Essay Series 7.1: Girls and women are catching up to boys and men by some measures of educational achievement.

Women and girls have a long history of less access to education in North America. However, sex discrimination didn’t become illegal in U.S.-based institutions accepting federal education funds until 1972. This step and others led to major progress in girls’ and women’s education over the past 50 years. See the Timeline of Education Laws and Court Decisions that follows Essay Series 7, if you want more information.

Brief History of Women’s Access to Education

Society assumed women needed education after the American Revolution because mothers were raising the next generation of patriotic, morally correct men. At this time, educating women involved giving them access to books, newspapers, and other methods of learning about current events, morals, and civics.⁴⁹⁵

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, girls’ schools, primarily in the Northeastern United States, focused on educating them to be good wives and mothers. However, women had little access to education at the college level, with the exception of Oberlin College in Ohio, which began as a school for women and men in 1833. Women’s access to college became more common after the U.S. Civil War. By 1900, women were 37 percent of college students; this rose to about 48 percent by 1920.⁴⁹⁶

Education in the 1970s and Beyond

It wasn’t until about 50 years ago that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 began promoting equality between the sexes in higher education. The Amendments bar discrimination based on sex in any federally funded education program or activity, including school sports. These Amendments have enabled girls and women to close some of the gaps between the sexes in terms of academic opportunities and achievements.⁴⁹⁷

As a result of federal laws and court decisions, by 1995, about 25 percent of young men and 25 percent of young women in the United States held a bachelor’s degree. Since then, the gap between women and men has grown. By 2024, 47 percent of U.S. women ages 25 to 34 had a bachelor’s degree, compared to 37 percent of men. Women received the majority of advanced degrees in law, medicine, and dentistry in 2019.⁴⁹⁸ However, women only have about 18 percent of computer science degrees and about 27 percent of technology-related jobs in the United States.⁴⁹⁹ These STEM jobs generally come with high salaries.

Girls and Boys’ Academic Achievements

Across the world, girls are doing better than boys on some measures used in international achievement tests.⁵⁰⁰ One test is part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In PISA’s 2022 international assessment:

1. Girls outperformed boys in mathematics in 17 countries. In 40 countries, boys outperformed girls. No significant differences were found in the remaining 24 countries.

1. In reading, girls on average scored above boys in all but two of the 81 countries that participated in PISA 2022.

1. In the United States, boys did better than girls in mathematics by 13 score points, while girls outperformed boys in reading by 22 points.⁵⁰¹

Girls in the United States start out with an advantage over boys in that they are 14 percentage points more likely to be school ready at age 5. Likewise, disparities exist in educational achievement in terms of grade point average (GPA), with girls being two-thirds of high school-age children who have GPAs in the top 10 percent of students. In 2018, 88 percent of girls graduated high school on time compared to 80 percent of boys. The gap between the sexes in education is much wider among Black people than among White people. For example, twice as many Black women as Black men get degrees.⁵⁰²

According to some experts, physiological differences between girls and boys may account for some of these disparities. Research indicates that on average, boys’ brains develop about a year more slowly than girls’. The biggest sex difference occurs during adolescence when girls reach puberty earlier than boys.⁵⁰³

Education Interventions

Education interventions tend to benefit girls more than boys by helping girls get beyond the stereotypes that they absorb from a very young age.⁵⁰⁴ Five-year-old girls are just as likely as five-year-old boys to think women can be highly intelligent. Something changes by age 6 when girls start doubting their own abilities and become less interested in activities for very intelligent children.⁵⁰⁵

Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, has some recommendations to help boys. They include:

1. Providing an extra year of pre-kindergarten for boys to help them catch up with girls in school.

1. Recruiting more male teachers to serve as role models for boys.

1. Providing more vocational education opportunities.

1. Encouraging men to train for careers in health, education, administration, and literacy work.

1. Engaging men more in fatherhood through paid leave for fathers as well as mothers.

1. Facilitating unmarried fathers’ contact and joint custody of their children.

1. Providing options to work part-time at the same wage rates as full-time jobs.

These ideas could help boys. Most of them also could help girls. For example, most children would benefit by having more involved fathers. Many children of both sexes could benefit from vocational education opportunities that could lead to good jobs.

Reeves’ suggestions don’t address some of the disadvantages of traditional stereotypes, which encourage boys to be tough and stoic with a focus on hierarchy and competition, rather than learning. Stereotypes that make girls feel inferior to boys are similarly damaging.

Reflections

My family’s experiences show the importance of the advances girls and women have made in education and the workplace over the past 50 to 60 years. My father saw how hard my widowed grandmother worked in a factory during the Depression to support him and herself. She also took in boarders and did babysitting in her later years. So, he understood that women often have to support their families. I believe my father’s childhood experiences led him to expect that I would get an education and have a career.

When my parents divorced in 1971, my mother had no college degree and little paid work experience at age 37. She had been raising four children and had to settle for clerical work. When she retired due to health problems, she had to rely on subsidized housing and Medicaid. My father was the family provider, which left him little time with his children. His undergraduate degree in engineering enabled him to have a comfortable retirement. Veteran’s benefits, his part-time work, and my mother’s paid and unpaid labor enabled him to get his degree.

Women have made great gains in education even though they were denied it for centuries. It wasn’t until the 1800s that some women had access to a professional-level education in the United States. It wasn’t until the 1970s that public schools legally had to treat girls equally to boys, and most colleges and universities had to treat young women equally to young men.

Some conservative men’s groups assert that girls and women are making progress at the expense of boys and men. Research doesn’t support this assertion. Girls and women have caught up with men in some respects. However, they still need to catch up in terms of STEM education. Regardless of sex, everyone needs a good education. It is a rare family that can afford a decent life without two incomes, and education is a key to good jobs.

We need evidence-based analyses of why the sexes differ in their academic achievements. With this information, we can devise solutions that lift up everyone.

Did you experience any educational disadvantages growing up as a result of discrimination by sex, race, or ethnicity?