Of eight Millennium Development goals set by the United Nations, two deal with women and education:

• Achieve universal primary education— Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
• Promote gender equality and empower women— Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015

More than 960 million adults, two-thirds of whom are women, are illiterate, and functional illiteracy is a significant problem in all countries, industrialized and developing.— World Declaration on Education For All

“…[O]nly about one in three developing countries were able to reach the target of eliminating gender disparity in primary education by 2005. I hope that the failure of countries to reach this target will serve as a wake up call, so that the international community will intensify its efforts to meet the goal of eliminating the gender gap in all levels of education no later than 2015.”—Geeta Rao Gupta, Director, International Council for Research on Women

Primary education

• “In the developing world as a whole, 85% of boys and 76% of girls complete primary school.”—Save the Children, State of the World’s Mothers, 2005

• Studies find that 150 million children currently enrolled in school will drop out before completing primary school—at least 100 million are girls.—Council on Foreign Relations, What Works in Girls’ Education, 2004

• The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40% higher than children of women with no education. UN Millennium Project

• In a survey of 83 developing countries for which there are data, only 50% have achieved gender parity in education at the primary school level, and less than 20% have done so at the secondary level.—UNAIDS, Educate Girls, Fight Aids, 2005

• A review of 113 studies indicates that school-based AIDS education programs are effective in reducing early sexual activity and high-risk behavior.—Council on Foreign Relations, What Works in Girls’ Education, 2004

• A 72-country analysis found that new HIV infections are noticeably higher where the literacy gap between boys and girls is greater than 25%. However, where the literacy gap between boys and girls is less than 5%, the HIV infection outbreak level falls by 40%. – Save the Children, State of the World’s Mothers, 2005

• An extra year of girls’ education can reduce infant mortality by 5-10 %. This link is especially striking in low income countries.—Council on Foreign Relations, What Works in Girls’ Education, 2004

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“Girls and boys enter school roughly equal in measured ability. Twelve years later, girls have fallen behind their male classmates in key areas such as higher-level mathematics and measures of self esteem.”—AAUW,How Schools Shortchange Girls, 1992

A study commissioned by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation found that girls in middle school must overcome “subtle, but powerful messages reinforcing boys’ dominance in the classroom” from teachers and school administrators.
- Girls Incorporated®, Girls Bill of Rights

Primary Education

• Research reveals a tendency, beginning at the preschool level, for educators to choose classroom activities that appeal to boys’ interests and to select presentation formats in which boys excel. - AAUW, How Schools Shortchange Girls, 1992

• Females outperform males on reading and writing assessments at fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grades.— National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Trends in Educational Equity of Girls & Women, 2004

• Gender differences in mathematics and science achievement have not been consistent across years and grade groups—NCES, Trends in Educational Equity of Girls & Women, 2004

• When African American girls do as well as white boys in school, teachers often attribute their success to hard work while assuming that the white boys are not working up to their potential.—AAUW, How Schools Shortchange Girls, 1992

Secondary Education

• “The quality of math and science teachers has also been found to be an important predictor of student learning in those subjects and perhaps later college science and engineering attendance. For instance, teacher interaction with girls may be different from their interaction with boys; it may be characterized by low expectation, passive feedback, and attributing failure to students’ lack of ability.” –NCES, Entry and Persistence of Women and Minorities in College Science and Engineering Education, 2000

• Girls make up only a small percentage of students in computer science and computer design classes. The gender gap widens from grade eight to eleven.—AAUW, Gender Gaps, 1998

• During the 1990s, the number of high school students who took science courses increased. By the end of high school, more young women than young men had taken biology and chemistry; more young men than young women had taken physics.— Girls Inc, Fact Sheet on Girls and Science, Math and Engineering, 2004

A report by the Educational Policy Institute suggests that higher education can best serve the nation by targeting low-income and other historically-underrepresented groups. - Education Policy Institute, Is More Better?, 2005

Higher education is in the middle of a paradigm shift initiated by the increased numbers of women students, staff, and faculty in the last 30 years. National Initiative for Women in Higher Education

In 2003, 31% of women ages 25 to 29 years had attained a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2003, which exceeded that of men in this age range (26 percent). U.S. Census Bureau, 2005 

In 2003, 51 percent of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens went to women, the same percentage as 2002, marking the second consecutive year U.S. women were awarded more doctorates than their male counterparts. Doctoriate Recipients from United States Universities, 2003 

Nineteen percent of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens in 2003 were earned by U.S. racial/ethnic minority groups. This is the largest percentage ever, and continues a steady upward trend. Among the 25,705 doctorates earned in 2003 by U.S. citizens who identified their race/ethnicity: 

• 6.9%were earned by African-Americans

• 5.3% were earned by Asians

• 4.9% were earned by Hispanics

• 0.5% were earned by American Indians

• 0.3% were earned by Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders

• 1.4% were earned by non-Hispanic individuals who identified more than one racial background.

The broad fields with the largest percentages of minorities were education, in which blacks were the predominant minority group, and engineering, in which Asians were predominant. Doctoriate Recipients from United States Universities, 2003 

National Council for Research on Women, Ford Foundation Project:
Leadership in Higher Education: A Path to Greater Racial and Gender Diversity