Gender Gaps in Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills: Roles of SES and Gender Attitudes

Justine Hervé (jherve@stevens.edu), Subha Mani, Jere Behrman, Arindam Nandi (anandi@popcouncil.org), Anjana Sankhil Lamkang (sankhil@cddep.org) and Ramanan Laxminarayan (ramanan@onehealthtrust.org)
Additional contact information
Justine Hervé: Stevens Institute of Technology
Arindam Nandi: The Population Council
Anjana Sankhil Lamkang: CDDEP
Ramanan Laxminarayan: One Health Trust

No 14132, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Gender gaps in skills exist around the world but differ remarkably among the high and low-and-middle income countries. This paper uses a unique data set with more than 20,000 adolescents in rural India to examine whether socioeconomic status and gender attitudes predict gender gaps in cognitive and noncognitive skills. We find steep socioeconomic and attitude gradients in both cognitive and noncognitive skills, with bigger effect sizes for the socioeconomic status (SES) gradients. Our results suggest that a sizable improvement in gender attitudes would yield important gains for females, but substantial gains would come only from large improvements in household socioeconomic status. Overall, the household socioeconomic and cultural environment is significantly associated with the gender gaps in both cognitive and noncognitive skills.

Keywords: gender; gender attitudes; noncognitive skills; cognitive skills; India; children (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I25 J13 J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-gen and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published as 'Gender gaps in cognitive and noncognitive skills among adolescents in India' in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, 193, 66 - 97

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14132.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Gaps in Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills: Roles of SES and Gender Attitudes (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14132

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
library@iza.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte (hinte@iza.org).