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The Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Variation by Age, Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity in the United States
The Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Variation by Age, Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity in the United States
The gender gap in educational attainment has been changing in recent decades. According to the Current Population Survey, women surpassed men in the proportion with high school diplomas in 2002 and this trend has continued. Data from the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS) showed that 84.6 percent of women 25 years and over had a high school diploma or more compared with 83.9 percent of men. While the gender gap in attainment has closed at the high school level, women still fall behind men in the proportion with a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2005, 28.5 percent of men 25 years and over had a bachelor’s degree or higher compared with 26.0 percent of women. However, this is likely also to close, as women now comprise a larger proportion of college graduates (Kannankutty, 2005; DiPrete and Buchmann, 2006).
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Page Last Revised - October 8, 2021
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