Canadian media platform Visual Capitalist, drawing on World Bank and UNESCO Institute for Statistics data from 2022 to 2025, set out to answer a straightforward question: today, are men or women more likely to hold a university degree?
The findings show that, globally, women lead men in tertiary education attainment by an average of 12 percentage points. In the country, women's coverage of higher education is 14 percentage points higher than men's, placing it 105th out of 148 nations overall.
Which countries have more women graduating from university than men?
The widest gap between men and women completing university was recorded in the Republic of the Gambia, where women lead their male counterparts by 83 percentage points.
Sint Maarten ranks second worldwide for the share of women with higher education, with a 78-point gap in women's favor, followed by St. Vincent and the Grenadines in third place at 68 percent.
The list of the ten countries where women are more educated than men also includes Qatar (64 percent), the Maldives (64 percent), Tuvalu (60 percent), Guyana (57 percent), Aruba (57 percent), Samoa (57 percent) and Kiribati (56 percent).
Among major economies, Sweden (40 percent), Poland (37 percent), Brazil (36 percent) and the United States (32 percent) stand out in this ranking.
The picture across the CIS
Within the CIS, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia lead in women's coverage of higher education, where the number of women enrolling in and graduating from universities exceeds that of men by 28 percent.
According to the ranking, Azerbaijan takes second place among Commonwealth countries with a 22-point gap, while Kazakhstan ranks third at 17 percent.
The country posted the same figure as China and Belarus — 14 percent — while in Russia the gap stands at 7 percent. Notably, Tajikistan is an outlier: there, men with higher education outnumber women by 5 percent.
Where men still outnumber women in higher education
At the bottom of the ranking are countries where men outpace women in tertiary education coverage.
The largest such gap was recorded in Benin, where the male figure runs 41 percentage points higher than the female one.
Other countries with a markedly higher share of men holding university degrees include the Republic of the Congo (33-point gap), Malawi (30 percent), Burkina Faso (26 percent), Laos (25 percent), Bangladesh (23 percent), Kenya (21 percent) and Rwanda (20 percent).
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