No. 5 The Structure of
Social Disparities in Education: Gender and Wealth
By Deon Filmer
|
No. 5 The Structure of
Social Disparities in Education: Gender and Wealth |
This paper uses a set of
internationally comparable household datasets (the Demographic and Health Surveys—or
DHS) to investigate the ways in which gender and wealth interact in generating
within country inequalities in educational enrollment and attainment. In addition,
a multivariate analysis is carried out to assess the partial relationship between
educational outcomes and gender, wealth, household characteristics (including
the education of adults in the household) and community characteristics (including
the presence of schools in the community). There are four main findings. First,
a large female disadvantage in education is found in countries in Western and
Central Africa, North Africa, and South Asia. Second, while gender gaps are
large in a subset of countries, wealth gaps are large in almost all the countries
studied. In addition, in some countries the interaction of gender and wealth
result in large gaps in educational outcomes. Third, the education of adults
in the household has a significant impact on the enrollment of children in all
the countries studied, and the effect of female adult education is larger than
that of males in some, but not all, of the countries studied. Fourth, the presence
of a primary and a secondary school in the community has a significant effect
on enrollment in some countries only (notably the Western and Central African
countries) and the effect does not appear to systematically differ by gender
of the child.
This paper is part of a series of papers on selected topics commissioned for the forthcoming Policy Research Report(PRR) on Gender and Development. The PRR is being carried out by Elizabeth King and Andrew Mason and co-sponsored by the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Group and the Gender and Development Group of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network. Printed copies of this paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Tai Lui Tan, in room MC3-624A or at Gnetwork@worldbank.org. Comments are welcome and should be sent directly to the author(s) at dfilmer@worldbank.org.
The full-length paper is available in PDF format.