Women with Post-Secondary Education

Gender differences are prevalent in every aspect of life. Parents paint their daughters' bedrooms pink and their sons' bedroom blue. Boys are often given matchbox cars and action figures to play with, whereas girls play with dollhouses and teddy bears. In the job sector today, there are many fields that consist primarily of women and other fields that severely lack the presence of qualified women. While the workplace has seen little change, women are catching up and even surpassing men in attaining a college education.
In Canada, a recent study found that women with post-secondary education outnumber men. Although the difference is just over one percent, women have surpassed men in overall education attainment for the first time. Females make up 62.2 percent of adults between 25 and 34 years with a medical degree, a sharp contrast from the women of the previous generations where only 25 percent of women between 55 and 64 years of age had a medical degree. Can neurological factors explain why men have attained college education more often than women until recently? Furthermore, can neurological factors explain why women are catching up to, and even surpassing men?
Lise Eliot's book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain, How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps, addresses such gender differences from a neurological standpoint. Eliot explains that girls actually start out doing better than boys in the fields of math and science, and regardless of age, girls get better grades than boys. However, boys consistently perform better on standardized tests, and they catch up to the abilities of the opposite sex by the end of high school. Eliot uses the gender difference in spatial skills in order to explain the difference in mathematical skill sets of men and women. Spatial perception, which results from visual acuity is greater in males than in females. While this could be advantageous to men navigating unfamiliar terrain, it also translates to improved math skills. Better spatial skills means that men have an edge with visualizing rotations, angles, and objects in three dimensions. Such skills are crucial in geometry, geography, as well as most areas of science and engineering. Furthermore, the math SAT score gap between men and women is completely eliminated if spatial ability is factored into the comparison of SAT scores. These phenomena help explain why more men than women have attained higher levels of education than women. But what has changed?
While there is not a lot of scientific research on the topic, the answer, according to Eliot, could lie in a number of variables that emerge out of cultural factors rather than neurological ones. One such cultural factor is that women have been stereotyped as being bad at mathematics, and this leads to lower confidence among girls as young as first graders who express less certainty than men to succeed at mathematics. But if this attitude were changed, and women were encouraged about their skills the lack of confidence could be eliminated. This could be one of the reasons why in the recent years, there has been an increasing number of women succeeding in college and beyond.

Reference:
Eliot, Lise. Pink Brain, Blue Brain, How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps -- And What We Can Do About It. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Print.

"More Women than Men Have Post-secondary Education." CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, 26 June 2013. Web. 26 Feb. 2014. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/more-women-than-men-have-post-secondary-education-1.1358656>