Gender Gaps in Primary Schooling in India

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): BACKGROUND: Approximately 130 million children in poor settings lack primary schooling, and nearly two thirds of these children are girls. Some of the largest gender gaps in primary schooling persist in South Asia. OBJECTIVES: This project will assess net associations of non-family institutions, family characteristics, and relative parental resources with primary-school achievements among age-eligible girls and boys in India. India's socioeconomic diversity, more than 1 billion inhabitants, and high percentages of girls without primary schooling make it an ideal setting in which to conduct this research. DATA: The sample for this analysis includes 87,301 children 6-14 y who are matched to married mothers' 15-49 y who took part in the Second National Family Health Survey of India (NFHS-2). This national survey has data on school entry, attendance, and attainment; reasons for non-entry or non-attendance; household assets, religion, and caste; and maternal and paternal human resources. Children in the sample will be matched to district and state-level measures that best approximate the environment around the age at which they were eligible to enter school. METHOD: Analyses will be conducted for 6-10 and 11-14 year-old children separately. We first will fit multivariate, state fixed-effects, population average (PA) models suitable for binary, nominal, ordinal, and continuous outcomes to assess the net associations of individual, family, district, and state-level attributes on measures of ever entry, current attendance, progression, and attainment. We will test whether children's family and community attributes alter estimated gender gaps in schooling. To interpret the findings, we will estimate multivariate, state fixed effects models for the probably of reporting specific reasons for children's non-entry and/or non- attendance of primary school. Multilevel (unit-specific) models that are suitable for continuous, ordinal, and binary outcomes and that include random intercepts and coefficients for child's gender also will be estimated. SIGNIFICANCE: Primary schooling has major effects on the wellbeing of individuals, their families, and societies. Yet, deficits in primary schooling among girls persist in many settings. Findings from this analysis will provide critical insights about the family and community variables that may be the focus of new policies and interventions to achieve the Millenium Development goals of gender parity and universal primary schooling. The project also will inform on-going related research and planned proposals for comparative research in South Asian and African settings, where gender gaps in schooling remain especially large.