The Structure of Social Disparities in Education : Gender and Wealth

Filmer, Deon

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ADULT EDUCATION;    AGED;    ASSET INDEX;    ASSET INFORMATION;    ASSET VARIABLES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2268
RP-ID  :  WPS2268

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Using internationally comparablehousehold data sets (Demographic and Health Surveys), theauthor investigates how gender and wealth interact togenerate within country inequalities in educationalenrollment and attainment. He carries out multivariateanalysis to assess the partial relationship betweeneducational outcomes and gender, wealth, householdcharacteristics (including level of education of adults, inthe households), and community characteristics (includingthe presence of schools in the community). He finds that: 1)women are at a great educational disadvantage in countriesin South Asia and North, Western, and Central Africa. 2)Gender gaps are large in a subset of countries, but wealthgaps are large in almost all of the countries studied.Moreover, in some countries where there is a heavy femaledisadvantage in enrollment (Egypt, India, Morocco, Niger,and Pakistan), wealth interacts with gender to exacerbatethe gap in the educational outcomes. In India, for example,where there is a 2.5 percentage point difference betweenmale and female enrollment for children from the richesthouseholds, the difference is 34 percentage points forchildren from the poorest households. 3) The education levelof adults in the household has a significant impact on theenrollment of children in all the countries studied, evenafter controlling for wealth. The effect of the educationallevel of adult female is larger than that of the educationlevel of adult males in some, but not all, of the countriesstudied. 4) The presence of a primary and a secondary schoolin the community has a significant relationship withenrollment in some countries only (notably in Western andCentral Africa). The relationship appears not tosystematically differ by children's gender.