Towards gender equality in education: Different strategies to improve subnational performance of European countries using data envelopment analysis

Dovilė Stumbrienė, José L. Ruiz and Inmaculada Sirvent

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2025, vol. 98, issue C

Abstract: The principle of equality between women and men is enshrined as one of the core values of the European Union. Even though in many European countries women outperform men at all educational levels, the perspective of men is limited in the strategies that frame gender equality. This paper assumes that the gender gap matters, regardless of its direction, towards gender equality in education. The paper proposes a benchmarking approach through a bi-objective Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model used in evaluating 30 European countries at the subnational level in terms of performance indicators, which are disaggregated by gender. Thus, the model incorporates information on gender equality and employs it to set region-specific targets seeking both to close the gap between actual performances and best practices (i.e., minimizing the efforts for improving performance) and to close the gender gap. Varying the importance attached to each of the two objectives considered, the proposed approach generates a series of targets that allow us to identify alternative planning strategies for improving performance toward best practices while at the same time closing the gender gap.

Keywords: Equality; Gender gap; Data envelopment analysis; Target setting; Education; European countries; Benchmarking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038012124003380
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceps:v:98:y:2025:i:c:s0038012124003380

DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2024.102138

Access Statistics for this article

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences is currently edited by Barnett R. Parker

More articles in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().