Gender Gaps in Skills-Adjusted Mean Years of Schooling 1970-2025

Ingeborg Spiegeler Castañeda , International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Michaela Potancoková, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Claudia Reiter, Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) Vienna; Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences

While women in many regions now match or surpass men in years of schooling, it is less clear whether and where this convergence also extends to functional literacy skills. By combining educational attainment with adults’ functional literacy skills from surveys, SLAMYS provide a measure of human capital that is both demographically consistent and directly relevant for economic and social outcomes. This paper introduces a substantially updated SLAMYS dataset by gender and broad age groups. We analyse time trends in gender gaps between 1970 and 2025 and identify where across the globe women outperform men in either or both MYS and SLAMYS. our analysis provides crucial insights into whether rising levels of education have translated into more equal human capital, and how educational expansion has shaped opportunities for women and men across generations. While in most high-income countries and in some middle-income countries women outperform men in both indicators, in developing countries the gaps in SLAMYS tell a less positive story than MYS expansion suggests. Male advantage persists in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where the gap in MYS has been narrowing faster than for SLAMYS, suggesting barriers in access to quality education for women and girls. The Middle East and North Africa stand out for the most rapid advances in SLAMYS. To account for the well known fact that women tend to outperform men in functional literacy, we extend the indicator to skill- in-numeracy-weighted MYS for the first time.

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 Presented in Session 14. Flash Session Inequality Dimensions of Human Capital