Search results

Recent worldwide gains in girls’ schooling are raising new questions about the continued relevance of gender for educational inequality. At issue is whether the time has come to shift the policy focus away from gender to socioeconomic status. Answers to this question, we suggest, depend on how gender gaps close, i.e., do they close irreversibly, evenly, and faster than socio-economic (SES)-related inequality?

Against this background and building on contrasted sociological perspectives on inequality, our chapter examines the recent convergence trajectories of several sub-Saharan countries, asking if these trajectories warrant a policy shift away from gender.

Our findings are mixed. Although, the magnitude of sex-related inequality in schooling is consistently smaller than SES-related inequality, the process of gender convergence remains reversible and it unfolds in top-down fashion. Such findings warrant continued attention to gender in sub-Saharan Africa, but with particular focus on poor girls and on synergies that address both female and poor children. This conclusion supports theoretical advances that transcend the Manichean divide between focus on cultural recognition and socioeconomic redistribution.

Does education still serve as a great equalizer today? Does today’s worldwide expansion of schooling foster a global economic convergence? These questions need fresh answers at this time of growing concern over inequality. Past studies have abundantly documented the effects of schooling on within-country inequality, but we know little about corresponding effects on between-country inequality. We fill this gap by drawing on two innovations. The first is to formulate a theory of global inequality that integrates international differences in both the quantity and quality of education. The second, methodological, innovation is to propose and apply a method for decomposing trends in global inequality in GDP in terms of five social forces that include the quantity and quality of schooling. Analyses focus on the 1990–2010 period. The results confirm the continued salience of education: Trends in education account for as much as 80% of the 1990–2010 decline in between-country GDP inequality. However, we find a declining significance of “quantity” over “quality.” In sum, education remains salient as a global equalizer but its salience increasingly depends on bridging international differences in school quality.