An assessment of the gender (in)equality in education

Abstract

It is an obvious fact that the human capital can only be enlarged with a sustainable education system. In this context, education is a unique area in which it promotes the equality of employment opportunities and amplify the economic growth. In addition, it supports the women’s empowerment itself. Moreover, it serves an interventionist role for both educators (i.e. teachers, school managers) and the educated ones (i.e. students). In considering the national education system, women have the equal opportunities to take the same education rights as the men. Also, the orientation and training of the teachers and the active involvement of educational institutions are the basic proofs of the gender equality. Even some improvements are observed in gaining the gender equality in education, some striking facts about the gender inequality can come in sight with the statistical facts. While the gender inequality in education is not an essential problem for the developed countries, developing countries or underdeveloped countries may suffer from this kind of inequality. According to Schultz (2002), the largest component of the investment in human capital is just the enrollment in schools, and generally female enrollment rates are used in order to show the gender inequality. Besides, gender distributions of the teachers are also good indicators. From this point, in the first part of the study, we try to analyze the gender (in)equality in education by making some comparisons among the country groups and in the second part, we aim to focus on the education system in Turkey.