Asia Under Girls 029

Education and employment

OECD countries

• Education

Significant progress has also been achieved in reducing the gender gap in educational qualifications. Younger women today are far more likely to have completed a tertiary qualification than women 30 years ago: in 19 of the 30 OECD countries, more than twice as many women aged 25 to 34 have completed tertiary education than women aged 55 to 64 do. In 21 of 27 OECD countries with comparable data, the number of women graduating from university-level programmes is equal to or exceeds that of men. Last but not least, 15-year-old girls tend to show much higher expectations for their careers than boys of the same age.^[3]

While women account for more than half of university graduates in several OECD countries, they receive only 30% of tertiary degrees granted in science and engineering fields, and women account for only 25% to 35% of researchers in most OECD countries.^[4]

• Employment

In OECD countries, women’s employment is not necessarily synonymous with high wages and career opportunities. The labour market remains difficult for women and in all fields of activity, it will be a long time before women have equal access to the same occupations as men. In OECD countries, both men and women work in an occupation where their own gender is in a strong majority. Over half of the occupations surveyed are more than 80% ‘dominated’ by the same gender. The scale and permanence of the phenomenon are such that it is customary to talk about ‘traditionally male’ and ‘traditionally-female’ jobs. But there are five times as many male-dominated occupations in the OECD countries as there are female-dominated ones. Women’s employment is therefore narrowly concentrated in a small number of highly female-dominated occupations. Yet on average women account for over 40% of total employment in the OECD area.^[5]

Source from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki