Abstract
Adolescent girls more often than boys expect higher education in nearly all 50 education systems in TIMSS 2011, before and after controls for effects of educational achievement, education-conducive family resources, and “liking school.” At a macrolevel, this gender disparity is moderately correlated with the gender disparity in “years of schooling” projected by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for children of school-entry age, but weakly with gender inequality in the adult population, and not at all with UNDP’s Human Development Index. A possible explanation for the robust prevalence of a reverse gender gap is that formal education is more influenced than the labor market and family life by “World Society”-mediated gender equity.