Significant progress has been made to close gender gaps in education over the last 25 years. Nevertheless, gender inequalities persist and education remains elusive for many girls. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that 11.2 million girls and young women may drop out or not have access to…

In the last decades, developed economies have witnessed significant declines in wages for low-skill workers, increases in employment in high-skill occupations, rapid diffusion of new technology, and expanding offshoring opportunities. Labor markets in developed countries have reallocated labor from manual to cognitive jobs and from routine to…

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields are considered catalysts for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet, particularly for STEM fields, girls and women, for a multitude of social, cultural and psychological reasons, engage and participate at a lower rate than boys and men. This research…

At any one time, about 300 million children of school going age are not in school. Experience indicates that when schooling is disrupted, whether by a pandemic, a natural disaster or other reasons, not all children return to the classroom. In addition, most countries have growing numbers of young people who have not completed schooling, or not…

In the past 40 years, the proportion of women in science courses and careers has dramatically increased in some nations but not in others. Our research investigated how national differences in women's science participation related to gender-science stereotypes that associate science with men more than women. Data from ~350,000 participants in 66…

Records show that school enrollment for girls is still lagging behind in some areas in the Asia and Pacific region, which poses challenge for the region to achieve Education for All (EFA) by 2015. And girls' labor in the Asia and Pacific region continues to constitute a major obstacle towards gender parity in education, another EFA target. Girls'…

Mother tongue-based education perpetuates equity in education, especially among girls who are often regarded as disadvantaged in access to education. The Asia and Pacific region is characterized by its rich ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Such diversity is found missing in many school systems in the region which often leads to gaps in…