10
WO R L D D E V E LO P M E N T R E P O RT 2 0 1 2
Gender parity in enrollments at lower levels has been achieved in much of the world, but tertiary enrollments are very low and favor women Primary education 100
Some African countries lag behind
school enrollment, girls, net, %
school enrollment, girls, net, %
100
80
60
40
20
girls disadvantaged
0 0
20
40
60
80
South Asia
80
60
40
20
girls disadvantaged
0
100
0
20
40
60
80
school enrollment, boys, net %
Europe and Central Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
100
Enrollment gaps dwarf gender gaps
school enrollment, boys, net % East Asia and Pacific
Tertiary education
Secondary education
Latin America and the Caribbean
100
school enrollment, women, gross, %
FIGURE 3
men disadvantaged
80
60
40
Women are more likely to participate than men
20
0 0
20
40
60
80
100
school enrollment, men, gross % Middle East and North Africa
High-income countries
Source: WDR 2012 team estimates based on World Development Indicators. Note: The 45° line in each figure above shows gender parity in enrollments. Any point above the 45° line implies that more women are enrolled relative to men.
into the market. Between 1980 and 2008, the gender gap in participation narrowed from 32 percentage points to 26 percentage points. By 2008, women represented more than 40 percent of the global labor force. Large increases in participation in countries that started with very low rates (mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean and to a lesser extent in the Middle East and North Africa) combined with small declines in countries that started with very high rates (mainly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia) mean that rates have converged across regions, although significant differences remain. Female labor force participation is lowest in the Middle East and Northern Africa (26 percent) and South Asia (35 percent) and highest in East Asia and the Pacific (64 percent) and Sub-Saharan Africa (61 percent).
What explains progress? Where gaps have closed quickly, it has been a result of how markets and institutions have functioned and evolved, how growth has played out, and how all these factors have interacted through household decisions. For education, consider each in turn. Higher incomes allow families that had previously only sent their sons to school to now send their daughters as well. As countries get richer, their economic struc-
tures change so that activities in which men no longer have an advantage become more prominent. This shift opens new opportunities for women’s employment, and households respond to these signals by educating daughters. Richer countries can also invest in more accessible education systems by building schools and hiring teachers. When combined with better incentive and accountability systems, these inputs help deliver better and cheaper services, lowering the costs of access to households and increasing their use. Where all these factors have worked together, the gaps have closed rapidly, as in Morocco. But even if bottlenecks appear in any one of these channels—pro-boy preferences within households or inadequacies in the provision of education or slow growth or limits on women’s employment opportunities—the other channels still have allowed progress in educating girls. Policies targeted to getting children to school, such as the conditional cash transfers used in more than 30 countries worldwide (many explicitly targeting girls, as in Bangladesh and Cambodia), have also helped. These forces are illustrated in figure 4 by the (green) gears representing households, formal institutions, and markets all moving in ways that narrow educational gender gaps (“oiled” by supportive policies).