 Leading by Example: What is the effect on educational outcomes of exposing girls, in addition to parents, to female role models?Eline Bos No 2016-37, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Abstract: Beaman et al. (2011) show that female leadership influences the aspirations of girls and educational attainment, comparing villages that randomly reserved leadership positions for women in India. They suggest that female leaders mainly had this effect through providing a role model of a woman in a leadership position, thereby raising girls’ aspirations for themselves and parents’ aspirations for their daughters. In this paper I look at the effect of exposing girls to a female role model, in addition to parents. Within the same village council, I compare the effect of exposing both children and parents to a female role model to the effect of exposing only parents, because their children were too young to be actively exposed to a female role model. I find a significant effect of exposing girls in addition to parents on educational attainment for girls, comparing outcomes for children in the age range of 4-18 years. This suggests that policies to improve girls’ education should crucially include a focus on both parents and girls. Keywords: Education; India; Gender inequality; Behavioural Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2016-37 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.