El Salvador’s Homicide, Women’s Education, and Texas

Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.

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Today's charts:

1. Women's education levels (story by Gabriel Cohen)

2. Homicides in El Salvador

3. Texas + Mexico = one big partnership (story by Pedro Madero)

Make sure you check out the comment of the week at the bottom!

Education 👩‍🎓

In LatAm. Women are Now More Educated Than Men

A Girls Count report once estimated that providing an additional year of education to a woman increases her wages by 10–20%. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that women’s education has been an important part of Latin America’s success story in recent decades.

Today, more than 6 out of 10 women in Latin America go to college, compared to just under half of men. But fifty years ago, only 5% of women could pursue tertiary education (that’s university level or higher). While Latin American men have also seen quite the jump since 1970, the percentage of women attending college has grown by over 14x—and shows no signs of slowing down.

Notably, 1993 is the year women began centralizing into tertiary education more than men. To put it in perspective, that became the case in the European Union just one year earlier, and only became a global reality in 2001.

The first country in the region to drive this trend was Panama, which saw women begin their collegiate takeover in 1973. This was followed by Uruguay and Argentina in 1979 and 1989, respectively, and was most recently seen in Mexico in 2016.

Today millions of women across Latin America are pursuing collegiate degrees in law, economics, STEM, and more. And that’s great news—not just because societies with more educated women have lower levels of violence and higher likelihoods of democratic governance, but because women’s education has been shown to lessen economic inequality and lead to more sustainable development.

So we hope to see more and more women entering university and pursuing education that can improve the lives of themselves, their families, and their communities. We also hope that, on the flip side, these women can then graduate into labor markets that are open to their skills and flexible to their needs. After all, the region has made immense progress in the last half-century. Let’s see how far we can go in the next one.

Homicides 💀