Educating Young Women
From here, we can take the leap to educating young women. The World Bank estimates the global economy loses $15-$30 trillion when girls don’t complete 12 years of education. However, there would be an 18 percent boost in per capita GDP for each extra year of education.
Key Barriers
Forced marriage and violence are two of the barriers blocking adolescent girls’ access to education and economic independence:
Focusing on just one of the barriers, you can see the prevalence of forced marriage:
Our Bottom Line: Production Possibilities
As economists, we can summarize the impact of gender inequality with a production possibilities frontier. The graph lets us see the underutilization created by 85 percent of the girls in low income countries not completing secondary school.
Whereas our curved line shows the world economy’s maximum production potential, the dot indicates underutilization. Because no nation achieved the maximum global equality score of 100, the result is a vast gap between world production and its potential.
However, each extra year of a girl’s education would move the dot closer to the frontier:
