Yet when asked, many poor families will say that they want their daughters to be educated. Many girls stay home, not because parents are poor or culturally intransigent, but because they do not believe that the kind of education on offer is appropriate for their daughters or because they feel the risks are too great. In most developing countries far more boys are being educated than girls. Those risks are real. Girls are sexually harassed, sometimes raped, by their fellow students, or their teachers, or sometimes by strangers as they walk to school.
Girls get pregnant.
And these sexual pressures and vulnerability are central to low enrolment and retention rates for girls in the classrooms of many countries. If classes are overcrowded, if children are poorly supervised, if male students are unruly and violent, then many girls feel threatened and many parents fear for their safety. If no single-sex schools or classes are available, if there are no women teachers, and if the school is too far from the home or community, then female attendance tends to fall away. Here, too, poverty plays its part. If their clothes are torn or inadequate, girls from poor families, constrained by the demands of modesty and propriety, will stay at home.