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The paper compares private returns to education by gender for 14 EU countries. Building on de la Fuente (2003), we define the rate of return as the discount rate that equalizes marginal costs and benefits of education. We extend his model by estimating separately the values of the relevant parameters for men and women and introducing variables specifically related to maternity leave and benefits. Then, we calibrate the model and we evaluate the elasticities of the returns to education with respect to some policies. In the second part of the paper, we provide further analysis concerning the returns in Italy. The three key contributions are: estimation of the Mincerian coefficients of the wage equation by gender and by region; computation of the returns to education by gender with the same geographic disaggregation; and some counterfactual experiments to evaluate the impact and relevance of several public policies. JEL Code: I21, I24, I28