Focus on girls’ education leaves boys behind

Boys are increasingly being left behind by a multibillion dollar global push to prioritise improving access to education for girls.

In the majority of countries, boys now receive fewer years of schooling than girls, according to analysis of Unesco data by the Financial Times. Boys are also less likely to attend secondary school than girls and less likely to enrol in tertiary education in most countries.

Despite this, in April Michelle Obama, the US first lady, announced that the World Bank is to spend more than $2.5bn on improving access to education for adolescent girls over the next five years, but nothing specifically on boys.

The governments of Japan, South Korea, the UK and the US, which has committed $1bn to the cause, also continue to prioritise improving education for girls over that of boys, despite evidence it is now the latter lagging behind.

Unesco, the United Nations’ educational, scientific and cultural arm, has also spoken of a “learning crisis for girls and young women” and “a generation of young women [being] left behind,” despite its own data suggesting boys are now more disadvantaged in most countries.

“I think that it’s important to continue to address disparities in education where that affects girls. I think we need this focus on girls because we haven’t got to where we need to,” said Justine Sass, chief of education for inclusion and gender equality at Unesco.

Amit Dar, director of operations, strategy and human development at the World Bank, added: “We thought it was important to have initiatives focused on girls because enrolment rates are lower for girls than boys in many countries. There wouldn’t be separate [initiatives] for boys’ education.”

The push to focus on girls’ education was historically driven by figures showing girls were less likely than boys to attend primary school. This problem has now largely been solved, and campaigners are increasingly focusing on secondary education instead.

“We have seen enormous progress in education, largely to girls advantage, addressing a lot of the gender inequality that exists,” said Ms Sass. “We have got gender parity at primary level [but] we do still see differences, particularly when we get to secondary schools.”

Yet Unesco’s own data show that girls’ secondary school enrolment rates are higher than those for boys in 98 countries (with a combined population of 3.4bn, based on UN data), far outstripping the 48 countries (combined population 1.3bn), where rates for boys are higher (not all data are available for every country).

The difference is often quite large, with female enrolment rates at least four percentage points higher than the male rates in 42 countries, based on the most recent year for which data are available for each country.

In Lesotho, one of the states where Unesco has focused its push on girls’ education, 42.5 per cent of secondary school age girls were enrolled in 2014, compared with 27.1 per cent of boys.

Large gender gaps in favour of girls are also evident in Namibia (57.5 per cent vs 45.1 per cent), Botswana (66.6 per cent vs 59.1 per cent), Swaziland (38.2 per cent vs 30.7 per cent), East Timor (55.7 per cent vs 48.2 per cent), the Dominican Republic (69.8 per cent vs 61.2 per cent), Nepal (62.8 per cent vs 58.2 per cent) and Comoros (45.5 per cent vs 42.5 per cent).

All seven countries are among the nine where Mrs Obama’s Let Girls Learn initiative plans to start focusing investment on educational opportunities for adolescent girls — but not boys — in 2017, bringing the total number of countries where it operates to 44.

Other countries where Unesco’s data show sizeable secondary school enrolment gender gaps in favour of girls include the Philippines (73.5 per cent vs 61.8 per cent), Armenia (90.7 per cent vs 78.6 per cent), Uruguay (78.9 per cent vs 71.6 per cent), Argentina (91.2 per cent vs 85.2 per cent), Brazil (84.6 per cent vs 79.3 per cent), Bermuda (78.6 per cent vs 67.9 per cent) and Tuvalu (78.3 per cent vs 62.1 per cent), as the table shows.

Globally, Unesco data show girls’ progression rates from primary to secondary education overtook those of boys in 2010 (the latest year for which such figures are available), with the boys’ rate having fallen from 92 per cent to 90.8 per cent between 2006 and 2010, even as the girls’ rate had continued to rise to a record high of 91.1 per cent, as the chart shows.

Analysis of Unesco data also shows tertiary education enrolment rates are higher for girls in 112 countries for which there are data, and higher for boys in only 51 countries.

Some of these tertiary education gender gaps are huge, with female enrolment rates at least 20 percentage points higher than male rates in 28 countries, including Argentina, Barbados, Italy, Jamaica, Mongolia, Poland, Sweden and the US. Male rates are 20 percentage points higher than female ones in only three countries: the two Koreas and Liechtenstein.

Boys do still have a slight advantage at primary school level, with higher enrolment rates in 95 countries. But with girls more likely to attend primary school in 76 countries, the gender gap is smaller than for secondary or tertiary education.

Overall, Unesco’s “expected years of schooling” measure shows girls are on course to enjoy more years of education than boys in 100 countries, with the reverse true in 61.

Despite this Unesco, which says “girls’ and women’s education is a fundamental human right”, has an ongoing push to “increase the resources invested in girls’ and women’s education”.

Historically, a focus on girls’ education is not hard to understand. Unesco data show that in 1970, 78.4m primary school-age girls were out of school, compared with 48.4m boys.

However this gap has narrowed sharply, with 30.9m primary school-age girls and 28.4m boys out of school as of 2013, according to the most recent available data. Unesco does not report similar figures for secondary school-age children, but given that boys’ secondary enrolment rates tend to be lower in most countries, it is likely this figure would be higher for boys than girls.

But even though the remaining bias against girls now appears to be outweighed by bias against boys, a female-focused development approach has continued, even at secondary school level, with the current push centring on adolescent girls.

Despite this, Ms Sass said she was not surprised by the figures showing boys are less likely to attend secondary school. “There are issues with the relevance of education and the pressures that boys have to be breadwinners and bring an income into their households,” she said.

“In countries where we see gender disparities at the expense of boys we need to understand why. Boys tend to have lower [relative] enrolment rates where there is high [average] enrolment, girls where there is a low [average] enrolment rate. Boys are at a disadvantage in the vast majority of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Mr Dar said most of the World Bank’s education programmes focused on both genders, with “less than 5-7 per cent” gender specific, although these are all focused on girls.

“We make sure we give [girls’ education] a little more focus because girls are facing more difficulties,” said Mr Dar, who is also acting senior director in the World Bank’s education global practice.

One of the success stories highlighted by the Bank is Bangladesh, where in 1994 the gender parity index for secondary school enrolment was 0.83 (meaning girls’ enrolment rate was just 83 per cent of that for boys).

The Bank launched a series of projects to tackle this disparity. As a result, by 2008, the gender parity index had risen to 1.13. In other words, it was almost as skewed as when the Word Bank started the project in 1994, just the other way around, and had once again returned to a level Unesco defines as “severe disparity”.

Yet the Bank did not launch an initiative specifically aimed at boys to tackle this unbalance, as it had done for girls 14 years earlier. The Bank and the Bangladeshi government are instead focusing on enrolment rates for the poorest children of both genders.

Mr Dar says that, as a result, “gender parity is coming back to closer to 50 per cent”. “What we were finding is that the poorest boys were not attending school, so the additional number of boys [as a result of the programme] is greater”.

The latest Unesco data show Bangladesh still had a secondary school gender parity index of 1.09 in 2013, the latest year for which figures are available, while in 2010 (again the latest data available) 624,000 primary school-age boys were out of education, compared with 283,000 girls.

Mr Dar said the new Bangladesh programme “only started two or three years ago, so there is [still] a shift happening”.

Both the World Bank and Unesco have also called for measures to increase the proportion of female teachers, with Unesco arguing that “affirmative action should be considered to attract more women into teaching”.

Yet Unesco’s own data show that male teachers are already in the minority, both globally and in most countries, with female primary teachers being more commonplace in 147 out of 185 countries and female secondary teachers in 99 of 152 states for which it has data.

More than 99 per cent of primary schoolteachers in Armenia and Belarus are female, 98 per cent in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the Kyrgyz Republic and Kazakhstan and 97 per cent in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania and Slovenia.

Ms Sass argued it was “important to have female teachers as role models in many settings”. More broadly, she said a disproportionate focus on girls’ schooling could be justified because “it’s not just about education, it’s about outcomes,” in areas such as health, employment and early marriage and pregnancy.

“There is a lot of attention not only on girls’ education but on adolescent girls’ education. I think a lot of that is around the returns on investment that we get for girls. We don’t appear to get the same rates on investment for boys,” she added.

However Ms Sass said Unesco would be publishing a paper early next year focusing on boys’ disadvantage “which will review in which countries and contexts boys are falling behind, the factors affecting this and what policies are having success in addressing this gender disadvantage”.