Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap

Abstract

This figure depicts the gendered patterns of educational expansion across Africa. The horizontal axis displays educational access, and vertical lines represent educational gender gaps for 267 country-specific birth cohorts, representing adults born between 1941 and 1992 in 32 African countries. The gaps take on an almond shape. In early stages of educational expansion, boys enter school at higher rates than girls; female enrollment begins to catch up only when at least half of the cohort attends school. Cohorts with the lowest educational access are disproportionately located in West Africa, and most higher-access cohorts are in central and southern Africa. In more than 30 percent of cohorts from central and southern African countries, girls surpass boys in rates of basic educational participation. Africa’s gender inequality is structured not only by regional context and temporal trends but also by a country’s position along the spectrum from scarcity to abundance of educational opportunities.

Adults living in Africa today represent the full range of possible variation in educational opportunities, from cohorts in which virtually nobody attended school to near universal schooling (Frye and Lopus forthcoming). We take advantage of this stunning heterogeneity to visualize the gendered patterns of educational expansion across Africa (Figure 1). Our horizontal axis displays educational access—the percentage of individuals in each country cohort with any formal education. Vertical lines represent educational gender gaps—the differences in educational access between men and women—for 267 country-specific five-year birth cohorts, representing adults born between 1941 and 1992 in 32 African countries. The horizontal midline shows gender parity, which we would observe if boys and girls were educated at equal rates. Diagonal lines show the maximum possible gender disparity, which we would observe if all boys attended school before any girls (or vice versa). The bottom panel displays cohort time trends and exposes the uneven expansion of educational access across Africa. In Zambia and Zimbabwe, for example, 1950s birth cohorts achieved 80 percent ever educated, whereas cohorts born 30 years later in Mali and Burkina Faso achieved only 40 percent ever educated.

Figure 1.

This figure displays data from 118 Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in 32 African countries, aggregated into 267 five-year birth cohorts and representing 323,358 men and 781,744 women born between 1941 and 1992 (DHS Implementing Partners and ICF International 1988–2015; authors’ own analysis). The vertical line segments represent the educational gender gap (the difference between the percentages of men and women in a country cohort who attended any school) as a function of the percentage of both genders who attended any school. The bottom panel demonstrates that this graph should not be interpreted as moving strictly from left to right over time; education has expanded at vastly different rates across Africa. In the upper panel, gray diamonds represent male values, and black circles represent female values. Colored lines and points correspond to African region (blue for West Africa, yellow for East Africa, and red for central and southern Africa).

The gender gaps take on an almond shape: gaps are smallest at the poles and largest at intermediate levels of educational access. In early stages of educational expansion, boys enter school at higher rates than girls; female enrollment begins to catch up only when at least half of the cohort attends school. Of course, gender gaps are constrained by the maximum possible disparity for a given level of educational access. To reveal how close our data come to this constraint, we measure the ratio of observed to maximum possible gender gap. For each 10-point span of percentage ever educated, mean values fall closer to gender parity than to maximum disparity (mean ratio across 10 groups = 0.32). As evidenced by the almond’s asymmetry (i.e., more dots hugging or crossing the parity line on the right side of the graph), greater gender disparity exists in cohorts with fewer than 30 percent educated than in cohorts with greater than 70 percent educated (mean gender disparity ratios of 0.44 and 0.25, respectively). Women catch up to men more quickly at higher levels of educational access than men outpace women at lower levels.

Geographically, cohorts are not distributed randomly across the almond shape. Instead, cohorts with the lowest educational access are disproportionately located in West Africa (blue), cohorts in East Africa (yellow) typically have intermediate levels of educational prevalence, and most higher access cohorts are in central and southern Africa (red). In more than 30 percent of cohorts from central and southern African countries, girls surpass boys in rates of basic educational participation; a similar gender gap reversal unfolded in Latin America and Southeast Asia (Grant and Behrman 2010).

Harnessing the unique comparative leverage gained from Africa’s heterogeneous patterns of educational expansion, this figure demonstrates that gender inequality is structured not only by regional context and temporal trends but also by a country’s position along the spectrum from scarcity to abundance of educational opportunities.

Supplemental Material

Data_cleaning_1_creating_cohort_data_files – Supplemental material for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap

Supplemental material, Data_cleaning_1_creating_cohort_data_files for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap by Sara Lopus and Margaret Frye in Socius

Supplemental Material

Data_cleaning_2_creating_merged_data_file – Supplemental material for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap

Supplemental material, Data_cleaning_2_creating_merged_data_file for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap by Sara Lopus and Margaret Frye in Socius

Supplemental Material

edgraph_data – Supplemental material for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap

Supplemental material, edgraph_data for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap by Sara Lopus and Margaret Frye in Socius

Supplemental Material

figure_code – Supplemental material for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap

Supplemental material, figure_code for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap by Sara Lopus and Margaret Frye in Socius

Supplemental Material

Lopus_and_Frye_Supplemental_File – Supplemental material for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap

Supplemental material, Lopus_and_Frye_Supplemental_File for Visualizing Africa’s Educational Gender Gap by Sara Lopus and Margaret Frye in Socius