Women in Education

Helen Fisher

"Brains are an asset, if you hide them," Mae West once said. Women are clever enough to play dumb when necessary. But one place where women usually do not try to hide their intelligence is in the schoolroom. Women are vitally interested in learning—in part, I think, because contemporary educators impart their information primarily with spoken and written words.

This form of learning is relatively recent in the course of human evolution. Our chimpanzee cousins learn by watching: watching their mothers as they crack nuts, watching siblings as they pluck ripe fruit, watching males threaten one another in status duels. Likewise, after our ancestors descended from the trees, children watched their fathers chip stone tools and watched their mothers gather herbs for headaches and sore throats. In the beginning, our hominid ancestors learned very little by verbal instruction and, of course, nothing whatsoever from written words.

The development of alphabets, writing tablets, and eventually paper, ink, and the printing press changed the course of human education. Our forebears began to capture and spread knowledge by using symbols on paper and disseminating these written words to all who had the opportunity and the curiosity to learn to read. Today we learn predominantly by listening to or reading words. This kind of learning favors those with superior verbal and reading skills—most frequently women.

In the knowledge economy, blue-collar laborers are being supplanted by what Peter Drucker call "knowledge workers." Many of those who are smart, educated, and computer literate, the "gold-collar" workers, will even write their own career tickets. Given this powerful economic impetus, it is hardly surprising that women are motivated to employ their feminine advantage and go to school.

In the 1980s, American men and women were acquiring an education at just about the same pace. But in the 1990s, women began to pull ahead. In 1997, 89 percent of American women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine had graduated from high school, whereas 86 percent of men in the same age group had received a high school diploma. More women than men in this age group had also completed college, 29 percent of women and 26 percent of men having received college degrees. At the postgraduate level, 46 percent of all U.S. doctorates" awarded in 1996 were earned by women. Interestingly, most of these advanced degrees were in education.

Women in other countries, too, are seizing the opportunity to go to school. In contemporary Germany, Britain, and Italy, the numbers of men and women with university degrees are almost equal. Even in countries where rigid cultural traditions keep women in the home, more are getting educated. The 1995 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme states that the world-wide gender gap in education has "narrowed rapidly in the past two decades."

About 33 percent of women in the world are now literate, a huge advance over earlier years. In contemporary China, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe, to name but a few developing countries making progress with literacy, women have come much further. Roughly 70 percent of adult women in these countries can read and write.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire," wrote William Butler Yeats. For women, the fire has ignited. They are earning the essential currency of the information age: knowledge. And what women learn, they want to teach.

"Educate a man and you educate an individual; educate a woman and you educate a family," it has been said. Women do like to teach. In 1996, 98 percent of all prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers in the United States were women, as were 94 percent of teachers' aides, 84 percent of special education teachers, 84 percent of elementary school teachers, 57 percent of secondary school teachers, 68 percent of vocational and educational counselors, and 45 percent of college and university teachers.

Not many women have reached the highest administrative echelons of the education system. The vast majority of deans, chancellors, and college and university presidents are still men. Given men's greater preoccupation with rank, this is not surprising. Yet in the United States women dominate the direct day-to-day education of the growing mind.

It seems probable that even more women will be teaching in coming decades. Teachers will be needed.

In 1910, only 10 percent of eighteen-year-olds in New York City had finished high school, a figure that probably reflected the national educational level at the time. By 1993, 88 percent of all American adults had earned high school diplomas. Today some 51 million children are enrolled in U.S. primary and secondary schools—more than at any other time in American history. Educators project that by 2005 some 55.9 million children will be enrolled.

Americans have come to believe Ben Franklin's dictum "If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him." As students pour into classrooms, schools will need more teachers to give them information and help them convert this resource into knowledge. I think women will respond enthusiastically to this need for teachers, since the educational system is changing in ways that will appeal to women.

From The First Sex, New York: Random House, 1999.