Girls Now Far Ahead Of Boys In Education -World Bank Experts

if you are a girl, come closer for a hi five, because you are now far ahead of boys in education, World Bank experts have said.
The submission via an article, Tracing Global Trends in Education: A Tale of Old and New Gender Gaps, was authored by Anna Bonfert and Divyanshi Wadhwa.

Describing advances in education across the world as one of the most inspiring development successes over the last 50 years, the authors say that girls, who historically had very low levels of education and who consistently lagged boys, are now educated at far higher levels than at any other point in history.

“While girls have been catching up on opportunities, challenges remain. At the same time new gaps have emerged in learning outcomes – in virtually all countries for which we have data, boys have higher rates of learning poverty than girls do”, the authors say.

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They also refer to the Sustainable Development Goal 4 principle which commits all signatory countries to ensure that, by 2030, “all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education”, adding however that girls and boys have gained access to primary school at unprecedented levels, with each age cohort surpassing the enrollment rates of the previous one.

“Over the past fifty years there has been steady progress towards gender parity in school enrollment, both at the primary and secondary level, although global gender parity in primary school enrollment was first achieved for the first time in 2013.
“At the tertiary level, female enrollment has exceeded male enrollment for the last 20 years, and the gap has been widening.
Global parity rates, however, conceal important regional differences, especially in secondary and tertiary education.
“The remaining gap to parity is largest for the Sub-Saharan Africa region, both at secondary and tertiary level, but impressive gains towards achieving parity can be observed for the last 30 years in this region”, the study stated.

Enrolling is one thing, but how about completion rates? Girls still beat boys in both high, middle, and upper-middle income countries, the authors submit.

“Since the 1980s there has been a remarkable spurt of female completion rates in lower middle-income countries and in 2012 female completion rates had completely caught up with the male rate.

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“However, girls in low-income countries continue to trail their male peers in lower secondary completion rates, with only 38 percent of girls completing lower secondary school compared to 43 percent of boys”.

Encouragingly though, the gender gap in secondary completion rates in low-income countries has consistently fallen since 2014.