A key Sustainable Development Goal target is to ‘eliminate gender disparities in education’ by 2030. The prevailing consensus is that considerable progress has been made in reducing gender schooling inequality during the last two decades. As the 2020 UNESCO Global Gender Education Monitoring Report notes that ‘there has been a generational leap in access to education for girls over the past 25 years (2020: 1). However, it is also widely recognised that ‘despite significant gains in recent years, education outcomes for girls in developing countries continue to lag behind those of boys’ (GPE, 2018:2).

Read more in my working paper number 18