Women's empowerment and the goal of parity between the sexes in schooling in India

Abstract

Greater ‘empowerment’ of women in India, measured by their education and autonomy, is associated with a reduction in the extent to which their sons' educational attainment exceeds that of their daughters. Improving both father's and mother's education increases the educational attainment of daughters more than that of sons, but raising mother's education is associated with a significantly greater reduction of the difference in attainment between sons and daughters. In families in which the mother has completed primary education, the average difference between boys and girls in years spent in school is almost a third of a year lower than it is where the mother has less education. A one-standard-deviation increase in mother's autonomy is associated with an increase in daughter's schooling of more than half a month but has no correlation with son's education. The findings highlight the importance of women's empowerment for the intergenerational transfer of equality in educational attainment of the sexes.

Keywords:

• empowerment
• education
• autonomy
• gender
• South Asia
• India

Notes

1. Farzana Afridi is at the Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi – 110007, India. E-mail: [email protected]

2. The author is grateful to Bill Axinn, Julie Cullen, David Lam, Albert Park, Rohini Somanathan, and three anonymous referees for detailed comments and suggestions. This paper has also benefited from discussions with Brahima Coulibaly and Bob Willis and inputs from seminar participants at the University of Michigan, the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research, and participants at the Population Association of America Annual Meeting, 2005.