Place and Male Educational Attainment Gaps
In our latest release of the Distressed Communities Index, we highlighted the very strong relationship between local economic distress and the gap in educational outcomes between men and women. Men in the most prosperous places are 1–2 percent less likely to have attained a high school diploma than women; men in mid-tier places are 2–3 percent less likely; and men in the most distressed places are 4–5 percent less likely, as shown below.
Nationally, 90 percent of women and 89 percent of men over 25 have a high school diploma — close to parity. But this relatively small gap in educational attainment is significantly larger in distressed places, those with higher poverty rates, lower prime-age employment rates, lower median household incomes, among other characteristics.1
When men and women with only a high school diploma, versus those with any college education, are separated out, the attainment gaps widen further. On average, 53 percent of women in distressed counties have received at least some college education, while only 43 percent of men have — a 10 percentage point difference.
Why this matters
That overall education levels are lower in distressed places than they are in prosperous ones is not surprising, and reflects the poorer opportunities available in these places. But the larger gap between men and women in these places matters too. When men in distressed communities fall behind women educationally, it threatens their relative socioeconomic mobility, longevity, and health — and comes with political and cultural consequences.2
High school graduation is particularly important. Because high school dropouts are far more likely to be unemployed and impoverished than those with higher levels of education,3 the share of adults without a high school diploma is a meaningful indicator of disadvantage.
How did we get here?
The last 75 years have seen an extraordinary rise in high school graduation rates overall, a remarkable achievement linked to growing economic prosperity for Americans across the income distribution. As younger cohorts earned diplomas at higher rates, the overall portion of adults with diplomas increased. However, these gains have not been shared equally.
From 1950 to 1980, the share of men and women with a high school diploma rose at similar rates, with men slightly ahead in both distressed and prosperous counties. After 1980, women began pulling ahead everywhere, but the gender gap widened fastest in the most distressed communities.
Today, 86 percent of women and 82 percent of men in distressed places have a high school diploma, a gain of 37 percentage points for women versus 32 percentage points for men since 1980.
Men in distressed places lagging behind has resulted in a larger gender gap than what exists in prosperous ones. In 1980, the gender gap in educational attainment was smaller for both types of communities — differing by only one percentage point. Today, that difference between prosperous and distressed communities has grown to 2.5 percentage points, as shown in the figure above, and appears to be widening further still.
Are these education measures missing something?
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), where this data comes from, does not collect information on alternative educational pathways such as trade and vocational schools.4 These programs are lauded for propelling young men into highly demanded, well-paying jobs in the trades.
If many men living in distressed areas without high school diplomas have received vocational or trade education, the gender gap might simply reflect a measurement problem. The ACS may be failing to capture relevant educational pathways that have similar — or better — employment and earnings outcomes compared to a high school diploma.
But vocational school attendance has been low for decades, with no systematic gender gap. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) education supplement, the share of both men and women between ages 16 and 30 who report being enrolled in vocational training programs has hovered between 2 and 4 percent, with a slight downward trend.
Similarly, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) estimates that 14 percent of women and 13 percent of men 18 years and older have educational certificates — which are essentially vocational, technical, and trade degrees. And according to SIPP, less than one percent of either men or women have earned a certificate without graduating high school.
The lack of a national gender certificate gap aligns with evidence that the most popular vocational training programs are healthcare-related, a field that women dominate.5 Even so, perhaps men in distressed areas are more likely to pursue vocational degrees. Unfortunately, detailed county-level data isn’t available to confirm whether this pattern actually exists.
Yet even if we assume that 15 percent of male high school dropouts in distressed areas have vocational degrees and no female dropouts do, the gap remains. Counting these vocationally-educated men as having a high school diploma brings the male rate to 85 percent, still below women’s 86 percent.
There does not appear to be a gender gap in terms of vocational or trade school degrees. However, data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on high school career and technical education does find larger gaps in high school courses taken in these disciplines. In 2019, 87 percent of male high school graduates and 82 percent of female high school graduates took at least one of these courses.6
A larger course-taking gap suggests a second potential education pathway: that young men are accumulating enough vocational-related course credits to secure jobs before graduating high school, allowing them to sidestep the diploma.
If this were the case, it should show up in employment rates.
In general, employment rates are higher for men than for women, and higher for prosperous places than distressed ones. We can measure a geographic employment gap as the ratio of employment rates in distressed counties to employment rates in prosperous counties. If men are dropping out of high school for jobs, we would expect this distressed-to-prosperous employment ratio to be similar for both men and women. It is not.
Relative to their peers in prosperous counties, men are 24 percent less likely to be employed, while women are only 19 percent less likely — a five percentage point gap. Even if men are taking more trade and vocational courses in high school, this is not translating to improved employment outcomes.
Which people are we talking about here?
People move to seek economic opportunity. Distressed places frequently lose more-educated adults who find jobs in more prosperous areas. This migration implies two potential measurement issues for local-level educational attainment gaps:
Adult education levels may not reflect actual graduation rates. The share of adults over 25 with a high school diploma could be lower than the actual graduation rate if educated residents leave. In this case, adult education levels would reflect who stayed rather than who did or did not graduate. Both measures are meaningful, but since we’re interested in how growing up in a distressed county affects educational outcomes, we need to understand actual graduation outcomes.
Men and women may differ in geographic mobility. If men have weaker ties to place, higher-achieving men might leave distressed areas while higher-achieving women stay. This would create an apparent gender gap in adult educational attainment even if actual high school graduation rates were equal for both groups.
These concerns can be addressed by identifying which location individuals resided in when they would have been attending high school. Even with this restriction, the gender gap persists: young women who lived in a distressed place at age 18 are three percentage points more likely to have graduated high school than young men in those same places.7 This suggests that the adult education gap was not simply a product of selective out-migration, though differences in mobility may still play a role.8
The gap also appears earlier in the educational pipeline. Male non-enrollment rates among children ages 5–17 have consistently exceeded female rates, with slightly larger differences in distressed places than in prosperous ones. This further indicates that gender disparities in attainment likely begin before high school completion rather than emerging solely through post-graduation sorting.
Worryingly, the COVID-19 pandemic widened these patterns. Non-enrollment rates rose sharply for both boys and girls in distressed places, while increases were comparatively modest in prosperous areas. If these disruptions translate into lower completion rates, educational divergence between distressed and prosperous places may accelerate in the coming years, regardless of gender.
Are all distressed places created equal?
Distressed counties encompass a wide range of places — from former manufacturing hubs that declined in recent decades, to rural farming counties with poorly funded schools, to inner-city neighborhoods experiencing intergenerational poverty.
This variety shows up in the gender education gap. Across distressed counties, the gender gap in the share of adults with a high school diploma ranges widely: in some places, men are 10 percentage points ahead of women; in others, they’re 10 percentage points behind. This range indicates that there is significant educational attainment variability within distressed counties.
We can get a sense of what explains this variability by looking at differences in the mean education gap between different types of distressed places. The figure below shows the percentage point gap in these means between distressed counties that
Have a degree-granting institution or not
Have above-median single-parent households or not
Have above-median manufacturing employment share in 1990 or not
Are rural or not
Are in the southern Census region or not
Have above-median black population share or not
Note that as a baseline, distressed counties have a negative high school education gap (-3.6 percentage points). The coefficients displayed capture the relative difference.
We can see that on average, counties that have large black populations, are located in the south, are rural, or were a manufacturing hub in the ‘90s, have a more negative gap than those that are not. Those that have a higher-education institution located in the county, or where a large share of households with children are run by a single parent, have a more positive gap.
There is substantial variation in educational gaps within groups. The standard errors in this analysis help show whether the difference between groups (e.g., southern or not) is large or small relative to dispersion within groups. For counties with above-median black population share, those in the south, and rural counties, the difference between groups is relatively large compared to within groups.
Greater understanding of the role of economic distress for widening gender gaps in educational attainment has the potential to improve education policy.
Current education policy often focuses on improving test scores, teacher quality, and curriculum standards. These goals matter, but they may miss something crucial: how place shapes educational outcomes differently for men and women.
If distressed communities face unique barriers that particularly affect young men’s education, then effective interventions must be tailored to local economic contexts. Education policy needs to explicitly consider place — recognizing that a one-size-fits-all approach may fail students in communities where economic distress creates gender-specific educational challenges.
View the GitHub repository with code for replicating this analysis here.
The ACS does ask about associates degrees, which trade schools hand out infrequently.
See Congress’s report and NCES for vocational programs, and Census’ article on healthcare professions for employment by gender.
This estimate is derived from an IPUMS ACS microdata sample, identifying the PUMA in which 19 year olds lived the year prior. Distressed categories are crosswalked to PUMAs.
County or district high school graduation rates broken out by sex are not available, necessitating this alternative approach.
I was really surprised to see that the gap between men and women is growing faster in distressed areas than in more prosperous ones. The employment data that challenges the vocational dropout theory is also very interesting. In distressed places, men are 24% less likely to be employed than their peers in prosperous counties, compared to 19% for women. Clearly, something about these places is affecting men's outcomes in a way we don't fully understand yet. This is fascinating work, Sarah.