Towards gender equality in education: Different strategies to improve subnational performance of European countries using data envelopment analysis

The principle of equality between women and men is enshrined as one of the core values of the European Union. Even though in many European countries women outperform men at all educational levels, the perspective of men is limited in the strategies that frame gender equality. This paper assumes that the gender gap matters, regardless of its direction, towards gender equality in education. The paper proposes a benchmarking approach through a bi-objective Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model used in evaluating 30 European countries at the subnational level in terms of performance indicators, which are disaggregated by gender. Thus, the model incorporates information on gender equality and employs it to set region-specific targets seeking both to close the gap between actual performances and best practices (i.e., minimizing the efforts for improving performance) and to close the gender gap. Varying the importance attached to each of the two objectives considered, the proposed approach generates a series of targets that allow us to identify alternative planning strategies for improving performance toward best practices while at the same time closing the gender gap.