The education gender gap: have men given up?

March is women’s history month. So what better way to honor women than by taking a look at one area in which they are leading the way: education.

Women now outnumber their male counterparts in college and earn more bachelor’s degrees by a 30% to 22% margin, according to the October Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2011, more than30 million women received. While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees.

However, the reason for women taking the lead educationally may be that so many men have given up. Claudia Buchmann, author of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means For American Schools, pointed out on Monday’s show that because more men are failing to pursue higher education, the U.S., which “used to have the most highly educated population in the world, [has now] slipped down to 12th in that ranking.” Buchmann said, “We want to find policies and solutions to support both girls and boys to get them as far as they can in school today, because we are living in a knowledge economy where we need more educated people.”