Using world data that is. It is possible that it was different in a small handful of countries, but considering that feminists everywhere repeat the exact same cliches, I might as well use world data since the arguments are the same everywhere anyway
.
With how much feminists love to cry about women being banned from higher education in the past and so on, and how horrible and limiting it was, it seems that those numbers just aren't mentioned as often as they should be.
ourworldindata.org
I've heard A LOT of "Women couldn't even go to school, can you imagine trying to have an independent life like that!" but I don't think anyone has ever pointed out that it was the same for 99+% of men for as long as there were any real barriers to female enrollment in higher education (which always existed, but that's a slightly different topic.) It almost sounds like those people imagine current day levels of university enrollment when thinking of 19th century, and that that is what foids were banned from. Presentism and recency bias are nasty barriers to understanding the past.
Male university enrollment worldwide reached 0.1% in 1860 and 0.2% ten years later. Female one reached 0.1% in 1915 and 0.2% five years later, still before the male one had reached 1% as can be seen in the screenshot above, meaning that there was at most a 60 year window during which male enrollment in tertiary education was significantly greater than the female one, and during that time, it was still an extremely exclusive and very elite thing.
What the data clearly shows is that tertiary education was for a long time something so rare that it was a status marker even among the most privileged 1%. That made sense to keep mostly male-only, since it's men, not women, who often need extra status or elevated societal position to guarantee getting to find someone and start a family. Any women who would even have a chance to get non-Church university education at the time when less than 0.5% of men got it were already beyond set for life, so they simply didn't need it, though their brothers could use it to raise their value on the marriage market.
Then, it started getting more common among the elites, so elite foids started demanding access to wider higher education as well, and after doing so for about 60 years were given it as well. Then you had a short period, about 20-30 years, when it became commonplace among both elite men and women, before starting to trickle down to the rest of the world about a decade after the end of WWII, with men being more enthusiatic to take it than women due to the increased status and earning potential necessary for a lot of men to increase their chances on the dating and marriage market as I mentioned above, but it was always at most about a 2:1 split even then.
The story here isn't at all of a gender-based oppression where vast swathes of men were enjoying privileges and opportunnities associated with university education that were completely denied to women. Just looking at the lines makes it clear that it was an economic status thing, and the endless cloaking of it as a gender issue just shows, like many other things, the overwhelming Apex Fallacy through which feminists and foids in general see the world, with lower-status, if not non-elite men in general, not really existing in their view of the world.
And of course, while that was going on in tertiary education, as the graph makes clear, there was never anything like that in primary education, or at least not in the last few centuries. There, there doesn't seem to ever have been even as many as twice as many boys than girls since the early 19th century.
.With how much feminists love to cry about women being banned from higher education in the past and so on, and how horrible and limiting it was, it seems that those numbers just aren't mentioned as often as they should be.
Gender gap in primary, secondary and tertiary education
For primary, lower secondary and upper secondary, this is the net enrollment ratio — the share of children of official school age enrolled at that level. For tertiary, it is the gross ratio, which includes students of any age and can exceed 100% because many enrol late or repeat a year.
ourworldindata.org
I've heard A LOT of "Women couldn't even go to school, can you imagine trying to have an independent life like that
!" but I don't think anyone has ever pointed out that it was the same for 99+% of men for as long as there were any real barriers to female enrollment in higher education (which always existed, but that's a slightly different topic.) It almost sounds like those people imagine current day levels of university enrollment when thinking of 19th century, and that that is what foids were banned from. Presentism and recency bias are nasty barriers to understanding the past.Male university enrollment worldwide reached 0.1% in 1860 and 0.2% ten years later. Female one reached 0.1% in 1915 and 0.2% five years later, still before the male one had reached 1% as can be seen in the screenshot above, meaning that there was at most a 60 year window during which male enrollment in tertiary education was significantly greater than the female one, and during that time, it was still an extremely exclusive and very elite thing.
What the data clearly shows is that tertiary education was for a long time something so rare that it was a status marker even among the most privileged 1%. That made sense to keep mostly male-only, since it's men, not women, who often need extra status or elevated societal position to guarantee getting to find someone and start a family. Any women who would even have a chance to get non-Church university education at the time when less than 0.5% of men got it were already beyond set for life, so they simply didn't need it, though their brothers could use it to raise their value on the marriage market.
Then, it started getting more common among the elites, so elite foids started demanding access to wider higher education as well, and after doing so for about 60 years were given it as well. Then you had a short period, about 20-30 years, when it became commonplace among both elite men and women, before starting to trickle down to the rest of the world about a decade after the end of WWII, with men being more enthusiatic to take it than women due to the increased status and earning potential necessary for a lot of men to increase their chances on the dating and marriage market as I mentioned above, but it was always at most about a 2:1 split even then.
The story here isn't at all of a gender-based oppression where vast swathes of men were enjoying privileges and opportunnities associated with university education that were completely denied to women. Just looking at the lines makes it clear that it was an economic status thing, and the endless cloaking of it as a gender issue just shows, like many other things, the overwhelming Apex Fallacy through which feminists and foids in general see the world, with lower-status, if not non-elite men in general, not really existing in their view of the world.
And of course, while that was going on in tertiary education, as the graph makes clear, there was never anything like that in primary education, or at least not in the last few centuries. There, there doesn't seem to ever have been even as many as twice as many boys than girls since the early 19th century.
