 Going to School in Purdah: Female Schooling, Mobility Norms and Madrasas in BangladeshWorking Papers from eSocialSciences Abstract: This paper looks at the determinants of secondary school attendance in Bangladesh with a focus on the interaction between community gender norms and relative supply of madrasas (i.e. Islamic schools). It presents a theoretical framework where the probability of children’s school participation varies with respect to a non-economic factor – how the community observes social norms regarding female mobility – conditional upon the types of available schools. Household data from the Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey (BDHS) is combined with community information on the availability of non-religious secondary schools and madrasas to test our theoretical predictions. It is found that in communities which are more 'progressive', in the sense that women have a relatively high level of mobility, the effect of availability of non-religious school on attendance does not vary by gender. However, in the more ‘conservative communities’, female schooling is more sensitive to the availability of madrasas. Keywords: Mobility Norms; School Going Girls; Conservative Communities; Women Empowerment; Female Schooling; Non-Religious School; Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey (BDHS); Madarasa Schools; Islamic Schools; Secondary Schools; Bangladesh. (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:ess:wpaper:id:7756 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences |
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