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175. Access to secondary education remains a challenge for girls in many regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. While the disproportionate exclusion of girls from access to education is not only greater at the secondary than at the primary level, it increases from lower to upper secondary levels. Numerous factors may be the cause, pointing to gender discrimination both inside and outside school, including family and social pressures for girls to devote more time to household work, early marriage, potential increases in emotional and physical dangers as girls age and face risks of sexual harassment and assault, lack of bathrooms, families’ unwillingness to pay school fees for girls, and the potentially unsafe daily journey to school for girls and young women.113 176. Globally, young males are more likely than young females to enrol in vocational education programmes, though there are notable exceptions such as Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, where females outnumber males.113 177. Gains in school enrolment mask other important inequalities, particularly in the quality of education. Access to good quality education is especially limited for those living in poverty. Schools serving poor children characteristically have teachers who are overburdened, unsupervised and underpaid, crowded classrooms and a lack of adequate learning materials, therefore producing poorer outcomes, even in wealthy countries. 114 A recent comparison of the pupil-teacher ratios at primary level in Asian countries, for example, highlights the wide range between countries, from 16 pupils per teacher in Indonesia and Thailand to 17 in China, and up to 40, 41, and 43 pupils per teacher in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. 115 178. Quality education includes access to knowledge about human biology and comprehensive sexuality education, which remain underresourced and incomplete in many schools throughout the world, in both poor and wealthy countries. 179. Finally, although access to higher education remains limited in many countries, the last decades have seen a major expansion of higher education in every region of the world, and women have been the prime beneficiaries. Globally, the gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education was 28 per cent for females in 2009, compared with 26 per cent for males. Regionally, more women than men were enrolled in institutions of tertiary education in North America and Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and East Asia and the Pacific, while in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia, the gross enrolment ratios favoured men. 116 180. Governments’ priorities in education for the next 5-10 years highlight their concern for equality in access, the quality of education, and the importance of linking education to decent work opportunities. In addressing these priorities it will be important that teacher shortages be addressed. According to new global projections from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the world will need an extra 3.3 million
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See, for example, J. Douglas Willms, Learning Divides: Ten Policy Questions about the Performance and Equity of Schools and Schooling Systems, UNESCO Institute for Statistics Working Paper No. 5 (Montreal, 2006). J. Dreze and A. Sen, An Uncertain Glory, India and Its Contradictions (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2013). UNESCO, World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education.
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