Gender Inequalities and different Levels of Education in Italy

Gender inequality in education is a theme that has always been studied by both economists and sociologists. Our societies continuously pursue the aim of gender equality and the common vision is that women are always disadvan-taged with respect to men. Following the publication of the 2015 BES Report by ISTAT, our analysis aims to use the education indicators the report provides to create an additive index of education and compare the index between males and females. This article investigates levels of education in twenty Italian regions: we built an additive index for females, for males and a general one, and then, comparing the ranks for each region, we looked for differences and similarities in the ranks. Research on gender gaps in educational performance offers different points of view to explain this phenomenon. Decades ago, educational theory and research remained focused on social class disparities and classic studies of inequality in education typically fo-cused on disparities by social class among men (Blau & Duncan, 1967, Bour-dieu & Passeron, 1977, Collins, 1979, Karbel & Halsey, 1977) and, as Jacobs pointed out, scholars who did focus on gender issues have often treated all aspects of education as working to the disadvantage of women (Jacobs, 1996). Today, research does not always find evidence of this disadvantage: in OECD countries, for example, more women than men enter higher education (Vincent- Lancrin, 2008). Today, the awareness that something has changed in gender inequalities leads to new questions about gender differences in education. In order to analyse the literature about gender inequalities in education, we pro-pose an analysis that does not pretend to be exhaustive, but aims to capture different directions in which studies have been developed. Literature focused on both gaps from kindergarten to high school and gaps in higher education. The starting point to analyse the source of inequality is to admit that some gender differences in some cognitive tasks are well established (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008) and that, as Halpern and colleagues point out: “bio-logical hypotheses are not necessarily sexist [and] there are biological origins to any cognitive ability” ( (Halpern, Wai, & Saw, 2004). However, biological explanations to inequality in education are not totally satis-factory and other questions can be raised about this subject. There are questions on how traditional gender stereotypes and norms influence students’ perceptions of their own abilities and the socialisations of girls and boys within their families and schools, and it has long been known that many aspects of one’s family of origin are integrally related to both educational per-formance and attainment. Other possible explanations for gender gaps are re-lated to the environments within schools and classrooms and a debate regard-ing whether teachers systematically favour one gender over the other is still ongoing (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008). Other studies focused on gender differences in higher education. Vincent-Lancrin writes about this subject as follows: “Until the 1990s, there were on av-erage more male than female students in OECD member countries. Women were disadvantaged by inequalities in access to higher education. Since then, inequalities to the detriment of men have emerged in almost all countries. How-ever, the faster increase in female participation in higher education has re-versed the trend in OECD member countries (but not in most of the rest of the world)”. He found out that “It is only at the doctoral level that women have not yet caught up with men, although current trends suggest that this will happen within a few years. All fields of study have therefore become feminised, even though gender segregation along subject lines still remains very pronounced” (Vincent- Lancrin, 2008). Buchmann and colleagues arrive to the same conclusions: “Trend statistics in the United States reflect a striking reversal of a gender gap in college comple-tion that once favoured males” (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008). Our analysis starts with the awareness that inequalities still exist and that when we talk about inequalities this does not mean that women are always disadvan-taged. As the European institute for gender equality found, European countries are, on average, halfway to achieve gender equality in education. What the in-stitute highlights is that, in contrast with other domains of analysis, women are not clearly disadvantaged in education, but the situation is characterized by many nuances (EIGE, 2016). Our work takes into account Italian regions and it has two different aims: 1) building an index of education for males and one for females (relative to 2014) and observing and discussing ranking in order to analyse whether the best-performing regions are the same for both sexes or instead well-performing re-gions for one sex are not also well-performing for the other sex; 2) building an index for both sexes together to observe how Italian regions are distributed and to analyse best-performing and worst-performing regions. In the first part of the article we present the variables selected and we discuss the method we used to set up the index. The second part contains the results and the concluding remarks.