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No Stalled Revolution: The Closing Gender Gap in Early Careers in Europe and the United States

By on September 28, 2026 in Articles

Oliver Lipps, Daniel Oesch, Roujman Shahbazian

Sociological Science September 28, 2026
10.15195/v13.a44

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Women have surpassed men in higher education, yet their labor market progress relative to men is widely seen as stalled. We address this apparent contradiction by adopting a cohort perspective—since gender convergence is driven by cohort replacement rather than period effects—and focusing on early careers (ages 25–34), before parenthood widens the gender gap. Drawing on large-scale national data spanning several decades, we analyze single-year birth cohorts from 1960 to 1998 in France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States across multiple labor market outcomes. Our results show that gender gaps in employment, working hours, and occupational attainment have narrowed substantially in all countries studied. Most importantly, young women have made up considerable ground in total labor income: the gender gap has more than halved between the 1965 and 1995 birth cohorts. Although young women still lag behind young men, particularly mothers, our findings show steady convergence and challenge the narrative of stalled progress.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Oliver Lipps: FORS, Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences.
E-mail: oliver.lipps@fors.unil.ch.

Daniel Oesch: LIVES Centre, Géopolis, University of Lausanne.
E-mail: daniel.oesch@unil.ch.

Roujman Shahbazian: Uppsala University, Stockholm University.
E-mail: roujman.shahbazian@uu.se.

Acknowledgments: This article benefited from helpful comments by Fabrizio Bernardi, Guillaume Bornet, Matthias Enggist, Alicia Garcia-Sierra, Michael Grätz, Luis Ortiz, and Gina Westenberger, as well as from participants at the 2025 SLLS Conference in Fribourg, the 2026 Social Demography Seminar Series at UNED Madrid, and the 2026 RC28 Annual Conference in Sevilla.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The statistical code, documentation, and instructions needed to reproduce all the empirical results reported in this article are publicly available at https://osf.io/ks4qj. As our analyses rely on restricted-access microdata, which we are not legally permitted to redistribute, the package contains the full code and step-by-step documentation of how each dataset can be obtained from the respective statistical agencies and data archives (see the Data availability section).


  • Citation: Lipps, Oliver, Daniel Oesch, and Roujman Shahbazian. 2026. “No Stalled Revolution: The Closing Gender Gap in Early Careers in Europe and the United States” Sociological Science 13:1159-1178.
  • Received: May 31, 2026
  • Accepted: September 1, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bianca Manago
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a44


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

By on June 25, 2026 in Articles

April Sutton, Bernardo Mackenna, Bolun Zhang, Amanda Bosky

Sociological Science June 25, 2026
10.15195/v13.a28

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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.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


April Sutton: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: asutton@ucsd.edu.

Bernardo Mackenna: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: bmackenn@stanford.edu.

Bolun Zhang: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: bolunzhang@zju.edu.cn.

Amanda Bosky: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: abosky@utexas.edu.

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by a National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship and a UC San Diego Hellman Fellowship awarded to April Sutton. We are grateful for the helpful feedback of anonymous reviewers. The article also benefited from presentations at the NAEd Annual Meeting and Fall Retreat and the Population Association of America.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: A replication package, including code, documentation, and links/DOIs to data sources, is available at Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.17336597). The primary analyses use restricted-access data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education. These data are available only to approved investigators through the IES/NCES application process (https://ies.ed.gov/about/restricted-use-data). We provide the URLs/DOIs and table identifiers needed to retrieve the publicly available data (e.g., U.S. Census summary files) we used to augment the ELS:2002.


  • Citation: Sutton, April, Bernardo Mackenna, Bolun Zhang, and Amanda Bosky. 2026. “The Exception to Women’s Advantage: How Rurality, Red Counties, and the Local Economy Shape Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment” Sociological Science 13:712-746.
  • Received: May 15, 2025
  • Accepted: October 13, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a28


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Equalization through Deterioration: The Shrinking Gender Gap in Swedish School Grades

By on September 30, 2025 in Articles

Carina Mood

Sociological Science September 30, 2025
10.15195/v12.a27

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This article documents a surprising reversal in the long-standing gender gap in academic achievement: between 2021 and 2024, Swedish girls’ school grades declined sharply, whereas boys’ grades remained stable, narrowing the gender gap by over a third. Using full-population data on official school grades and national test scores, the analysis shows that the decline is broad based, affecting nearly all subjects and concentrated among previously high-performing girls. Changes in grading policy or long-term mental health trends are unlikely to account for the sudden downturn. Instead, the evidence points to behavioral changes in girls’ school engagement, possibly triggered by external shocks. Among the most plausible shocks are the rise of TikTok, which increased in popularity among girls just before the grade decline, and Covid-19 disruptions, which may have acted as a catalyst. Although the causes remain uncertain, the pattern signals a sociologically significant disruption, challenging assumptions of stable female academic advantage and inviting international replication.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Carina Mood: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Institute for Futures Studies E-mail: carina.mood@sofi.su.se.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Janne Jonsson for helpful comments and Vetenskapsrådet (grant number: 2022-02036) and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number: P24-0170) for financial support.

Reproducibility Package: A reproducibility package is available at https://osf.io/y8vmk/files/osfstorage. Parts of the article are based on publicly available aggregate data. These data, links to sources, and code to reproduce the analyses are provided in the reproducibility package. Parts of the article are based on analyses of microdata accessed through Statistics Sweden’s secure MONA server within the framework of the Inequality project with ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2019-02761). Data can be accessed only after ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (see https://etikprovningsmyndigheten.se/en/) and after secrecy assessment of Statistics Sweden (see https://www.scb.se/en/services/ordering-data-and-statistics/ ). A list of necessary registers and variables and code to reproduce the analyses are provided in the reproducibility package.


  • Citation: Carina Mood. 2025. ““Equalization through Deterioration: The Shrinking Gender Gap in Swedish School Grades” Sociological Science 12: 670-684.
  • Received: July 30, 2025
  • Accepted: August 30, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: : 10.15195/v12.a27

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