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Academically-focused learning activities beyond formal schooling are expanding in myriad forms throughout the world. This diverse realm of learning activities includes private supplementary education purchased by families such as private tutoring, online courses, cram schools, and learning center franchises. Some public schools also provide academically oriented after-school programs beyond their formal curricula. This review identifies factors relating to students, families, schools, and educational systems that affect participation in supplementary education. Macro forces are also related to the proliferation of learning activities outside of formal schooling. We discuss implications of this trend for educational stratification as well as challenges it creates for families and formal educational systems. Finally, we suggest promising new avenues for data collection and empirical research.

The terrain of gender inequalities in education has seen much change in recent decades. This article reviews the empirical research and theoretical perspectives on gender inequalities in educational performance and attainment from early childhood to young adulthood. Much of the literature on children and adolescents attends to performance differences between girls and boys. Of course, achievement in elementary and secondary school is linked to the level of education one ultimately attains including high school completion, enrollment in post-secondary education, college completion, and graduate and professional school experiences. We recommend three directions for future research: (a) interdisciplinary efforts to understand gender differences in cognitive development and noncognitive abilities in early childhood, (b) research on the structure and practices of schooling, and (c) analyses of how gender differences might amplify other kinds of inequalities, such as racial, ethnic, class, or nativity inequalities.

In a few short decades, the gender gap in college completion has reversed from favoring men to favoring women. This study, which is the first to assess broadly the causes of the growing female advantage in college completion, considers the impact of family resources as well as gender differences in academic performance and in the pathways to college completion on the rising gender gap. Analyses of General Social Survey data indicate that the female-favorable trend in college completion emerged unevenly by family status of origin to the disadvantage of sons in families with a low-educated or absent father. Additional analyses of National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) data indicate that women's superior academic performance plays a large role in producing the gender gap in college completion, but that this effect remains latent until after the transition to college. For NELS cohorts, who were born in the mid-1970s, the female advantage in college completion remains largest in families with a low-educated or absent father, but currently extends to all family types. In conjunction with women's growing incentives to attain higher education, gender differences in resources related to family background and academic performance largely explain the growing female advantage in college completion.

In the United States, women have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men since the mid-1980s. We examine the historical continuities in this trend and its sources, as well as changes since 2000 in gender gaps in advanced credentials, fields of study, types of institutions attended, and financing for higher education. The gender gap in bachelor’s degrees has remained stable at a high level over this period and a female advantage in advanced degrees emerged, especially in professional degrees. The deepening gender divide in credentials coincided with rising shares of women attending for-profit institutions and an emerging gender divide in student indebtedness. Thus, women disproportionately carry the promise and bear the costs of educational expansion, with far reaching implications for the future.

Analysis of March Current Population Survey data from 1964 through 2002 shows that white women overtook white men in their rates of college completion and that this phenomenon occurred during a period in which women's standard-of-living gains from college completion grew at a faster rate than those for men. We assess whether these trends are related to changes in the value of education for men and women in terms of earnings returns to higher education, the probability of getting and staying married, education-related differences in family standard of living, and insurance against living in poverty. Although returns to a college education in the form of earnings remained higher for women than for men over the entire period, trends in these returns do not provide aplausible explanation for gender-specific trends in college completion. But when broader measures of material well-being are taken into account, women's returns to higher education appear to have risen faster than those of men.

Immigrant-origin students (i.e., first- and second-generation immigrants) comprise roughly 20% of the US school-age population. Despite growing awareness of a female-favorable gender gap in educational performance, quantitative research on immigrant educational adaptation rarely considers whether there are differences in the educational adaptation patterns between boys and girls. Using a nationally representative sample of 2002 high school sophomores from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we examine gender-specific patterns of generational differences in high school grades and investigate racial/ethnic variation in these patterns. Among whites and Asians, girls and boys exhibit similar patterns of educational adaptation as measured by high school grade point average, but there are significant gender differences in patterns of educational adaptation among blacks and Hispanics. Second-generation Hispanic boys, but not girls, have lower grades than their coethnic native counterparts, and first-generation black boys, but not girls, earn higher grades than their native peers. Class preparedness and instrumental motivation partially explain these gender differences in educational adaptation, especially among blacks. The results reveal the heterogeneity in immigrant-origin youth's educational adaptation along gender and racial/ethnic lines and illuminate which students--in terms of gender, generational status, and race/ethnicity--are most at risk of downward mobility.

This review examines research on education and inequality in developing regions. In tracing the progress of this field of inquiry, it focuses on empirical studies of educational inequality in four broad areas: macro-structural forces shaping education and stratification; the relationship between family background and educational outcomes; school effects; and education's impact on economic and social mobility. It assesses the contributions of research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to the general study of education and social stratification and the theoretical leverage gained from examining stratification processes in developing regions of the world. Finally, the review discusses recent developments that hold promise for addressing the knowledge gaps that remain; these include utilizing relatively new data sources and methods in comparative, cross-national studies and greater collaboration between researchers who study strikingly similar questions but remain segregated due to their focus on either industrialized or developing societies.

This study is the first to use nationally representative data to examine whether differences in gender-typical behaviors among adolescents are associated with high school academic performance and whether such associations vary by race or socioeconomic status. Using wave I data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and linked academic transcript data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study, we find that boys who report moderate levels of gender atypicality earn the highest grade point averages (GPAs), but few boys score in this range. As gender typicality increases, boys’ GPAs decline steeply. In contrast, girls who practice moderate levels of gender typicality earn slightly higher GPAs than other girls. These patterns generally hold across race and socioeconomic status groups.

It is well established that mothers are paid less than childless women and that fathers tend to earn higher wages relative to childless men, but we do not know whether these findings apply to workers in all occupations. Using IPUMS and ACS data from 1980 and 2010, we examine the family wage gap for highly educated professionals, the most advantaged sector of the occupational distribution. Results indicate that the size of the negative wage differential for motherhood has declined over time in all professions. Moreover, in the traditionally male-dominated professions of STEM, medicine, and law, women with children experience a positive wage differential, whereas their counterparts in female-dominated professions continue to experience a negative one. The positive differential for fatherhood has remained stable over time. These findings underscore the growing heterogeneity of women's experiences in combining work and family and raise important questions for further research.