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Eliminating differences in education between men and women has been a priority of development organizations and the international community for many years. The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to “eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015” is echoed by institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank. According to the World Bank, “there is no investment more effective for achieving development goals than educating girls.” Equality of educational opportunities between men and women has also been acknowledged in the Universal Declaration of Human rights of 1948.1 It has been suggested in the literature that educating girls and achieving the MDG goal on gender equity will lead to a range of improved outcomes for developing countries (see e.g. Schultz, 2002), including higher economic growth (e.g. Abu- Ghaida and Klasen, 2004). We now know that in many countries, the differences in education between men and women has disappeared, or even reversed. This reversal of the gender education gap has occurred in almost all developed countries and many developing countries as well, and the reversals occurred among cohorts born over 60 years ago in several countries.
After the gender education gap has reversed, have these countries also made progress in closing other gender gaps? What have we observed regarding gender equality and women’s empowerment in terms of labor force participation? Married women’s and single women’s labor force participation? Mothers’ and non-mothers’ labor force participation? How have developed countries fared relative to developing countries? In this article, we use International Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-International) Census data from 40 countries to document the reversal of the gender education gap and to rank countries by the year in which the gender education gap reversed. Then we turn to an analysis of the state of other gaps facing women: we compare men’s and women’s labor force participation (the labor force participation gap), married women’s and single women’s labor force participation (the marriage gap), and mothers’ and non-mother’s labor force participation (the motherhood gap). We show that gaps still exist in these spheres in many countries, although there is significant heterogeneity among countries in terms of the size of the gaps and the speed at which they are changing. We then investigate the relationship between the gaps.