 Why are boys falling behind? Explaining gender gaps in school attainment in Sri LankaRozana Himaz () and Harsha Aturupane No 2019-14, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Abstract: A trend that is increasingly common in developed countries and middle income countries such as Thailand, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka is that females outperform males in terms of attainment at school and enrolment in higher education, on average. Alarmingly in countries such as Sri Lanka and Thailand, households also seem to allocate significantly higher resources towards girls' education rather than boys’ (Himaz, 2010, Wongmonta and Glewwe, 2017). This paper looks at attainment in mathematics among a sample of 12 year olds in Sri Lanka to see to what extent parental aspirations, teacher attitudes as well as school-based management programs, inter alia, can explain gender differentials disfavouring boys. The paper finds that although teacher attitudes and parental aspirations are significantly lower for boys, these factors -as we measure them- do not sufficiently explain the attainment gap. Much of the gap remains ‘unexplained’ and is due to differences in returns to endowments. The paper argues that positive discrimination of men in the labour market and bottle necks in higher-education may be important in understanding the unexplained component. Date: 2019 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2019-14 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. |
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