Giving Compass' Take:

• Alia Wong at The Atlantic reports on how women now make up a larger share of educators and teachers than they have in decades.

• How can we continue to empower and support women in education? How do more women teachers affect aspects of learning or administration? 

• Here's an article on how to create leadership pathways for women in higher education. 

Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession’s gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country’s public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority—63 percent—of all the country’s teachers (though men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s). Within a few decades, the choice to teach young children was solidified as an inherently “feminine” pursuit; in fact, girls who couldn’t or didn’t want to be homemakers had few other job options.

In the mid-20th century, however, cultural and political shifts prompted a surge in the number of women seeking employment in traditionally “masculine” sectors. These changes also prompted the reverse—albeit to a lesser extent: The number of men seeking classroom careers rose and has grown by 31 percent since the early 1980s.

Read the full article on the U.S. teaching population getting bigger and more female by Alia Wong at The Atlantic.