Stepping Up:
How Education Access Can Help Bridge the Gender Gap for Working Adults
White PAPER
The gender gap in higher education and its impact on the workforce
Working adult student perspectives and education benefits
Strategies higher education institutions and employers can deploy to help working adult women leverage their education benefits and unlock career mobility
Women dominate frontline roles. Many aspire to leverage these jobs as gateway roles into greater career mobility. Today, career advancement often means learning new skills and competencies, but for many women working frontline jobs, the cost of earning a degree that could unlock economic mobility is simply too high —both in terms of time and money. Yet the prospects of not doing so are bleak: a stagnant minimum wage, coupled with high automation risk means that not only do frontline employees face continued economic hardship, but a growing danger that their roles will be lost in coming years.
Career Path With Education Benefit
There is a clear and undeniable correlation between education level and income.
How can education benefits be leveraged
to help address discrepancies in pay and representation for women?
The American labor force lost 2.4 million women in 2020. Predominantly, this loss included Black, Hispanic, Latinx, and Indigenous women who are overrepresented in frontline roles and sectors hardest hit by the pandemic, and by women forced to choose between career and parenting or caregiving responsibilities. These trends were mirrored in higher education, where women lost 1.4x as many jobs as men - and people of color, who represented 1 in 4 higher education employees accounted for more than half of all jobs lost.
It’s easy to point at the pandemic — a clear and exogenous shock that left virtually no industry untouched — as a singular cause of this job loss, but that isn’t the full story. Women are underrepresented in fields and roles historically aligned with the most earning potential, and those who do enter those fields are generally paid less than their male counterparts. The pandemic simply made the impact of deeply ingrained gender inequities more visible.
This white paper explores:
Learn more about how access to higher education can help close the gender gap
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Women dominate frontline roles. Many aspire to leverage these jobs as gateway roles into greater career mobility. Today, career advancement often means learning new skills and competencies, but for many women working frontline jobs, the cost of earning a degree that could unlock economic mobility is simply too high —both in terms of time and money. Yet the prospects of not doing so are bleak: a stagnant minimum wage, coupled with high automation risk means that not only do frontline employees face continued economic hardship, but a growing danger that their roles will be lost in coming years.