Vaccination as a cause of women's equality?
I ran into an interesting paper on the causes of women's equality. The introduction starts with the stirring analysis
One of the greatest achievements of the world during the twentieth century has been the progress made toward gender equality. Comparing the role of women in economic and social life in 2000 relative to that in 1900 reveals the remarkable changes that occurred in terms of women’s legal status, political rights, access to the labor market, and other areas. Yet, nowhere is this change more visible than when looking at female educational attainment. In many countries of the world, women nowadays outperform men in all levels of education, to the point that the relative under-performance of men is being considered an emerging problem.
The progress achieved by women in terms of their educational attainment relative to men can be seen in Fig. 1. The fgure depicts the evolution of the female-to-male ratio of average years of schooling over the twentieth century for a broad sample of 146 countries based on data from Barro and Lee (2013). In the beginning of the century, this ratio fluctuated around 0.75, implying that women had on average only 3/4 of the years of schooling that men had. Following World War II, though, we see a clear upward trend in this ratio, as female educational attainment began to catch up. By 1990 women had similar levels of schooling than men in many countries of the world and subsequently their educational attainment began to surge ahead.
The paper goes on to propose that a major cause was large-scale vaccination. They say that women develop stronger immunity from vaccination than men on the average, and so vaccination tends to increase women's life expediencies more than men's. This increases the incentives for women's education more than the incentives for men's education.
What makes this testable is (1) The rich world sponsored a world-wide vaccination campaign over a fairly short period of time, so the reduction of vaccinatable diseases happened in many countries of widely varying characteristics independently of their economic status, and (2) The fraction of the health burdens of a country which were due to which vaccinatable diseases varied greatly.
The correlations suggest that indeed, vaccination increased women's relative life expectancies and this was a driver in increasing women's education vis-a-vis that of men.
One of the greatest achievements of the world during the twentieth century has been the progress made toward gender equality. Comparing the role of women in economic and social life in 2000 relative to that in 1900 reveals the remarkable changes that occurred in terms of women’s legal status, political rights, access to the labor market, and other areas. Yet, nowhere is this change more visible than when looking at female educational attainment. In many countries of the world, women nowadays outperform men in all levels of education, to the point that the relative under-performance of men is being considered an emerging problem.
The progress achieved by women in terms of their educational attainment relative to men can be seen in Fig. 1. The fgure depicts the evolution of the female-to-male ratio of average years of schooling over the twentieth century for a broad sample of 146 countries based on data from Barro and Lee (2013). In the beginning of the century, this ratio fluctuated around 0.75, implying that women had on average only 3/4 of the years of schooling that men had. Following World War II, though, we see a clear upward trend in this ratio, as female educational attainment began to catch up. By 1990 women had similar levels of schooling than men in many countries of the world and subsequently their educational attainment began to surge ahead.
The paper goes on to propose that a major cause was large-scale vaccination. They say that women develop stronger immunity from vaccination than men on the average, and so vaccination tends to increase women's life expediencies more than men's. This increases the incentives for women's education more than the incentives for men's education.
What makes this testable is (1) The rich world sponsored a world-wide vaccination campaign over a fairly short period of time, so the reduction of vaccinatable diseases happened in many countries of widely varying characteristics independently of their economic status, and (2) The fraction of the health burdens of a country which were due to which vaccinatable diseases varied greatly.
The correlations suggest that indeed, vaccination increased women's relative life expectancies and this was a driver in increasing women's education vis-a-vis that of men.