Mind The Gap! The Influence of Family Systems on The Gender Education Gap in Developing Countries, 1950--2005

Lotte van der Vleuten

Economic History of Developing Regions, 2016, vol. 31, issue 1, 47-81

Abstract: This paper argues that, by shaping everyday attitudes towards women and perceptions of their value and decisions about them, family systems explain part of the difficulty in bridging the gap between men's and women's achievement in education. The gap is more pronounced outside the highly industrialized nations, where affordable mass education is not the standard, and gender differences in educational attainment are markedly affected by persisting cultural norms. I test this hypothesis by examining family systems that have had a lasting effect on gender norms. I find evidence that family systems explain gender differences in average years of education in 86 developing and middle-income countries around the globe, for the period 1950 to 2005.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20780389.2015.1114414 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:rehdxx:v:31:y:2016:i:1:p:47-81

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rehd20

DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2015.1114414

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History of Developing Regions is currently edited by Alex Klein and Alfonso Herranz-Loncan

More articles in Economic History of Developing Regions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().