Why Female Education is a Staple of an Advanced Society

Look around you, are you surrounded by dozens of women in all of your university classes? Good. You might even be one of them, which is even better.

If you are a man and think that somehow the system is working against you, and that women are afforded more opportunities in education you should think again, and more importantly hope that it certainly is the case. Would you rather be in a class full of women, or men?

But seriously, beyond these shallow interpretations, the sharp increase of educated women in the last 50 years is indicative of something more important than just more people walking around with college degrees. It is suggestive of an advanced society, that is moving beyond superstitions, and more importantly beyond autocratic rule.

In every instance, a society where women are on average more educated, and have access to education is more advanced in every single aspect, from economic certainty to social equality, but more importantly these places are inherently Free. 

In 1970, the percentage of women in the U.S labour force(which itself was smaller than today) who had some sort of college degree ranged between 11-12 %, while today more than 36% of women have post-secondary education. More women compete in more fields than ever before, and more women are going for degrees in sciences and engineering. And all of this is becoming ever present not only in the West, but most first-world nations.

The current CEO of GM Motors, a woman of 52, is tackling one of the biggest recall problems in history of auto mobiles, but is doing it diligently and with strength. Yet she is not only one example, there are hundreds of women in the west that achieved higher education and went on to utilize it in the private and public domains.

Yet, those are Western countries. While these women are making something of themselves, their sisters in most parts of the world do not have access to education, as they live under autocratic regimes that prohibits them from doing so. Just recently, the 17 year old girl, Malala, who one the Nobel Peace Prize for blogging the lack of education women were and are afforded in her native Pakistan and got shot for it, brings light to the problem and how grave it actually is.

Wherever women such as in Malala’s country are denied education two characteristics prevail: poverty, and more often than not, overpopulation.

If we take most Middle Eastern nations where women are second class citizens and are afforded no freedoms, they tend to live in ubiquitous hardship, from Afghanistan to places such as Syria, the level of poverty is staggering. In places such as India, where although women have access to education, the great divide between the classes make its impossible for millions to get an education, which in itself exacerbates that divide as they never achieve the literacy or qualifications needed for better employment opportunities.

Women in most African nations, including the Maghreb in the north are forced to work from a young age, they get stuck in male patriarchal traditions, and through their lack of education continue to make the poverty and overpopulation problem of these countries even worse. The prime example of Fatimah Bamun who was forced to drop out of school because her father would not buy her pencils or paper, is in itself a grotesque implicit incident that is widespread throughout the world.

You might be asking yourself the important question of how? Well I will tell you.

It has been proven that the more education and independence a woman has, the more likely that she has control over her reproduction, through the use of contraceptions and family planning, which in turn brings down the number of children born, which in turn leads to less mouths to feed and work for. If a women has the literacy and global education that should be primary to the human condition, the problem of economic deficit would begin to dissipate.

The ultimate truth is that it is a viscous cycle, the more a third world country continues to avoid educating its women the further it will continue to fall in a void of economic destitution. Poverty and totalitarian male control do indeed cause a lack of education for women, but that in itself makes those two even more pronounced.

I do not care who I offend. Countries where women are not given an education, or are not educated on average, are usually backward states. So stop complaining that your psychology class is made up only of women.

Economic and social progress can be accelerated by affording women in third world countries, and even at home, more opportunities to learn.