Determinants of Schooling in Egypt: The Role of Gender and Rural/Urban Residence

Abstract

This paper examines the role of gender and rural-urban residence, and the interaction between them in influencing schooling outcomes, using household level cross-section data from Egypt. Our empirical analysis finds strong evidence for the hypothesis that being male and living in urban areas significantly improves schooling outcomes. We show that relative to a female child who is 'never enrolled' in school, a male child is nearly twice as likely to be currently attending school, and over two and a half times more likely to have some schooling. Interestingly, the adverse effect of gender is greater in rural areas, with urban location increasing the odds of female children being currently enrolled. Finally, we find that female headship reduces the likelihood of a favorable schooling outcome for females and children living in rural areas.

Between returns and respectability: parental attitudes towards girls’ education in rural Punjab, Pakistan

“…Girls, who are assumed to marry and hence leave their natal homes, are seen as futile investments in this light, while boys are viewed as steadfast investments worthy of a larger share of family resources (Sathar and Lloyd 1994;Sawada and Lokshin 2001;Stith, Gorman, and Choudhury 2003). The notion of men as breadwinners also awards them preferred status over females in terms of their productive potential, which impacts upon how they are invested in early on in life (Dancer and Rammohan 2007;Khan and Ali 2005).…”

“…While this is a limitation in terms of ascertaining the power dynamics, the qualitative interviews provide a certain amount of recourse to fill in some of the gaps created by this. Schooling outcomes for girls have been argued to be affected by the perceptions and social characteristics of the HOHs (Mare 1980) and, in particular, about girls' higher level schooling (Chernichovsky 1985;Dancer and Rammohan 2007;Khan and Ali 2005;Sawada and Lokshin, 2001). Similarly, Buchmann and Hannum (2001) inferred that in developing countries the education of rural girls face the vicious cycle of poor cultural beliefs of the male HOHs.…”

Gender differences in intrahousehold schooling outcomes: the role of sibling characteristics and birth‐order effects

“…Although school attendance rates remain low in Egypt, particularly among female children, few studies have systematically investigated this issue using household-level data. Recent studies on schooling in Egypt include Lloyd et al (2003) studying the link between school quality and grade attainment for adolescents, Assaad et al (2005) examining the trade-off between schooling and child work, Wahba (2000) analysing the effect of market wages on child labour and schooling outcomes, and Dancer and Rammohan (2007) examining gender differentials in schooling attainment.…”

11 - Household-level Social Capital in Cameroon and Children’s Schooling: A Gender Analysis

“…This distinction helps in the analysis of conditions under which a child is likely to have had some schooling rather than none. This is important because using only 'currently enrolled' as the response variable, we are likely to lose valuable information on those children who may have dropped out of school after gaining basic literacy and numeracy skills (Dancer and Rammohan 2007).…”

“…These results, together with the fact that the lowest proportion of children that report 'never enrolled in school' lived in households where there were no pre-school age siblings, suggests a 'quantity-quality trade-off' in schooling investment (Becker and Lewis 1973;Dancer and Rammohan 2007). 2 We also observe that the highest proportion of children who never attended school lived in the poorest households, with a per capita expenditure in logform of 5.19 below rich households.…”