The Role of Pubertal Development, Geography, and the Family in Predicting Women's Educational Attainment at Ages 25 and 40

Introduction: Early pubertal development among girls is associated with numerous biological and psychosocial health risks in adolescence and beyond.  There is evidence that women’s educational attainment is associated with pubertal timing, but few studies have explored if this relationship endures into adulthood.  The goal of this study was to explore the longitudinal impact of pubertal timing on educational attainment, a strong social determinant of health, while controlling for potentially influential environmental contexts. 

Methods: Data are from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative cohort study of Americans born between 1957 and 1964 that has been followed from 1979-2010. The analytic sample consisted of 3,905 women who reported their age at menarche (M= 12.78, SD=1.59) and number of years of education completed at ages 25 (M=12.75, SD=2.26) and 40 (M=13.3, SD=2.49).   Women’s age at menarche and educational attainment were converted to dichotomous variables (early menarche (<12 years old) versus not early and graduated from high school (>= 12 years of education) versus not) for logistic regression analyses. Covariates included race/ethnicity, mother’s educational attainment, whether she lived with both parents at age 18, and residential geography (i.e., urbanicity, region of country) at age 14.

Results: Women who reported early menarche had a lower odds of graduating from high school by age 25 (OR=.61, p<.001) and age 40 (OR=.64, p=.008).   After controlling for race/ethnicity, urbanicity, and region at age 14, women who reported early menarche still had a lower odds of graduating from high school by age 25 (OR=.64, p=.002) and age 40 (OR=.65, p=.013).  However, after adding mother’s education and household composition at age 18 into the model, early menarche was only marginally predictive of high school graduation by age 25 (OR=.73, p=.05) and not significantly predictive of high school graduation by age 40 (OR=.75, p=.15). 

Conclusions: This study supports previous cross-sectional research linking early pubertal development among girls to lower educational attainment.  Our findings suggest that this relationship persists throughout the lifespan when controlling for race/ethnicity and geographic factors in adolescence.  However, family factors, including mother’s educational attainment and household composition, appear to partially explain away this association, which also appears to weaken over time. Implications of these results will be discussed.