Closing the Gap for Women in Education and Employment

Higher rates of university enrollment among women are not closing gender pay gaps after graduation and female participation in more lucrative technical fields like engineering continues to lag men.

These are among the key findings of a survey of 14,000 graduates from 50 universities and other institutions offering technical and vocational qualifications, in more than 20 developing countries.

While World Bank research has already established that women earn just 77 cents on the dollar compared to men, this study aims to shed light on whether female graduates earn less than their male counterparts with the same educational backgrounds. It also examines whether they are more likely to be unemployed.

In 2022, women’s enrollment rate in tertiary education was 45 percent, compared to 39 percent for men, and over 90 percent of female graduates cited improving employment outcomes as a key motive for pursuing their studies.

Nevertheless, female graduates continue to earn less than men, the survey found, even after controlling for factors such as the field studied, institution attended, country, year of graduation, experience and age.

Recent women graduates are, on average, 30 percent more likely than their male counterparts to report that they are in the two lowest earning categories, and 50 percent less likely to be in the top two earning categories.

Meanwhile, older female graduates tend to earn substantially less than their male peers of a similar age which is likely to reflect the fact that women more frequently disrupt their careers to care for children or the elderly.

One key factor in understanding the dynamics behind lower earnings for female graduates is that they are less likely to find jobs in the field that they studied.

Though the data suggests that both men and women move into their field of study over time, women do so more slowly, spending more time working in professions other than that in which they are qualified.

The report recommends that educational institutions seek ways to help improve employment outcomes for women, building on recent progress in boosting female enrollment. Collecting better data to enable evidence-based decisions on strategy and better understand the relevance of their curricula to labor market needs is one way to improve outcomes.

Closing these gender pay gaps should be an important priority for educational institutions, employers, and governments. Indeed, the World Bank has estimated that eliminating women’s participation gap in the workforce by 2034 could double the global growth rate. It follows, therefore, that the advantages of eliminating the gender pay disparities highlighted in the study are likely to be far reaching, benefiting not just employers but also spreading into the wider economy.