Young women and higher education in Peru: how does gender shape their educational trajectories?

ABSTRACT

In the last 20 years, a reversal of the gender gap in higher education (HE) has been observed both in developed and developing countries. Nowadays, more women than men are studying HE. Nevertheless, averages tend to high disparities and gender gaps are still observed when indicators take poverty and ethnicity into account. This paper uses qualitative longitudinal data from the Young Lives study in Peru in order to analyse the role of gender in shaping young women’s educational trajectories beyond secondary school. We find HE is indeed highly valued by young women who persist in their efforts to continue studying beyond secondary school, even in the face of gender norms that hinder their educational advancement. Having more access to HE is giving young women the possibility to construct new female identities, but it is not necessarily empowering them to challenge gender norms deeply rooted in their social context.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• higher education
• Peru
• poverty
• gender norms

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the young people and caregivers who participated in the qualitative component of this study and the Young Lives teams in Oxford and Peru. Special thanks are due to Gina Crivello, who provided insightful comments on previous versions of this paper, and to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments. We would also like to thank the fieldworkers who participated in the gathering of information in the qualitative survey rounds.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gabriela Guerrero is Senior Researcher at the Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE) and Research Advisor for the Young Lives Qualitative Component in Peru. She holds a PhD in Educational Sciences from the KU Leuven in Belgium and a Master’s Degree in Development Studies with a major in Public Policy from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Educational Psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

Vanessa Rojas is researcher at GRADE and Lead Qualitative Researcher for Young Lives in Peru. She has a degree in Anthropology and a Master’s in Political Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

Notes

1 World Bank, World Development Indicators Data Bank. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.

2 www.inei.gob.pe.

3 In each site, we based our work mainly in one community. Communities’ names remain anonymous. The name of the site corresponds to the name of the province where the community is located.

4 A private centre where young people go after completing secondary school, in order to be trained to pass the admissions exams of universities or technical institutes.

5 For a detailed account on this claim, see Rojas, Guerrero and Vargas (2016); Guerrero et al. (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty following the lives of 12,000 children in four countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam) over 15 years (www.younglives.org.uk). Young Lives is core-funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID). The views expressed are those of the author(s). They are not necessarily those of, or endorsed by, Young Lives, the University of Oxford [agreement no. R12983 / CN287], DFID or other funders.