This dissertation examines a striking empirical observation: the rapid, recent, and worldwide growth of female enrollment in higher education. In the postwar period, the landscape of higher education has shifted dramatically. Access to higher education, once reserved exclusively for the upper crust of society, has been significantly broadened to serve students from all walks of life, including traditionally marginalized groups such as students of color, low-income students and women. While most of these historically underrepresented groups continue to trail their more privileged counterparts in enrollment rates, women, who were once largely barred from entering the higher education system, have reached parity and surpassed their male counterparts. Despite this stunning empirical transformation, the issue of women’s tremendous rise in higher education remains understudied. The relatively small body of literature has focused on individualistic explanations and/or national contexts, thereby overlooking the role of global discourses and initiatives in propelling women into institutions of higher education. Addressing this gap in the existing literature, this dissertation examines the global rise of women in higher education through a cross-national and longitudinal lens. To better make sense of such an unprecendented, worldwide empirical transformation, my dissertation explores how globally institutionalized initiatives and resources have propelled women’s entry into colleges and universities around the world. In chapter 1, I look at global discourses and policies associated with women’s rights and education equality as well as their evolution over time. I trace shifting global discourses around women’s status in the public sphere and their incorporation into the higher education system from the early 20th Century to the present. I draw on a combination of primary UNESCO publications and secondary sources to discern the distinct periodization by which globally legitimated cultural frameworks shifted: from the time when gender essentialist ideologies assumed inherent biological differences between gender and women were primarily perceived through the lens of motherhood to when women gained individual actorhood and their human capital potential served as a rationale for their entry into the education system. Around the 1980s, UNESCO reconceptualized universal access to education as a fundamental, inalienable human right, which further bolstered international efforts to facilitate women’s participation in the education system. Finally, in the post-Beijing Conference, women’s persistent underrepresentation in STEM has garnered significantly greater attention from international organizations such as UNESCO, who began to highlight the issue as a social injustice, in spite of the tremendous progress women have made in gaining access to higher education. The discourse analysis complements my cross-national, quantitative analysis by providing important qualitative grounding for the worldwide empirical transformation that I describe and examine. In chapters 2 and 3, I employ large-scale, quantitative, cross-national and longitudinal datasets to examine the remarkable growth in women’s participation in higher education and their simultaneous, persistent underrepresentation in STEM fields. In chapter 2, I look at how domestic contexts and particularly global influences shape women’s enrollment in higher education. Drawing on World Society Theory, I argue that growing resources, accountability structures as well as discursive changes in the global institutional environment in the post-1990s period have ushered women into instituions of higher education worldwide. My multivariate statistical analyses reveal that countries with strong linkages to the global civil society through INGO networks are more likely to observe a massive growth in female enrollment in postsecondary education. After the onset of pivotal global initiatives, famously including the Education for All Movement (1990), countries that are deeply embedded in the global civil society have observed a more pronounced growth in women’s higher education enrollment, net of all controls. In chapter 3, I complicate the progressive picture of massive growth in female participation in higher education by disaggregating their enrollment patterns by fields of study. I employ a large-scale, original dataset derived from UNESCO sources that trace higher education enrollment by gender and academic disciplines from 1960 to 2020. It represents much more extensive data coverage both crosss-sectionally and longitudinally compared to the small number of existing studies on this topic. It explicitly tests a somewhat counterintuitive finding from sociologists Maria Charles and Karen Bradley (2009)’s work, which asserts that horizontal sex segregation in higher education by fields of study (i.e. women’s overrepresentation in humanistic fields and underrepresentation in STEM fields) is more severe in liberal, egalitarian national contexts. When liberal democratic countries empower women with the autonomy to choose their own academic majors, they are more likely to indulge in their gendered selves and align their fields of study with their associated normative gender stereotypes. Focusing on the tension between access and choice, my analyses use improved measures to proximate the concept of individual actorhood and empowerment and indicate that women are more likely to enter early feminized fields such as education and arts/humanities compared to STEM fields in liberal egalitarian countries. My dissertation project contributes a cross-national, longitudinal perspective to understanding both women’s remarkable rise in higher education enrollments and their persistent underrepresentation in STEM fields. Even though it accounts for national contexts such as GDP per capita, level of democratization and fertility rates, I privilege countries’ linkages to the global civil society and key international initiatives that advocate for women’s access to higher education and more recently, their participation in STEM fields. I provide a qualitative and quantitative account of how the growing authority and organizational capacity of international actors in the postwar period has fundamentally altered the gender landscape of higher education institutions around the world by ushering women into postsecondary education at unprecedented, tremendous rates.