Full report
Published: 13 July 2022

Global Gender Gap Report 2022

2.7 Gender gaps in tertiary education, lifelong learning and skills prioritization

In the last five years, women worldwide have been enrolling in and graduating from tertiary education degrees at increasing rates. In addition, the distribution of learners by field in 2019 showed that tertiary education continued to be segregated by gender. For example, between 2013 and 2019, the gender gap in ICT and Engineering and Manufacturing remained mostly intact. Women's participation in Health and Welfare fields decreased, in contrast to Education.

As illustrated in Figure 2.12, the fields where women continue to be overrepresented compared to men include Education and Health and Welfare. In contrast, women are underrepresented in STEM fields, and the gender gap is most prevalent in two fields: Information and Communication Technologies and Engineering and Manufacturing.

The digitalization of the global economy, further accelerated by the pandemic, has allowed distance learning solutions to multiply and provide a range of options for basic, higher and lifelong education. However, only economies with the infrastructure, internet access, computer literacy and time availability have been able to support the transition of a broad learner base into online courses.1515: UNESCO, 2020. Nonetheless, online learning is more widespread since the start of the pandemic, particularly among adult learners seeking to complete, complement or supplement training.1616: OECD, 2020. Women increased their participation in this space significantly, according to high frequency data from Coursera.

As illustrated in Figures 2.13.A-D, gender gaps are substantially smaller in online enrolment than in traditional tertiary education for selected countries, when comparing online Coursera enrollment with traditional tertiary education data from the OECD. However, in both online and traditional formats, men continue to be overrepresented in fields typically characterized as "male-dominated", with two STEM fields reporting the highest gender gaps: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Engineering, Manufacturing, and Construction. However, in economies like India and Saudi Arabia, the ICT STEM gap is wider in online education than in traditional education.

The data further reveals that gender parity increased in online training in ICT in several economies between 2019 and 2021 (Figures 2.13.c and 2.13.d). Online ICT enrolments for women increased from 9.2% of total enrolments to 16.1% in Saudi Arabia and had slight increases in India, from 23.8 to 24.8%. The share of women enrolled in ICT in Greece almost doubled, from 8.6 to 15.8%. Similarly, the share of women enrolled in ICT in Hungary rose almost seven percentage points, from 12.0 to 18.7%. In Canada, Chile, Finland and Brazil, however, the gender gap in ICT in online education increased from 2019 to 2021.

Conversely, the overall gender gap for online training in Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction increased across most economies between 2019 and 2021 (Figures 2.13.a and 2.13.b), with two exceptions. In Japan, the female share remained stable at 2.2% but the male share decreased from 3.5 to 2.9%. In Latvia, the female share fell from 2.1 to 1.5% while the male share dipped from 4.5 to 2.6%. In Saudi Arabia, the converse was true - female share of enrolments rose in higher proportion than the male share, from 1.9 to 2.2% compared to 6.1 to 6.3% for men.

However, even as women in many countries have begun to match men's participation in online learning since the pandemic, a significant gender gap remains in the distribution of enrolment preferences across skills. While both men and women upskill in valuable areas of competency - such as Problem Solving, Resource Management and Marketing - for the future job market, they nonetheless emerge with gendered learning profiles. Broadly speaking, men are more likely to invest in Digital and Innovation skills and women are more likely to choose to upskill in Working with People and Self-Management skills (Figure 2.14a). The picture comes into sharper focus at the more granular level 3 of Coursera's Global Skills Taxonomy: women are substantially more likely to upskill in Resilience, Stress Tolerance, and Flexibility, and men are twice as likely to choose to upskill in Technology Use, Technology Design, and Mathematical Thinking (Figure 2.14b).

Enrolment data from Coursera suggests that increasing diversity of instructors may engage more women learners. Women learners enroll more than men in courses taught by women instructors: 49% of enrollments from women learners were in courses with women instructors, compared to 38% for men learners.

There are also gender gaps when it comes to reported skills among those in leadership roles. Linkedin data for skills displayed by those in leadership roles such as Director, VP, CXO and Partner in the 155 countries included in the data sample shows that, on average, both men and women attribute the highest relative importance to industry-specific skills by an almost equal measure. However, women tend to back up their industry knowledge with business skills, to which they attribute higher relative importance than men. Men tend to rely more on technology skills and disruptive technology skills than women to demonstrate leadership (Figure 2.15b). Lastly, the skills that are least displayed by women and men leaders on their profiles are attitudinal skills. However, attitudinal skills have higher relative importance as a leadership quality in women's skills profiles than they do in men's, regardless of the industry (Figure 2.15a).