Publié en ligne: 29 janv. 2021
Pages: -
Accepté: 29 sept. 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/izajodm-2021-0001
Mots clés
© 2021 Deborah A. Cobb-Clark et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Investing in girls’ education has long been held up as an antidote to the manifold challenges of the developing world. Researchers, international agencies, and politicians have all championed the value—both inherent and instrumental—of girls’ education. For example, a review of evidence from 15 years ago concluded that “extensive research confirms that investing in girls’ education delivers high returns not only for female educational attainment, but also for maternal and children's health, more sustainable families, women's empowerment, democracy, income growth, and productivity” (Herz and Sperling, 2004). Likewise, a review of the relationship between education and women's labor force participation in low- and middle-income countries found a positive association “more often than not” (Psacharopoulos and Tzannatos, 1989). Former World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said that “investing in gender equality and girls’ education isn’t just the right thing to do; economically, it's one of the smartest things to do” (World Bank, 2018a). Politician Hillary Clinton, in her capacity as first lady of the United States, said that “if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish” (Minerva, 2012).
Despite these promised gains, adult women still have less education than men in more than two-thirds of the world's countries. The pattern is similar if we exclude high-income countries. Adult women have less education than adult men in 72 of 93 low- and middle-income countries for which data is available.
This study complements earlier work documenting advances in girls’ education around the world. Most recently, Psaki et al. (2018) have identified low- and middle-income countries where girls’ education is advancing. Our data cover a much broader range of countries and years and complements their work, which uses individual-level microdata for a smaller set of countries. Bertocchi and Bozzano (2019) examined the gender gap in education for an earlier period (1850–1950) and their data also cover a smaller group of countries; Baten et al. (2020) examined the gender gap in sub-Saharan Africa specifically over the twentieth century. Our study also complements two other literatures, one on the impacts of girls’ education on outcomes for girls and others (Mensch et al., 2019; Psaki et al., 2019; Qureshi, 2017), and another on what interventions are most effective at improving girls’ education (Sperling and Winthrop, 2015; Evans and Yuan, 2019). In this article, we focus on years of schooling, which is associated with a range of positive outcomes (Oye et al., 2016). However, this does not downplay the importance of quality in education (World Bank, 2018b; Pritchett, 2013).
The principal source of data for this analysis is the Barro–Lee educational attainment dataset (Barro and Lee, 2013). It provides a measure of educational attainment of the adult population (15 years and above). Coverage is for 146 countries at 5-year intervals from 1950 to 2010, disaggregated by age and gender. The underlying data come from available census and survey data provided by national statistical agencies, UNESCO, Eurostat, and other sources. In Table A1 in the Appendix, we compare the countries included in the Barro-Lee dataset to the full sample of 193 UN member states. Countries in the Barro-Lee dataset have comparable income levels and adult literacy rates relative to the excluded countries. Alternative data sources based on household surveys, such as the Education Attainment and Enrollment around the World database (Filmer, 2018), rely on surveys that extend back only to the 1990s for most countries, so inferences about earlier cohorts may be heavily influenced by selection in who survives to report attainment.
We use a sample of 126 countries, excluding all countries (mostly high-income) that were founding members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The excluded countries are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We use this criterion rather than country income status since the latter changes over time. A large number of countries in the sample became independent in the 1960s.
We calculate the gender gap by subtracting the average level of educational attainment among men from the average level of educational attainment among women. Hence, a negative number indicates that men are more educated than women and vice versa. We use the difference in education levels rather than the ratio of male years of schooling to female years of schooling because doing so is less likely to suggest that gender gaps are declining when they may not be: a fixed difference in the levels of educational attainment would imply a declining proportional gender gap as the level of male educational attainment increases, whereas a fixed ratio of education levels will suggest an increasing gender gap in absolute years of education as the level of male attainment increases.
Because our focus is on long-term changes in gender gaps, we use the average of the adult population, which is slower to change than if we were to focus only on a single age cohort. For that reason, countries where current cohorts achieve many years of education may still have relatively low average years of schooling overall if previous cohorts had little education. In Section 3.5, we examine gender gaps among younger cohorts (age 20–24), both because this is more likely to reflect recent education investments and because it is less sensitive to country-level differences in life expectancy.
In 1960, adult women across the 126 countries in our sample had an average of 2.6 years of education. By 2010, that number had nearly tripled to 7.7 years of education. Women have more education today than in 1960 in every single country in our sample. Education for men has also increased, from 3.5 years of schooling in 1960 to 8.2 years in 2010. Figure 1 shows the trajectory of male and female educational attainment in each of the 126 countries in our sample. The country with the largest gain in female schooling, the United Arab Emirates, began at the low level of 0.9 years of schooling for the average woman and shot to 10 years by 2010, but even the country with the smallest gain in adult female schooling over the 50 years, Senegal, shows a marked improvement for women. Between 1960 and 2010, the average level of educational attainment among Senegalese women rose from 1.2 years to 2.2 years. The average level of educational attainment among Senegalese men rose from 3.1 years to 3.6 years.
Figure 1
Change in Average Schooling Years Between 1960 and 2010.
In most countries, increases in women's education have been accompanied by increases in men's education. Figure 1 illustrates this: most of the country-level trajectories are concentrated around the 45-degree line, suggesting similar gains for both sexes. There are, of course, outliers. Women's relative gain (as compared to men's) was worst in Afghanistan, where women's educational attainment increased by only 0.4 years for every year increase in men's attainment. Between 1960 and 2010, women's educational attainment in Afghanistan increased from 0.1 years to 2.0 years, while men's attainment increased from 0.6 years to 5.4 years.
The pattern of marked gains for women over the last 50 years is remarkably consistent around the world. In most regions, even countries with the smallest gains in women's education have shown sizable improvements. For example, the smallest gain in Latin America and the Caribbean was in Haiti, where women's education increased more than sixfold, from a little more than half a year to more than 3 years. In Yemen, the country with the smallest gain in the Middle East and North Africa, women's education increased from an average of virtually no education in 1960 to more than 2 years in 2010. New Zealand, the country with the smallest gains in East Asia and the Pacific, made smaller absolute gains (1.6 years), but average women's education was already very high in 1960, at 9.8 years.
In each region, there are countries where women's educational attainment has improved dramatically. In Malaysia, adult women's education jumped from 1.5 years in 1960 to more than 10.2 years in 2010. In Botswana, women's education leaped from 1.5 years to 9.4 years, a sixfold increase. As Figure 1 illustrates, there are standout countries in every region, but almost all countries in our sample saw substantial improvements. Women's educational attainment more than doubled in 107 of 126 countries (85%); it increased by more than 5 years in 70 countries (or 56% of our sample).
The region with the largest average gain over time is the Middle East and North Africa, where women's education has increased by more than 6 years.
While women's education increased dramatically around the world between 1960 and 2010, the gender gap in educational attainment persists in most countries. During that period, the gender gap narrowed in 94 countries but widened in 32 countries. Across all countries in our sample, the median gender gap improved from −0.8 in 1960 to −0.3 in 2010 (as shown in Figure 2)—so women in our sample countries had 0.8 fewer years of schooling than men in 1960, and they had 0.3 fewer years of schooling than men in 2010.
Figure 2
Change in Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment.
Some regions made very clear progress in reducing educational gender gaps between 1960 and 2010. In Europe and Central Asia, every single country experienced a shift in the gender gap in favor of women. In East Asia and the Pacific, all but two countries (Cambodia and Papua New Guinea) saw gender gaps diminish, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, all but three countries (Cuba, Guatemala, and Haiti) observed the same. Progress was more mixed in other regions. In the Middle East and North Africa—the region that experienced the largest increase in educational attainment among women—gender gaps in attainment grew in 7 of 17 countries. In both South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the median worsened. The country with the largest average gap in 2010—Afghanistan—went from −0.5 in 1960 to −3.4 in 2010.
In every region of the world, women are still more likely to have no schooling than men. Table 1 shows the ratio of women at each level of education relative to men in 2010. Across our entire sample, there are 1.73 women who have no schooling for every man with no schooling. Even in Latin America and the Caribbean, where women are slightly more likely than men to have completed secondary education (1.02 women for every man), women are also more likely to have no schooling at all (1.48 women for every man). In the regions with the largest gaps, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, for every man who has completed primary schooling, 0.73 and 0.86 women have, respectively.
Ratio of Females to Males at Various Education Levels in 2010.
| East Asia and Pacific | 1.89 | 0.99 | 0.93 |
| Europe and Central Asia | 2.13 | 0.99 | 0.94 |
| Latin America and Caribbean | 1.48 | 0.97 | 1.02 |
| Middle East and North Africa | 1.79 | 0.91 | 1.08 |
| South Asia | 1.84 | 0.73 | 0.88 |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 1.52 | 0.86 | 0.77 |
As shown in Table A4 in the Appendix, this pattern is still apparent when we restrict attention to the younger age cohorts. Among adults aged 25–29, women were more likely than men to have no schooling in every region of the world except Europe and Central Asia. Women aged 25–29 are substantially less likely to have completed primary school than similarly aged men in South Asia and substantially less likely to have completed secondary school than similarly aged men in sub-Saharan Africa, though other regions are now quite close to parity on both margins. Interestingly, in the younger age cohorts of adults, we see evidence that women in Europe and Central Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America and the Caribbean are more likely than men to have completed secondary education.
While the global trend has been positive over the last 50 years, gender gaps widened before beginning to narrow in many countries. Baten et al. (2020) refer to this as the “educational gender Kuznets curve.” In South Asia, the gap has been widening since 1960, so the “getting better” part remains in the future. Current data on school enrollment suggests that things may be getting better in parts of South Asia. In 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, the net primary enrollment rate in India was 93.0 percent for girls and 91.6 percent for boys (World Bank, 2020).
Figure 3
Regional Change in Gender Gaps in Average Schooling Years, 1960–2010.
In total, the gender gap deteriorated before beginning to improve for 96 (76%) of the 126 countries in our sample (Figure A1). Table A5 in the Appendix shows the year of the largest gender gap for all 96 countries.
Why is it so common for gender gaps to get worse before they get better? Most countries that experience this phenomenon had low levels of both men's and women's education in 1960. As educational opportunities begin to expand, those countries tended to invest first in education for men. Eloundou-Enyegue et al. (2009) observed, using household survey data from across Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s, that as countries’ total enrollment increased, so did the gender gap.
Across our sample countries, we observe that countries with lower rates of female and male schooling in 1960 are much more likely to experience a subsequent widening of the gender gap (Figure 4). Thirty of 43 countries where the average level of male educational attainment was less than 2 years in 1960 experienced worsening gender gaps in education over the next 50 years, compared to two of the 83 countries where the average level of male educational attainment was above 2 years in 1960. Thus, the countries where gender gaps have been worsening over time are precisely those countries where both men and women had very little education to begin with.
Figure 4
Change in Gender Gap in Average Schooling Years Given Schooling Levels in 1960.
What explains when the gap begins to narrow? There is enormous variation in this across countries, and the reasons may vary. For those countries that experienced a widening of the gap followed by a narrowing, we calculate the level of male and female schooling for the entire population 15 and older as well as for a young adult cohort (age 20–24) at the turning point, the year that the gap was at its widest (Table A6 in the Appendix). We find that years of schooling of young adult men was between 5.6 years of education (25th percentile) and 8.6 years of education (75th percentile), with a median of 6.7. This may suggest that once men are completing primary school, countries were more likely to begin expanding girls’ education. The years of education for young adult women at the turning point varies much more widely across countries. This may imply that households view boys’ and girls’ education as substitutes at very low levels of education and income, and later—as education becomes more available—as complements.
There are very few countries where men are highly educated but women are not; once men become highly educated, women tend to become highly educated as well. A simple regression in Table 2 illustrates that an additional year of schooling for men is highly statistically significantly associated with more than a year of schooling for women. In 1960, just seven countries in our sample (Armenia, Australia, the Czech Republic, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Slovakia) had at least 8 years of male educational attainment (what we will call “high-education countries”), and only two of those (Israel and Japan) had gender gaps of at least one year (what we will call “large” gender gaps). The other 119 countries had low levels of men's education in 1960; 42% of those countries also had substantial gender gaps in educational attainment. 15 countries did not have a gender gap because both men and women had, on average, less than one year of education — making a gender gap defined in terms of a difference of at least one year of schooling impossible.
Regression of Female Schooling and Gender Gap in Schooling on Key Variables.
| Male years of schooling | 1.121*** (0.028) | 0.121*** (0.028) |
| Log GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) | 1.985*** (0.155) | 0.428*** (0.066) |
| Poverty index | −0.104*** (0.010) | −0.016*** (0.005) |
| Life expectancy at birth | 0.298*** (0.024) | 0.052*** (0.013) |
| Infant mortality index | −0.126*** (0.010) | −0.025*** (0.005) |
| Corruption index | 0.107*** (0.011) | 0.019*** (0.005) |
By 2010, the number of high-education countries had increased to 68. More than half of the countries in the sample had high levels of education and small gender gaps by 2010, and almost half the countries that had low levels of male and female educational attainment in 1960 had high levels of (male) attainment and small gender gaps by 2010. 29 of 51 countries (57 percent) that had low educational attainment and substantial gender gaps in 1960 had transitioned to high educational attainment without meaningful gender gaps; and 27 of 68 countries (40 percent) that had low educational attainment without substantial gender gaps in 1960 had transitioned to having high attainment and small gender gaps.
In contrast, the evolution of gender gaps in countries where men are highly educated is quite predictable: gender gaps (in educational attainment) tend to diminish over time. Psaki et al. (2018) document the converse, in a smaller sample of 43 countries, that “both males and females were worst off in countries with female disadvantages.” In 2010, the average level of educational attainment in Japan was 11.7 years for men and 11.5 years for women. The average level of educational attainment in Israel was 11.3 years for both men and women.
Our analysis illustrates the common historical pattern: men's educational attainment initially surges ahead, but women's attainment tends to catch up in countries with high levels of men's education. Figure 5 shows, for each 5-year period, the number of countries with high levels of male educational attainment (greater than eight years of schooling, on average) and the share of those countries where there is a gender gap of more than a year. The number of high-education countries (for men) has increased steadily over time, from 7 in 1960 to 68 in 2010, as discussed above. The number of countries where men have greater than 8 years of schooling and women's educational attainment lags behind men's by more than a year rises and falls over time—it peaked at 12 in 1990 and then dropped to five in 1995, but was back up to 10 in 2005 before falling again (to five) in 2010. However, the proportion of high-education countries with substantial gender gaps in attainment peaked at 62.5% in 1965 and has been declining fairly steadily since then; it has remained below 50% since 1985 and below 20% since 1995.
Figure 5
The Number of High-Education Countries by Year.
Countries do transition through periods with high levels of male educational attainment (an average of more than 8 years) and gender gaps of more than 1 year: 28 countries were in this state at some point between 1960 and 2010 (Figure A2 in the Appendix). However, many of these countries—for example, China, Iran, Malaysia, and Peru—exist as highly educated countries with substantial gender gaps for very short periods before gender gaps begin to disappear. Gender gaps take longer to diminish in other countries—for example, Croatia and South Korea—but these countries appear to be the exception rather than the rule; moreover, even in these countries, gender gaps in educational attainment do become smaller eventually.
Where do the largest gaps remain? Table 2 shows the relationship—in a series of bivariate regressions—between female schooling and a series of other indicators of societal well-being. Countries with low levels of female schooling and large gender gaps also have low levels of male schooling. Figure A3 in the Appendix shows that gender gaps are largest where male educational attainment is the lowest, and they are quite small in the overwhelming majority of highly educated countries. Table A3 in the Appendix shows that the pattern holds across regions. South Korea and India appear to be exceptions, but the gap has halved even in South Korea as men's education has doubled. The positive associations between per capita income, girls’ education, and boys’ education suggest that both are normal goods, although anticipated returns to educational investments mean that the association is likely endogenous.
Poor performance on other development outcomes does not justify a large gender gap in education, but it underscores the complex challenges hampering progress on girls’ education in many of the countries where gender gaps in attainment persist. Existing evidence suggests that interventions focused exclusively on girl's education may not be the most effective or efficient way to improve educational outcomes for girls (Evans and Yuan, 2019). This is particularly true in weak, fragile states that are struggling to address multiple developmental crises simultaneously. There are outliers: gender gaps in India, Morocco, South Korea, and Tunisia are larger than one would expect relative to performance on other measures of governance and development. However, in most cases, gender gaps in educational attainment are a symptom of a broader failure of growth, governance, and development—and thus they are unlikely to be eliminated by policies focused exclusively on girls’ education.
By 2010, women had more education than men in 36 of the 126 countries in our data set, and many more countries were well on their way to eliminating gender gaps in educational attainment. As one indicator of what the future holds, we look at younger cohorts of women and men rather than the entire adult population. We re-examine our main findings, focused only on the cohort aged 20–24, as this cohort will have completed their education in much of the world. Education has still risen for women in almost every country in the world (Figure 6), but the median gap has risen above zero around the developing world (Figure 7). In other words, for those cohorts of women and men just entering the labor market, women have more education than men in more than half the countries in our sample.
Figure 6
Change in Average Schooling Years between 1960 and 2010 for Younger Cohort.
Figure 7
Change in Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment for Younger Cohort.
This trend is driven by countries in Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa (Figure A4 in the Appendix). Researchers have proposed both cognitive and behavioral hypotheses to explain the reversal of the gender gap in education. Bossavie and Kanninen (2018) found the strongest evidence for what they term the “tail hypothesis” in low- and middle-income countries, which is that girls have a smaller variance in academic performance, which generates a higher return to school enrollment. Alternatively, Bertocchi and Bozzano (2019) discussed that due to boys’ later puberty and maturation, boys are more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems in secondary school, so as average education levels rise, boys may be more likely to drop out. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the gaps continue to favor men. Finally, the pattern that gender inequality fades in countries with high levels of education for men manifests more strongly in the younger cohort. Only 3 out of 86 countries (3.5%) with high levels of education for men have a gender gap larger than a year, whereas 14 out of 40 countries (35%) with lower levels of education for men have large gender gaps.
Education is a human right and has been recognized as such by the international community since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (United Nations, 1948). Educating girls yields a range of benefits—for the girls themselves, their dependents, and society as a whole. Education (for both boys and girls) increases the human capital embodied in the workforce, increasing economic growth (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2012). Education also yields benefits beyond the economic. More educated women experience reduced child mortality (Mensch et al., 2019). They have lower fertility and better sexual health (Psaki et al., 2019). Duflo (2012) defines women's empowerment as “improving the ability of women to access the constituents of development – in particular health, education, earning opportunities, rights, and political participation.”
Figure 8 shows the relationship between the country-level change in the gender gap in educational attainment between 1990 and 2010 and the change in the gender gap in labor force participation over the same period. Labor force participation data is from the World Bank's World Development Indicators from 1990 to the present.
Figure 8
Gender Gaps in Education and Labor Force Participation.
Around the world, 129 million school-aged girls are not enrolled in school. Girls of primary school age are 1.2 times more likely to be out of school than boys (UNESCO, 2019). Gender gaps in education are both a symptom and a cause of gender inequality. Households that cannot afford to educate all of their children often favor boys, but families (or societies) where boys get as much education as they desire while women and girls remain uneducated are rare. More often than not, gender gaps in educational attainment persist in countries that are struggling to progress on many fronts—in educating boys and girls, in other dimensions of human development, and in political and economic domains as well. Gender gaps in educational attainment tend to disappear as countries grow, but this does not mean that educational parity leads to gender equality. While education as currently provided does not translate into gender equality in adulthood, some scholars propose that reforms to education systems could boost women's empowerment by building critical thinking skills as well as productive, personal, and social competencies that will pay off later in life (Ashraf et al., 2020; Buvinic and O’Donnell, 2019; Murphy-Grahan and Lloyd, 2016).
With data on women's and men's education across 126 countries and 50 years, we identify five broad facts about education. First, women's education has increased in every country in the world. Second, in the vast majority of countries, it still lags behind that of men. Third, in many countries, the gap between women's and men's education widens before it narrows. Fourth, it is rare that large gender gaps in education persist in countries where men achieve high levels of education. We further observe that equalizing education will be insufficient to equalize economic opportunities for men and women. Fifth, in some regions of the world, younger cohorts of women have more education than men.
Because gender gaps rarely persist in countries with high levels of educational attainment, policies that expand education for all children may also help to close the gender gap. Indonesia embarked on a massive school-building exercise in the 1970s, which yielded long-term benefits in education and other life outcomes for both women and men (Duflo, 2001; Akresh et al., 2018; Mazumder et al., 2019). In Ghana, reducing the cost of secondary school increased educational attainment and other outcomes for women and men (Duflo et al., 2019). Eliminating school fees led to reductions in early fertility in Nigeria and Kenya (Osili and Long, 2008; Brudevold-Newman, 2019), though eliminating school fees can sometimes exacerbate gender gaps (Lucas and Mbiti, 2012). A review of interventions to improve access and learning found that general interventions—not targeted by gender—were often among the most effective at boosting girls’ education (Evans and Yuan, 2019). In countries with persistent gender gaps despite high levels of male education—for example, South Korea—more targeted programs may be needed; however, our analysis suggests that these countries are the exception and not the rule. Even in settings where gender gaps in attainment are closing over time, policy makers may choose to prioritize rapid elimination of gender gaps over expanding access to education more broadly.
Many questions remain for future research. One question is what constrains girls’ participation in school in settings where gender gaps in attainment remain large, and which strategies are most appropriate to address these constraints. Many countries with large gender gaps in educational attainment are also struggling to recover from conflict, build state capacity, strengthen democratic institutions, and provide security and social protection to all citizens. In these settings, it is unclear whether the main obstacles to girls’ education are legal, political, economic, or social. When obstacles are legal or political, advocacy is likely to play a key role in pressuring governments to level the playing field. When the primary issue is the cost of schooling, policies that are gender-sensitive but not gender-targeted may be more critical—for example, aid to governments, reductions in school fees, and social protection programs that relax household budget constraints (Evans and Yuan, 2019). When cultural and social issues constrain girls’ education, grassroots advocacy is likely to play a key role in changing attitudes—but donors and other external actors may be limited in their ability to drive change from outside.
Our results resonate with previous work demonstrating that gender gaps often get larger before they begin to shrink (Eloundou-Enyegue et al., 2009), but we still know relatively little about when and why countries begin to shift from a widening attainment gap to a narrowing one. We show that countries that first experienced a widening are those that began with low levels of education for both men and women. But why the gap begins to narrow when it does and whether there are policy actions that can precipitate that shift are important, unanswered questions.
A final question is how we get from gender equality in education to gender equality in life outcomes. The United States achieved gender parity in educational attainment by 1870, 50 years before women's right to vote was enshrined in the constitution and almost 100 years before the Civil Rights Act made workplace sex discrimination illegal. There are still legal obstacles—for example, a lack of laws prohibiting the expulsion of pregnant girls, child marriage laws, and inadequate protection against labor market discrimination—in many countries where gender gaps in attainment persist. Nevertheless, the experience of high-income countries shows that education alone is insufficient to close the earnings gap between men and women. In many countries, the more challenging task of changing social and cultural norms remains (Colclough et al., 2000)—and we have limited evidence on what factors drive increased support for gender equality beyond the classroom.
Although we present evidence that increasing levels of education alone will not be enough to achieve economic equality by gender, not enough is known about the complementarities between educational investments and other reforms. For example, Hallward-Driemeier et al. (2014) examine the impact of reforms of property rights and legal capacity of women across 100 countries over 50 years and observe positive associations with both educational enrollment and a range of economic outcomes. Legal reforms may not only increase educational enrollment but also increase the return on educational gains. Other reforms—such as those that encourage entrepreneurship—may increase the return on education for women. Beyond reforms, urban areas often have smaller gender gaps (Evans, 2019) and one reason for that may be higher returns to education in areas with more formal sector employment. If so, then ongoing urbanization in many countries may affect investments in women's education.
In this study, we focus on educational attainment. But even where dramatic gains in attainment have been achieved, the quality of education often lags, with startlingly low learning outcomes in many low- and middle-income countries (World Bank, 2018b). Even low-quality schooling confers gains (Oye et al., 2016), but an analysis of schooling and literacy across 54 countries suggests that the gains from schooling in terms of child survival, fertility, and female empowerment are higher when schooling results in increased literacy (Kaffenberger et al., 2018). Even as the world seeks to close the remaining gaps in girls’ access to education, it will have to consider how to ensure that education is worth girls’ time.