In recent decades, a dramatic shift has occurred in higher education throughout much of the industrialized world. For the first time in history, women are completing more education than men. Through the 1970s, women lagged behind men in the number of tertiary degrees completed in most nations. Since the 1980s, women have begun to reach parity with men and, in many cases, surpassed men in terms of their educational attainment. Today, out of the 30 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), women comprise 53 percent of tertiary students, surpassing men in all but five countries: Germany, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and Turkey (UNESCO 2005; see fig. 1). Most striking about these changes is that they are occurring across a large number of countries. This increasingly upward shift in women’s educational status will no doubt cause further transformations in these societies and have large implications for gender stratification worldwide.

Research has begun to focus on women’s advantage in tertiary education in the United States (Buchmann and DiPrete 2006; DiPrete and Buchmann 2006), but it is important to remember that women’s growing share of tertiary completion does not indicate complete gender equality within education or in other arenas. College majors remain highly sex segregated, with women enrolled in fields of study that earn less money than men (Jacobs 1999; Charles and Grusky 2004). Women still lag behind men in terms of financial returns to education, labor market participation, and representation in politics (Paxton and Kunovich 2003; Pettit and Hook 2005; Bobbitt-Zeher 2007). Given the many arenas in which men continue to experience an advantage, it is especially important to study education, the one area in which women have reached parity with—and in many countries surpassed—men. Women’s increasing success in tertiary completion could influence future gender in-