations to give girls equal access to education

The report makes 18 recommendations to achieve gender equality. It says countries and all stakeholders should ensure that:

• All forms of discrimination, laws, policies and practices that directly or indirectly block girls’ access to education are eradicated
• Adequate funding and budgets are given for girls’ education
• Every girl is aware of her right to education 
• Girls’ education and an end to gender stereotypes are promoted
• School curriculums, textbooks and teaching methods are reviewed and revised
• Girls enjoy the same quality of education as boys
• Teachers are qualified and adequately trained including on gender equality
• Girls get access to safe drinking water, separate toilets and resources for menstrual hygiene – with attention to disabled girls
• Education is safe and physically accessible, including for girls in rural and remote areas (and including safe transportation)
• Pregnant girls can continue in school – and have access to childcare, breastfeeding facilities and counselling on school premises
• Violence against girls is eliminated
• Girls and schools are protected from attacks on girls’ education including use of schools for military or shelter purposes

See all news

Technology has the power to expand education for children with disabilities

17 Nov 2022

Skills for the future give young people the best chance of success

• CBSE Class 10th
• CBSE Class 12th
• UP Board 10th
• UP Board 12th
• Bihar Board 10th
• Bihar Board 12th
• Top Schools in India
• Top Schools in Delhi
• Top Schools in Mumbai
• Top Schools in Chennai
• Top Schools in Hyderabad
• Top Schools in Kolkata
• Top Schools in Pune
• Top Schools in Bangalore

Products & Resources

• JEE Main Knockout April
• Free Sample Papers
• Free Ebooks
• NCERT Notes
• NCERT Syllabus
• NCERT Books
• RD Sharma Solutions
• Navodaya Vidyalaya Admission 2024-25
• NCERT Solutions
• NCERT Solutions for Class 12
• NCERT Solutions for Class 11
• NCERT solutions for Class 10
• NCERT solutions for Class 9
• NCERT solutions for Class 8
• NCERT Solutions for Class 7
• JEE Main 2024
• MHT CET 2024
• JEE Advanced 2024
• BITSAT 2024
• View All Engineering Exams
• Colleges Accepting B.Tech Applications
• Top Engineering Colleges in India
• Engineering Colleges in India
• Engineering Colleges in Tamil Nadu
• Engineering Colleges Accepting JEE Main
• Top IITs in India
• Top NITs in India
• Top IIITs in India
• JEE Main College Predictor
• JEE Main Rank Predictor
• MHT CET College Predictor
• AP EAMCET College Predictor
• GATE College Predictor
• KCET College Predictor
• JEE Advanced College Predictor
• View All College Predictors
• JEE Main Question Paper
• JEE Main Cutoff
• JEE Main Advanced Admit Card
• JEE Advanced Admit Card 2024
• Download E-Books and Sample Papers
• Compare Colleges
• B.Tech College Applications
• KCET Result
• MAH MBA CET Exam
• View All Management Exams

Colleges & Courses

• MBA College Admissions
• MBA Colleges in India
• Top IIMs Colleges in India
• Top Online MBA Colleges in India
• MBA Colleges Accepting XAT Score
• BBA Colleges in India
• XAT College Predictor 2024
• SNAP College Predictor
• NMAT College Predictor
• MAT College Predictor 2024
• CMAT College Predictor 2024
• CAT Percentile Predictor 2023
• CAT 2023 College Predictor
• CMAT 2024 Answer Key
• TS ICET 2024 Hall Ticket
• CMAT Result 2024
• MAH MBA CET Cutoff 2024
• Download Helpful Ebooks
• List of Popular Branches
• QnA - Get answers to your doubts
• IIM Fees Structure
• AIIMS Nursing
• Top Medical Colleges in India
• Top Medical Colleges in India accepting NEET Score
• Medical Colleges accepting NEET
• List of Medical Colleges in India
• List of AIIMS Colleges In India
• Medical Colleges in Maharashtra
• Medical Colleges in India Accepting NEET PG
• NEET College Predictor
• NEET PG College Predictor
• NEET MDS College Predictor
• NEET Rank Predictor
• DNB PDCET College Predictor
• NEET Result 2024
• NEET Asnwer Key 2024
• NEET Cut off
• NEET Online Preparation
• Download Helpful E-books
• Colleges Accepting Admissions
• Top Law Colleges in India
• Law College Accepting CLAT Score
• List of Law Colleges in India
• Top Law Colleges in Delhi
• Top NLUs Colleges in India
• Top Law Colleges in Chandigarh
• Top Law Collages in Lucknow

Predictors & E-Books

• CLAT College Predictor
• MHCET Law ( 5 Year L.L.B) College Predictor
• AILET College Predictor
• Sample Papers
• Compare Law Collages
• Careers360 Youtube Channel
• CLAT Syllabus 2025
• CLAT Previous Year Question Paper
• NID DAT Exam
• Pearl Academy Exam

Predictors & Articles

• NIFT College Predictor
• UCEED College Predictor
• NID DAT College Predictor
• NID DAT Syllabus 2025
• NID DAT 2025
• Design Colleges in India
• Top NIFT Colleges in India
• Fashion Design Colleges in India
• Top Interior Design Colleges in India
• Top Graphic Designing Colleges in India
• Fashion Design Colleges in Delhi
• Fashion Design Colleges in Mumbai
• Top Interior Design Colleges in Bangalore
• NIFT Result 2024
• NIFT Fees Structure
• NIFT Syllabus 2025
• Free Design E-books
• List of Branches
• Careers360 Youtube channel
• IPU CET BJMC
• JMI Mass Communication Entrance Exam
• IIMC Entrance Exam
• Media & Journalism colleges in Delhi
• Media & Journalism colleges in Bangalore
• Media & Journalism colleges in Mumbai
• List of Media & Journalism Colleges in India
• CA Intermediate
• CA Foundation
• CS Executive
• CS Professional
• Difference between CA and CS
• Difference between CA and CMA
• CA Full form
• CMA Full form
• CS Full form
• CA Salary In India

Top Courses & Careers

• Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com)
• Master of Commerce (M.Com)
• Company Secretary
• Cost Accountant
• Charted Accountant
• Credit Manager
• Financial Advisor
• Top Commerce Colleges in India
• Top Government Commerce Colleges in India
• Top Private Commerce Colleges in India
• Top M.Com Colleges in Mumbai
• Top B.Com Colleges in India
• IT Colleges in Tamil Nadu
• IT Colleges in Uttar Pradesh
• MCA Colleges in India
• BCA Colleges in India

Quick Links

• Information Technology Courses
• Programming Courses
• Web Development Courses
• Data Analytics Courses
• Big Data Analytics Courses
• RUHS Pharmacy Admission Test
• Top Pharmacy Colleges in India
• Pharmacy Colleges in Pune
• Pharmacy Colleges in Mumbai
• Colleges Accepting GPAT Score
• Pharmacy Colleges in Lucknow
• List of Pharmacy Colleges in Nagpur
• GPAT Result
• GPAT 2024 Admit Card
• GPAT Question Papers
• NCHMCT JEE 2024
• Mah BHMCT CET
• Top Hotel Management Colleges in Delhi
• Top Hotel Management Colleges in Hyderabad
• Top Hotel Management Colleges in Mumbai
• Top Hotel Management Colleges in Tamil Nadu
• Top Hotel Management Colleges in Maharashtra
• B.Sc Hotel Management
• Hotel Management
• Diploma in Hotel Management and Catering Technology

Diploma Colleges

• Top Diploma Colleges in Maharashtra
• UPSC IAS 2024
• SSC CGL 2024
• IBPS RRB 2024
• Previous Year Sample Papers
• Free Competition E-books
• Sarkari Result
• QnA- Get your doubts answered
• UPSC Previous Year Sample Papers
• CTET Previous Year Sample Papers
• SBI Clerk Previous Year Sample Papers
• NDA Previous Year Sample Papers

Upcoming Events

• NDA Application Form 2024
• UPSC IAS Application Form 2024
• CDS Application Form 2024
• CTET Admit card 2024
• HP TET Result 2023
• SSC GD Constable Admit Card 2024
• UPTET Notification 2024
• SBI Clerk Result 2024

Other Exams

• SSC CHSL 2024
• UP PCS 2024
• UGC NET 2024
• RRB NTPC 2024
• IBPS PO 2024
• IBPS Clerk 2024
• IBPS SO 2024
• Top University in USA
• Top University in Canada
• Top University in Ireland
• Top Universities in UK
• Top Universities in Australia
• Best MBA Colleges in Abroad
• Business Management Studies Colleges

Top Countries

• Study in USA
• Study in UK
• Study in Canada
• Study in Australia
• Study in Ireland
• Study in Germany
• Study in China
• Study in Europe

Student Visas

• Student Visa Canada
• Student Visa UK
• Student Visa USA
• Student Visa Australia
• Student Visa Germany
• Student Visa New Zealand
• Student Visa Ireland
• CUET PG 2024
• IGNOU B.Ed Admission 2024
• DU Admission 2024
• UP B.Ed JEE 2024
• LPU NEST 2024
• IIT JAM 2024
• IGNOU Online Admission 2024
• Universities in India
• Top Universities in India 2024
• Top Colleges in India
• Top Universities in Uttar Pradesh 2024
• Top Universities in Bihar
• Top Universities in Madhya Pradesh 2024
• Top Universities in Tamil Nadu 2024
• Central Universities in India
• CUET DU Cut off 2024
• IGNOU Date Sheet
• CUET Mock Test 2024
• CUET Admit card 2024
• CUET Result 2024
• CUET Participating Universities 2024
• CUET Previous Year Question Paper
• CUET Syllabus 2024 for Science Students
• E-Books and Sample Papers
• CUET Exam Pattern 2024
• CUET Exam Date 2024
• CUET Cut Off 2024
• CUET Exam Analysis 2024
• IGNOU Exam Form 2024
• CUET PG Counselling 2024
• CUET Answer Key 2024

Engineering Preparation

• Knockout JEE Main 2024
• Test Series JEE Main 2024
• JEE Main 2024 Rank Booster

Medical Preparation

• Knockout NEET 2024
• Test Series NEET 2024
• Rank Booster NEET 2024

Online Courses

• JEE Main One Month Course
• NEET One Month Course
• IBSAT Free Mock Tests
• IIT JEE Foundation Course
• Knockout BITSAT 2024
• Career Guidance Tool

Top Streams

• IT & Software Certification Courses
• Engineering and Architecture Certification Courses
• Programming And Development Certification Courses
• Business and Management Certification Courses
• Marketing Certification Courses
• Health and Fitness Certification Courses
• Design Certification Courses

Specializations

• Digital Marketing Certification Courses
• Cyber Security Certification Courses
• Artificial Intelligence Certification Courses
• Business Analytics Certification Courses
• Data Science Certification Courses
• Cloud Computing Certification Courses
• Machine Learning Certification Courses
• View All Certification Courses
• UG Degree Courses
• PG Degree Courses
• Short Term Courses
• Free Courses
• Online Degrees and Diplomas
• Compare Courses

Top Providers

• Coursera Courses
• Udemy Courses
• Edx Courses
• Swayam Courses
• upGrad Courses
• Simplilearn Courses
• Great Learning Courses

Women's Education Essay

Essay on women's education -.

Education for women has been a global concern for many decades, with organisations and governments working towards providing equal opportunities and education for all genders. According to UNESCO, there are still significant disparities in education attainment between men and women, particularly in low-income countries.

100 Words Essay On Women's Education

Women's education is critical to empowering women and promoting gender equality. Education helps women break the cycle of poverty and provides them with opportunities for personal and professional growth. It also leads to better health outcomes and reduced population growth rates.

Women who are highly educated are more likely to be active participants in the political and social process and are better equipped to advocate for their rights and those of their families. Educated women are also more likely to prioritise their children's education, perpetuating a positive cycle of education and empowerment. The government has implemented several programs and policies to promote girls’ education, including the Right to Education Act, which ensures that all children between the ages of 6 and 14 have access to free and compulsory education.

200 Words Essay On Women's Education

Education is one of the most fundamental human rights essential for individuals and society's overall development and progress. Women's education is significant in this regard, as it has already been proven to be one of the most effective ways to empower our women and promote gender equality.

Why Women Education Is Necessary

Studies show that educating women leads to improved health, well-being for themselves and their families, and greater economic growth and stability. Women who are educated are more likely to participate in the workforce and have higher-paying jobs, which contributes to the overall prosperity of communities. In addition, educated women are more likely to make informed decisions for themselves and their families, leading to better health outcomes.

Challenges Faced

However, despite the numerous benefits, many girls and women worldwide still face significant educational barriers. Poverty, cultural norms, and lack of access to resources are just some challenges preventing girls from attending school. Governments, civil society organizations, and international bodies must work together to provide equal educational opportunities for all, regardless of gender.

In India, education for women has improved over the years. However, there are still challenges, such as socio-cultural barriers, poverty, and lack of access to education facilities that hinder the education of many girls. However, despite the numerous benefits of women's education, there are still many barriers to its attainment, including poverty, cultural norms, and limited access to educational resources. Despite the efforts, the literacy rate among women in India remains lower than that of men, and there is still much progress.

In conclusion, educating women is a basic human right and crucial for promoting gender equality, reducing poverty, and advancing economic development. We must work towards creating a world where every girl and woman has access to quality education and is empowered to reach their full potential.

500 Words Essay On Women's Education

Women's education is crucial to a society's development and growth. It is widely recognised that educating women can have many positive impacts not just on the women themselves but also on their families, communities, and even entire countries.

The Importance Of Women's Education

The importance of women's education cannot be overstated.

Education empowers women to make informed decisions, increases their employment opportunities, and improves their economic status.

Education also leads to better health outcomes for women and their families.

Women educated are more likely to seek medical care, use contraception, and vaccinate their children, resulting in improved health outcomes for both mothers and children.

Additionally, educated women are more likely to participate in the political process and advocate for their rights, leading to a more equitable and just society.

Challenges To Women Education

Despite the many benefits of women's education, numerous challenges still prevent women from accessing education. These challenges vary from country to country, but some of the most common obstacles include poverty, cultural attitudes, lack of infrastructure, and conflict. In many developing countries, families cannot afford to send their daughters to school, and girls are often forced to work instead of attending school. In addition, cultural attitudes that view women as inferior to men and discourage their education also significantly limit women's access to education.

Another major challenge is the need for more infrastructure in many rural and underdeveloped areas. Schools in these areas are often of poor quality and need more basic facilities like clean water, toilets, and electricity. This makes it difficult for girls to attend school, especially during their menstrual periods.

Initiatives

Several strategies can be implemented to overcome these challenges and ensure that women have access to education.

Firstly, governments and organisations can provide financial assistance to families so that they can afford to send their daughters to school. This can be done through scholarships, school fee subsidies, and other forms of financial support.

Secondly, efforts must be made to change cultural attitudes and challenge gender-based discrimination. This can be done through education campaigns, media, and community engagement.

Real-Life Examples On Women’s Education

These are some examples of organisations working towards promoting women's education in India.

Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust | This was founded by Mahatma Gandhi. This organisation provides education and training programs for women in rural areas of India.

SABLA | The Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls provides education and nutrition support to young girls in India.

Pratham Education Foundation | This non-profit organisation works to improve the educational quality for underprivileged children, with a special focus on girls.

Akshaya Patra Foundation | This organisation provides mid-day meals to school-going children, including girls, to improve their attendance and retention.

Room to Read | This global organisation focuses on girls' education in India and other developing countries, providing support for literacy and gender equality programs.

Women's education is crucial for promoting gender equality and ensuring the overall development of society. Despite significant progress made in the past few decades, there still exists a significant gender gap in education worldwide, particularly in developing countries. It is important to address the cultural, social, and economic barriers that prevent women from accessing education.

Applications for Admissions are open.

Aakash iACST Scholarship Test 2024

Get up to 90% scholarship on NEET, JEE & Foundation courses

ALLEN Digital Scholarship Admission Test (ADSAT)

Register FREE for ALLEN Digital Scholarship Admission Test (ADSAT)

JEE Main Important Physics formulas

As per latest 2024 syllabus. Physics formulas, equations, & laws of class 11 & 12th chapters

PW JEE Coaching

Enrol in PW Vidyapeeth center for JEE coaching

PW NEET Coaching

Enrol in PW Vidyapeeth center for NEET coaching

JEE Main Important Chemistry formulas

As per latest 2024 syllabus. Chemistry formulas, equations, & laws of class 11 & 12th chapters

Download Careers360 App's

Regular exam updates, QnA, Predictors, College Applications & E-books now on your Mobile

Certifications

We Appeared in

Q&A: Why investing in girls’ and women’s education is a smart move

The most recent data reveal that currently fewer girls are out of school than boys, and that more women are enrolled in higher education than men worldwide. But there is still a long way to go to achieve gender equality in education globally. 

Here is what you need to know about the latest data and why investing in girls’ and women’s education is crucial.

What are the latest trends in girls’ education?

Despite progress, a staggering 122 million girls remain out of school globally.  Girls’ disadvantage is exacerbated by several factors. One important factor is poverty. In Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, there are 72 young women in school – but only 22 poor young women – for every 100 young men.

Another factor is location. In Mozambique, for example, there are 73 young women in school for every 100 young men. But while there is gender parity in urban areas, there are 53 young women in school for every 100 young men in rural areas. 

There are also regional differences. In sub-Saharan Africa, gender parity in enrolment has not been achieved at any level of education. 

While girls have caught up and even surpassed boys in the completion of secondary education, only 94 young women complete secondary school for every 100 young men in Central and Southern Asia. Disparity also remains in sub-Saharan Africa, where despite progress only 88 young women complete secondary education for every 100 young men. 

Girls fare better than boys in reading. Globally, for every 100 proficient boys, there are 115 proficient girls in reading at the end of lower secondary education. Boys have a small advantage over girls in mathematics in primary education, but this is reversed in lower secondary education. Yet, boys tend to have a considerable advantage over girls in mathematics at the higher end of performance.

While young women are outnumbering young men at university globally, only 9% of young women enrol in tertiary education when primary and secondary education is neither compulsory nor free.

Where is progress most needed?

Nine of the 10 countries with the highest out-of-school rates for girls are in sub-Saharan Africa, the tenth country being Afghanistan. In 8 of these 10 countries, at least 50% of school-age girls are not in school; in Afghanistan, 75% of girls are not in school.  These rates are staggering and must urgently be addressed. 

What are the benefits of investing in girls’ education?

Globally, the loss in human capital due to gender inequalities is estimated to be around US$160 trillion, which is about twice the value of global GDP.

Educating girls has huge societal impact. It enhances women’s agency and their decision-making. It increases their living standards. It has benefits for the health and nutrition of their children. Education can help to end child marriage and early and unintended pregnancy. 

It also increases women’s access to decent work and sparks economic development.

There is an urgent need to transition to a green economy. Why is investing in girls’ and women’s education crucial to doing so successfully?

Investing in girls’ and women’s education is indeed a smart investment for the green transition. We know that women are more likely to start businesses focused on sustainability. Yet, girls and women are less well prepared for and represented in green jobs. Green jobs require science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills and knowledge. But gender is one of the strongest determinants of the likelihood of pursuing education and careers in STEM. 

In 30 out of 121 countries, fewer than 20% of graduates in engineering are women. In 61 out of 115 countries, fewer than 30% of computer science graduates are women. We cannot afford to lose out on the innovative ideas of women.  And we also know that where education opens leadership opportunities for girls as adults, their participation in national politics can lead countries to adopt more environment-friendly policies.

What can we do to improve girls’ education further?

Governments and partners need to invest in several critical areas to ensure that all girls’ right to complete a full cycle of basic education is met. Following the Incheon and Paris Declarations, governments shall allocate at least 4-6% of GDP and at least 15-20% of total public expenditure to education. As highlighted in the Call to Action on financing education, issued at the Transforming Education Summit, education investment needs to target the most marginalized. 

This includes investment in the collection, analysis and use of data on girls’ education and in the development of gender-transformative learning systems. 

The latter entails among others, gender-transformative teaching and learning materials and teacher training on gender-transformative pedagogy. Governments also need to invest into nutrition, sanitation and hygiene at school. The prevention of school-related gender-based violence and the provision of comprehensive sexuality education are also critical to keep girls in school. Importantly, governments need to provide 12 years of free, publicly funded, inclusive, equitable and quality education, without discrimination, including making school affordable, reducing the direct and opportunity cost of schooling through cash or in-kind transfers for poor families. 

• ‘Her Education, Our future’ fact sheet
• UNESCO’s work in  gender equality and education
• Her Atlas, UNESCO’s interactive tool on educational rights of girls and women

Related items

• Gender equality
• Girls education
• International Women’s Day
• Topics: Display
• See more add

More on this subject

Other recent news

Andrew Tate’s extreme views about women are infiltrating Australian schools. We need a zero-tolerance response

Lecturer in Education, Monash University

Professor of Education and Social Justice, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Steven Roberts currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian government that does not pertain to the content of this article. He is a board director at Respect Victoria. This article is written independently from this role.

Stephanie Wescott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

Earlier this week, two students were expelled from a Melbourne private school for their involvement in creating a spreadsheet that ranked girls using sexist and violent categories (from “wifeys” and “cuties” to “unrapeable”).

There has been a necessary focus on the school and its response and significant community outrage about the actions of the young men involved. But this incident is not an isolated one.

Our ongoing research has found sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny are rife in Australian schools.

This is influenced by the rise in popularity and ubiquity of figures from the “ manosphere ” (an overlapping collection of extreme men’s communities that are anti-women and against women’s empowerment) on social media. This includes Andrew Tate, the “ misogynist influencer ” who is facing trial in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape ( which he denies ).

At the same time, Australia is confronting shockingly high rates of violence against women. Last week, the federal government announced a range of measures to respond to the crisis and quell the public’s understandable anger.

Although the package contains measures aimed at preventing young people being exposed to misogynistic content online, it largely overlooks the crucial role of education in tackling sexist attitudes that enable and drive the current high rates of violence. To make real change, schools must be included.

Our research on schools and Andrew Tate

Our research explores the influence of anti-women and anti-feminist online figures such as Tate on boys’ behaviour and attitudes towards women in Australian schools.

In mid-2023, we interviewed 30 women teachers working in schools across the country. The women described a sharp increases in sexism, misogyny and sexual harassment in their classrooms.

Teachers also identified the explicit influence of Tate on their students’ attitudes and behaviours. This included setting images of Tate as their computer desktop backgrounds, provoking teachers with Tate’s ideas (for example, asking teachers whether they agree women shouldn’t be allowed to drive), and using his body language (such as a hand gesture he often displays when photographed).

One teacher spoke of the transformation of a student she had known for several years:

I taught [a] boy in Year 7 and he was a wholesome, creative [child]. This boy does dance competitions and is in a dance troop and is always polite to me […] and yet is [now] writing these disturbingly misogynistic messages, literally saying, ‘No, Andrew Tate is being vilified. He’s in the right.’ I’m like, who is that boy? That’s not the boy that I’ve seen for the last couple of years.

The response needs to be urgent

This is happening within a broader culture of backlash to gender justice gains achieved via feminist activism – including the #metoo movement. Teachers in our study said their students believe women have achieved unequal power over men.

Despite these worrying trends and teachers requesting help from school management, the women we spoke to reported schools were not responding in a meaningful or urgent way.

Our study findings have been echoed by an April 2024 survey of Adelaide school teachers, who described how misogynist language and physical intimidation are commonplace in their schools. They are also part of a much longer history of research showing an ongoing culture of sexism in Australian schools.

We need a national campaign…

If we are serious about changing the way our culture sees and treats women, we need to view schools as sites of primary prevention. This means they are places where we intervene to help stop the problem of gendered violence happening in the first place.

First, we need the federal government to lead a national campaign calling for a zero-tolerance approach to violence against women and girls in schools. It needs to specifically use the words “sexism”, “misogyny” and “violence against women”.

In our research teachers reported their schools will often stay away from using such language. Instead, “disrespect” or other ways of classifying this behaviour are used to explain what are obviously sexist incidents. This reluctance could be due to fears of controversy.

But this risks reducing the problem to simply being about individual behaviour and takes gender out of it. Naming and confronting sexism directly can be the first step in creating safer and more inclusive learning environments for women, girls and gender-diverse people in schools.

…and national guidelines

Second, we need national, consistent guidelines and advice for schools on how to respond to incidents of sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny.

At the moment, it is largely left up to schools to handle this and teachers are telling us they are falling short. With all the other pressures schools are under , clearly they need more support and guidance to respond to incidents adequately.

Other researchers have also suggested a national code of conduct for sexism and sexual harassment in schools with reporting guidelines.

This would ensure consistent approaches to incidents, give us a clearer picture of what is happening, and allow us to tell when things start to improve.

We also need more education

Third, respectful relationships education should be mandatory across all Australian schools.

Although it is mentioned in the Australian Curriculum , it is up to states and territories to decide how it is delivered. Even though respectful relationships is mandatory in Victorian government schools, teachers in our study described its presence in their schools as diluted. They said they would like to see it expanded.

The messages and attitudes should also be implemented across the whole school , including in school policies, school leadership and teaching approaches. This means there is greater recognition of schools as safe workplaces, places for learning and parts of the community.

Australia is in the grips of a national crisis of violence against women. Schools, as microcosms of broader society, deserve much more meaningful, long-term interventions to contribute to a change that is urgently needed.

• Violence against women
• Primary school
• High school
• Andrew Tate
• Teacher wellbeing

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer - Marketing

Research Fellow

Senior Research Fellow - Women's Health Services

Assistant Editor - 1 year cadetship

Executive Dean, Faculty of Health