Malala Yousafzai – the young campaigner who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban in Pakistan last October – has drawn the world's attention to the fight for girls' access to education.
On Friday, she marks her 16th birthday by delivering a speech at the UN, and a petition calling on the general assembly "to fund new teachers, schools, books and recommit to getting every girl and boy in school by December 2015".
Globally, more children are in primary school than ever before. Yet an estimated 57 million remain out of school, and gender disparities are large in many countries. How big is the gender gap in schools around the world? How has the picture changed in recent years?
The UN uses a gender parity index (GPI), comparing girls' gross enrollment rates to those of boys, to track progress towards the millennium development goal (MDG) target to achieve parity in primary and secondary education by 2015. A GPI lower than 1.0 signifies more boys in school than girls, with scores above 1.0 reflecting more girls than boys.
At the global level, the MDG target on parity at primary school has already been met. Estimates of global progress can mask stark differences at the country or regional level, however. Today, the gender gap in primary education is concentrated in a much smaller group of countries. The visualisation above shows how the picture has changed since the 1970s.
In Pakistan, there are an estimated 82 girls for every 100 boys at primary school. While still far from parity, this reflects significant progress since 1990, when there were only 52 girls for every 100 boys, and even more since the early 1970s, when estimates suggest boys outnumbered girls by almost three to one. The table below compares Pakistan's progress towards gender parity at primary school with four nearby countries – Afghanistan, Iran, India and Tajikistan.
Pakistan and nearby countries. Download the full data below.
At the secondary school level, less than 40% of countries have met the MDG target on gender parity. The remaining 60% are roughly split between those where boys outnumber girls and others where girls outnumber boys.
In higher education, the global gender gap is significant – but at this level, women outnumber men. In 2011, there were 108 women studying at this level for every 100 men.
Men outnumbered women in higher education until the late 1990s, when the world reached parity. Since 2004, however, the number of women in post-secondary school globally has exceeded that of men, with the gap steadily growing. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where the ratio of women to men studying at this level has dropped – from 66 women for every 100 men in 2000 to 61 in 2011.
Last month, the UN warned that progress on reducing the number of children out of school has ground to a "virtual standstill". Between 2008 and 2011, the number of out-of-school children of primary age fell by only 3 million.
"If this rate of change continues over the next few years, the world will still be far from the goal of UPE [universal primary education] in 2015," warned a report from Unesco and the Education for All campaign, which pointed to declining donor support for education.
International aid for basic education dropped 6% between 2010 and 2011, with six of the world's top 10 donors – Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the US – cutting spending. Aid to secondary education declined by 11% between 2010 and 2011.
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