A century of change in global education variability and gender differences in education

The aim of this article is to document and understand how trends in educational variability and the gender gap in education developed jointly over time. Main questions include: Is the education distribution among women becoming more dispersed as their average attainment surpasses that of men? Is education variability among women higher than that of men? Does the reduction–and eventual reversal–of the gender gap in education go hand-in-hand with less educational variability overall? To answer these questions we first show how overall education variability can be decomposed into four clearly interpretable components (variability among women and men, educational advantage favoring women and favoring men). We subsequently document how these components have evolved over time in the world and its regions from 1950 to 2010 (with projections until 2040). Our findings suggest that (i) with education expansion, education variability tends to follow an inverted U-shape trajectory. (ii) The composition of education variability has been shifting dramatically over time; in particular (iii) variability among men was usually higher than variability among women until the turn of the millennium, from then onwards their educational attainment distributions have the same degree of dispersion. And (iv) while in the 1950s the educational advantage of men was by far the main contributor to education variability, nowadays the educational advantage of women has become the most important source of variability in high- and middle-income countries.本文旨在记录并剖析教育离散程度与教育性别差距随时间协同演变的轨迹。核心研究问题包括：当女性平均受教育水平赶超男性时，其受教育程度的分布是否愈发离散？女性群体内部的教育离散程度是否高于男性？教育性别差距的收窄乃至最终逆转，是否与整体教育离散程度的下降同步发生？为解答上述问题，本文首先阐明整体教育离散程度可分解为四个可清晰解读的组成部分：男女各自群体内部的离散程度，以及偏向女性、偏向男性的教育优势带来的离散成分。随后，本文记录了1950年至2010年间全球及各区域上述四类组成部分的演变轨迹，并延伸至2040年的预测数据。本文研究结果表明：其一，伴随教育普及扩张，教育离散程度整体呈现倒U型演变轨迹；其二，教育离散程度的构成随时间发生了剧烈变化；其三，在千禧年之交以前，男性群体内部的教育离散程度通常高于女性，此后二者的受教育程度分布离散程度趋于一致；其四，1950年代男性教育优势曾是教育离散程度最主要的来源，而如今在高收入及中等收入国家中，女性教育优势已成为教育离散程度的首要贡献源。