, Columnist
Girls Have Always Been Better at School. Now It Matters More.
The higher-education gender gap has become a major factor in American political and economic life, and it yawns even wider in other rich countries.
Lead or get out of the way.
Photographer: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images
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Spend any time looking through the data on educational attainment in the U.S., and one thing that quickly stands out is how much more likely young women are to have college degrees than young men are.
Actually, as you can see from the above chart, the gap is now present well into middle age. It was back in the 1980s, about a century and a half after the first woman was awarded a bachelor’s degree in the U.S., that women began to outnumber men in the ranks of bachelor’s degree recipients.