While education can be a vehicle for change and contribute to achieving gender equality, the school system can also reproduce inequalities and often reflects inequalities in society. Here, we present a portrait of education in the region, incorporating a gender-based analysis from an intersectional perspective (GBA+).

Government data on education is broken down by gender in a binary fashion. That is why we address the differences between girls and boys, but we are aware that the experience of trans and non-binary young people is different and deserves to be better documented.

Although women in the region have a higher enrolment rate than men across all types of qualifications [1], they must study longer to earn an equivalent salary. In 2021, the percentage of people aged 25 to 64 without a qualification in the region was 16.4% for women and 24.3% for men [2]. More women than men had graduated from college, CEGEP or another non-university institution (24.4% of women and 15.4% of men) and had completed at least a bachelor’s degree (19.0% of women and 10.9% of men) [3].

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