New data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that 3.4 percent of all women ages 15 to 24 dropped out of high school from October 2008 to October 2009. This is only slightly lower than the rate for men which stood at 3.5 percent. Some 184,000 women dropped out of high school in the one-year period.
The data also showed that 7 percent of all women ages 16 to 24 in October 2009 did not have a high school diploma or the equivalent and were no longer enrolled in school. For men this so-called “status dropout rate” was 9.0 percent. There were 1,299,000 young women in the United States that were considered high school dropouts compared to 1,731,000 young men. Women were 42.9 percent of those students who had dropped out of high school.