Summary

GENDER SUMMARY
EDUCATION FOR ALL GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2015
Learning assessments highlight gender differences
in subject performance
Regional and international learning assessments
at primary and secondary level, including PISA,
TIMSS, Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium
for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ)
and SERCE, indicate variation in subject-specific
achievement by gender. Analysis presented in the
2012 GMR, using data from various international
and regional learning assessments surveys over
the period 2005–2009, shows that girls overall
performed better in reading, and boys performed
better in mathematics in most countries, although
the gap was narrowing. Performance in science was
more varied, with no significant difference between
boys and girls in many countries (UNESCO, 2012b).
PISA surveys, which assess the performance of
15-year-old students, show a widening gap in
reading, with girls performing significantly better
than boys in all locations surveyed (Figure 14a).
A comparison of the subset of locations that took
part in both the 2000 and 2012 surveys shows that
the gender gap in reading widened in 11 countries,
including Bulgaria, France, Iceland, Israel,
Portugal and Romania, largely due to a decline in
boys’ performance. Low-performing boys face a
particularly large disadvantage, as they are heavily
over-represented among those who failed to show
basic levels of reading literacy (OECD, 2014a).
The PISA results also show gender differences in
mathematics, with boys performing better than
girls in the majority of locations, although the
gap has narrowed in several countries, including
Montenegro, Norway and Slovakia (Figure 14b).
In the 2012 PISA survey, girls in OECD countries
underperformed boys by an average of 11
points. The data show that girls were underrepresented
among the highest achievers in most
locations, a possible challenge to achieving equal
participation in science, technology, engineering
and mathematics occupations in the future
(OECD, 2014a).
In poorer settings, girls continue to face
disadvantage in achievement
In some poorer countries where girls have
historically faced barriers to equal participation
in education, they continue to face disadvantage
in obtaining important foundation skills. Further
analysis shows that gender disparities in learning
can be underestimated when assessments only
include children attending school. Analysis of the
Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014
Survey in rural Pakistan assesses literacy and
numeracy skills of both those children aged 5–16
years who attend school and those who do not. It
shows that gender gaps are small among schoolgoing
grade 5 students, sometimes favouring girls.
However, girls’ relative performance is worse among
all the assessed children aged 10–12 years, whether
they are in school or not, particularly in poorer, less
developed provinces and territories. In Balochistan,
the percentage of girls in grade 5 who can read a
passage in Urdu, Sindhi or Pashto was, on average,
almost the same as for boys in grade 5, but among
all children aged 10–12 years, there was a gap of
5 percentage points between girls and boys. In the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the
gap was 14 percentage points at the expense of
girls (Figure 15).
Girls may face disadvantage in national
examinations
Limited research suggests that in some poorer
countries, girls face greater disadvantage in
national examinations than boys, raising obstacles
to their continued schooling. Even though girls
in grade 6 scored higher than boys in the 2007
SACMEQ III learning assessment, girls’ pass rates
in national examinations in Kenya and Zimbabwe
were significantly lower than boys (Mukhopondhyay
et al., 2012). National examinations at the end of the
primary cycle can form part of high-stakes selection
processes in which failure to pass or perform well
prevents transition to lower secondary. In Kenya
and Malawi, performance in exams for primary
school leaving certificates determines entry into
state-funded secondary schools (Mukhopondhyay
et al., 2012).
Gender parity in literacy is poor
Overall, nearly 781 million adults lacked basic
literacy skills in 2012, of which nearly 64% were
women, a percentage unchanged since 2000.
Globally, the average adult illiteracy rate fell from
24% to 18% between 1990 and 2000. Yet the pace
of decline has slowed, and estimates suggest the
rate has only fallen slightly to 16% in 2012 and is
projected to be 14% by 2015. This represents a
fall of only 23% in the number of illiterate adults
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