Gender Differences in Education Tuomas Pekkarinen - Index of - IZA

Although the aggregate changes in the employment shares are likely caused by demand side
factors, it seems likely that the differential consequences of these changes by gender are
linked to gender differences in educational attainment. Indeed, long run trends in male and
female participation rates seem to support this connection, as is shown in Figure 8. Between
1980 and 2007, the male labor force participation declined in all the OECD countries except
in Iceland. At the same time, female participation rates increased in all of these countries.
Furthermore, Autor (2010) shows that in the United States the decline in the labor force
participation was strongest for men with only secondary school education whose participation
rate declined by more than 10 percentage points. It seems likely that these changes in
participation rates reflect responses to declining earnings and employment opportunities. The
fact that the male educational attainment is lagging behind female educational attainment at a
time when the prospects for low educated workers are particularly bleak, is causing low
educated men to drop out of the labor force.
4. Policy implications
It is not of course entirely obvious that the gender gap in educational attainment should be a
policy concern. First of all, gender gap may simply reflect different rates of growth of
educational attainment. Yet, the evidence cited above suggests that in many countries the
widening gender gap in educational attainment reflects stalling or even declining male
educational attainment. In particular, the fraction of male cohorts continuing to post-
secondary education has stalled or started to decline in a number of countries. This is a cause
for concern since there is a large body of evidence showing that returns to university
education are large and increasing (Acemoglu and Autor (2011), Van Reenen (2011)).
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