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.