The Exception to Women’s Advantage: How Rurality, Red Counties, and the Local Economy Shape Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment

Rural communities have lagged urban areas in the economic and sociocultural shifts thought to underlie women’s advantage in bachelor’s degree (BA) attainment, such as the expansion of high-status professional jobs and increasing gender egalitarianism. Using nationally representative data (ELS:2002), we bridge the gap between the macroscale factors theorized to drive women’s educational gains and the local environments shaping youth outcomes by analyzing gender patterns in BA attainment across rural and urban high school students. Women who attended high school in metropolitan areas hold a clear BA advantage, but not women who attended nonmetropolitan high schools, where girls earn higher grades than boys yet attain bachelor’s degrees at similar rates. We find that, net of other characteristics, women’s BA advantage is most suppressed in rural counties with strong Republican majorities and limited professional employment opportunities. Overall, our study suggests that women’s BA advantage is geographically uneven and varies across local sociopolitical and economic conditions.