Gender Inequality amid Educational Expansion in India: An Analysis of Gender Differences in the Attainment of Reading and Mathematics Skills

IntroductionGender inequality in education is a persistent problem in Indian society, especially for girls from rural areas and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. During the past several decades, India has achieved success in moving toward universal school enrollment and in enacting policies to address educational inequalities such as those based on gender. However, education gaps still exist. This paper seeks to identify the factors through which educational gender inequality continues to operate and the social contexts that are associated with girls, who may be left behind academically.Using data from the 2005 India Human Development Survey (IHDS), this study analyzes how social background factors, access to learning resources, time devoted to formal learning activities, and cultural attitudes regarding the education of girls contribute to ongoing gender gaps in learning. This study is an attempt to go beyond more commonly found descriptive studies of country-wide achievement and attainment patterns by measuring a more diverse set of indicators available through the IHDS dataset, including the identification of statistical interactions among key variables. We hope the results will provide increased insight into the status of educational gender inequality in India, offer useful information to policymakers as they develop targeted policies to address areas of gender inequality where it persists, and identify areas for further study using more fine-grained analyses among a narrower range of variables.Prior research reveals educational disparities by various demographic and school-related factors such as gender, social background, and access to educational resources. To build on this foundation, additional research is needed to further examine factors that are associated with gender gaps, and to assess how the effects of India's increasing educational attainment, public policies targeted to girls, and changing educational landscape are having an impact.Several important questions emerge from the literature regarding gender inequality in education. For example, although socioeconomic and other family background factors have been shown to influence educational attainment, it is less clear how these factors differentially affect boys and girls. Time devoted to learning and other educational resources are also important to investigate, and it may be the case that parents are prioritizing sons' education over daughters' education through the allocation of these factors. Finally, the role of attitudes toward the education of girls is underexplored. Female students with parents who look favorably upon the education of girls might be expected to exhibit higher educational achievement relative to those without such parents. In order to answer these questions, this paper will explore the relative contributions that social background factors, learning resources, time devoted to learning, and cultural attitudes make to academic outcomes.Educational Expansion in IndiaAttempts to increase the educational achievement of girls are taking place amid a backdrop of sweeping educational expansion in India. During the last half of the twentieth century, India made great strides in improving its education infrastructure - an achievement representative of a worldwide educational expansion by newly independent states and the importance of education within the emerging nation-state model (Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal, 1992). This has included a rapid expansion in the number of primary schools in the decade preceding the IHDS data collection in 2005 (De et al., 2011). India's educational expansion is also reflective of the United Nation's Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program Education for All and the push to achieve universal primary education by the year 2015 under the Millennium Development Goals program (Govinda, 2002; United Nations, 2010; 2015). In addition, expansion efforts are guided by India's Constitution, which mandates universal education for those under the age of fourteen, as well as court decisions and policies that secure the right to education and increase educational investments for girls and other disadvantaged groups. …