The Education and Employment Gap for Rich and Poor Women
Are women on the road to closing the gender gap? A look at education and employment for women around the world.
The inspiration for this project was Melinda Gates’s book “The Moment of Lift”. The book’s key tenet is that when you give women resources, they invest it in their family and community, and this is an important reason we must “lift” women up. To empower women is to, in practical terms, make the world a better place. It’s full of amazing stories and some celebrity cameos (Hans Rosling!).
Gates’s insights were backed by data, and I wanted to see this for myself. I found a gender study dataset provided by the World Bank. It covers 263 countries, regions, and groupings, with 624 questions for each, ranging from personal freedom, cultural expectations, gender laws, makeup in business, and so on. I explored this data by creating visualizations with different combinations of countries and questions, and evaluated how much missing data there was, which varied widely since the study began in 1960.
I chose to focus on two areas that were highlighted in Gates’s book: Education and Employment. How far were women lagging in these areas globally, and were they correlated? Instead of investigating individual countries, I looked at the results of two widely accepted country groups: Pre-Demographic and Post-Demographic.
The terms Pre- and Post-Demographic are based on a social science theory that underdeveloped populations tend to have high birth and death rates, while developed countries tend to have low birth and death rates. These two groups are useful here because their aggregated behavior overcomes the random specificities of individual countries, and reveal the underlying patterns of poor and rich countries. I’ll refer to them as PreDem and PostDem (click for a list of countries).
I think the most surprising thing in this graph is the PostDem countries, where women start to overtake men in 1985. It reverses the gender gap; women increase their expected years of school over their male counterparts, although the gap stabilizes around 2010. Of the many factors that may have contributed to this, one is closely linked to the category Post-Demographic: lower birth rates. Less children to care for give women more opportunity to pursue education. Another is the staggered and slow acceptance of women to attend school (Yale, for example, did not accept female students until 1969). There are many theories as to why women surpass men in education, when given the chance, whether it’s biological or if traditional education methods are better suited to women’s gender roles.
In PreDem countries, men and women appear to move in lockstep, but in fact the gap has steadily narrowed over the decades.
Does education have any correlation to employment?
The order of groups is completely rearranged, compared to Years of School. A few things jump out:
- For both PreDem and PostDem groups, women are less employed than men by a relatively equal margin. The gap for PostDem women slowly decreases every year, while for PreDem women it barely moves at all.
- PreDem countries are more employed than PostDem. Initially this surprised me, but I was mistakenly defining employment in grand terms: full time, year-round, steady and sufficient incomes. I assumed more privilege would result in more employment. However, in struggling areas, employment does not guarantee a living wage. The high employment ratio in PreDem countries may come from the very young and the very old working for survival, whose counterparts in PostDem countries might be at school or retired. It disabused my notion of equating employment with wealth, or education.
- The 2007 financial crisis is apparent in the severe dip for PostDem men and women. It’s effect on poor countries is to accelerate an already downward trend. While PostDem employment recovers over the next decade, PreDem employment does not, increasing global inequality.
Correlations and Conclusions
I ran a correlation matrix on these four demographics, to test the relationship between Education and Employment. The results are:
- Male Pre-Demographic: -0.8597
- Female Pre-Demographic: -0.876
- Male Post-Demographic: -0.881
- Female Post-Demographic: 0.905
For the first three groups, the correlation is strongly negative, meaning that increased years of education is associated with less employment. I interpret this to mean education didn’t impact the employment ratio, at least not enough to result in a positive correlation. PostDem Females had a very strong positive correlation, and this confirms that Post-Demographic women have made the most strides when it comes to closing both the education gap and the employment gap. The progress between the two, however, has not been equal. PostDem women have completely upended the education gap since 1985, while the employment gap is still gaping.
The data shows that men and women on both ends of the demographic spectrum have made progress in education since 1960. This hasn’t translated into more employment though, and since 1990 the only group that has risen it’s employment population ratio is women from more privileged countries. Gates’s book highlights the need to assist women in poverty, and after viewing this data it is even more apparent why. Wealthy women are on their way to closing the gap, while poor women have a ways to go.
