Closing the Gender Gap: Six Decades of Reform in Mexican Education

Abstract

Gender parity in education is a goal for national governments and international organizations (UN General Assembly 2000). Achieving gender equality in educational opportunities by 2015 is one of the six key educational goals for 164 governments and various international organizations under the “Education for All” initiative (UNESCO 2007a). However, by 2005, according to a recent report to monitor global progress toward the goals of Education for All, only one-third of 181 countries with available data had achieved gender parity in both primary and secondary gross enrollment ratios, leading UNESCO (2007b, 79) to the conclusion that “the gender parity goal has been missed and gender equality remains elusive.” Despite the considerable progress toward gender parity at a global level, regional gender disparities in access to education, especially secondary and higher education, persist in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia (Knodel and Jones 1996; UNESCO 2007b). The case of Mexico, along with some of its neighboring countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, is particularly interesting given its current gender parity in terms of entrance into primary school (gross intake rate) and female advantage in enrollment in secondary school (gross enrollment ratio; UNESCO 2008). In fact, the gender gap in Latin America has been narrow to nonexistent for decades (Knodel and Jones 1996). By 1998, almost all children at primary school ages were enrolled in primary schools regardless of gender (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2001). Although only slightly more than half of children of secondary school age were enrolled in secondary schools, there was no gender difference in school enrollment at the secondary level (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2001). Gender differences in postsecondary enrollment were also negligible (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2001). In 2004, the percentage of Mexican women who had at least upper-secondary education was 11 percent for the older group of ages 55–64 but 27 percent for the younger