(see World Bank, 2007). Better educated mothers are superior teachers in the home, as demonstrated by Behrman et al. (1997) in the case of India. Hence, for a given investment in children, more educated mothers produce children with higher levels of human capital (Haveman and Wolfe 1995, Summers 1992). It can also be argued that schooled women contribute more income to the household, which may lead to more investment in child schooling and lower fertility rates. Another argument is that mothers with a high level of education have greater command of resources within the household (higher bargaining power), which they choose to allocate to children at higher levels than do men (see Quisumbing, 2003). Unsurprisingly, at the aggregate level, many studies have emphasized the role of female education in raising labor productivity and economic growth, suggesting that educational gender gaps are an impediment to economic development. This is the result obtained in Knowles et al. (2000) who use Barro and Lee’s human capital indicators, or Coulombe and Tremblay (2006) who relied on the International Adult Literacy Survey to build an homogenized indicator of human capital. These studies suggest that investment in the human capital of women is crucial in countries where the gender gap in education is high<sup>5</sup> . Societies that have a preference for not investing in girls or that lose a high proportion of skilled women through emigration may experience slower growth and reduced income.

Second, women’s brain drain is a crucial issue as women’s human capital is an even scarcer resource than men’s human capital. At the world level, our estimates based on Barro and Lee (2000) and own calculations reveal that the percentage of women with post-secondary education rose from 7.3 to 9.8 percent between 1990 and 2000, while the male proportion rose from 10.9 to 12.5 percent. Similarly, the percentage of women with completed secondary education rose from 31.6 to 34.7 percent during the same period while the male proportion rose from 45.4 to 46.8 percent. Although the gender gap decreases over time, women are still lagging far behind men. In addition, the convergence movement is mainly perceptible in highincome countries where recent generations of women are as well or more educated than young men. In low-income countries, the gender gap is much greater (in 2000, only 2.4 percent of women had post-secondary education, against 5.5 percent for men) and the convergence is slow. Such a gender gap in education is ampli...ed by the fact that women have lower participation rates than men. As women still face unequal access to tertiary education and skilled jobs in less developed countries, women’s brain drain may generate higher relative losses than male brain drain.

Finally, as documented in Morrison, Schi¤ and Sjoblom (2007), the feminization of migration is likely to a¤ect future amounts of remittances, the size of diaspora externalities and the structure of activities in source countries. In this report, women are shown to send remittances over longer time periods, to send larger amounts to 5In the same vein, Klasen (1999) or Dollar and Gatti (1999) demonstrated that gender inequality acts as a signi...cant constraint on growth in cross-country regressions, a result con...rmed by Blackden et al. (2006) in the case of sub-Saharn Africa.

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