volved. Nigerian women rarely constitute more than 15 percent of university graduates in a given year (Wright, 1998, p. 59). Women represent only about a quarter of the secondary students; 14 percent of girls ages 12 to 17 are enrolled in school, compared with 42 percent of boys the same age. Valerie E. Lee and Marlaine E. Lockheed (1998) observe,
Although males and females have been afforded theoretically equal access to education since the 1960s, traditional school attitudes about the appropriateness of education for young Nigerian women were not apt to change so rapidly toward social equality of the sexes (p. 207).
Conventional interpretation suggests that educational opportunities for women improved under colonialism and then slipped back to some version of pre-colonial neglect. In fact, under British rule, more women did attend school, but many of these schools focused on preparing women for domestic service rather than political leadership. After independence, womenÆs enrollment in schools rose again, but the complexities of economic instability a
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