This paper studies gender education gaps among indigenous and nonindigenous groups in Bolivia, a country that hosts the largest proportion of indigenous population in Latin America. The paper uses the 2012 National Census of Population and Housing and an estimation method analogous to difference-in-differences, originally proposed by Taş, Reimão and Orlando (2014), to compare the size of educational disadvantage faced by men and women across different subgroups of the population. The objective of the paper is to quantify the extent of educational disadvantages faced by men and women from different ethnic backgrounds, so as to account for the heterogeneity of the Bolivian population and for gender dynamics within each subgroup.

The intersectionality of gender and indigenous identity is highly relevant in the Bolivian context, where at least one in two persons identify themselves as indigenous.<sup>3</sup> Indigenous groups in Bolivia also show a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of culture, language, location of residence and level of interaction with state institutions. Each indigenous group, moreover, has had a different experience with the Bolivian state’s attempts to accommodate this diversity, which ranged from efforts to create a _mestizo_ nation in the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, to official commitment to multiculturalism and plurinationality in recent years (Crabtree and Chaplin 2013, Stephson 1999, Brienen 2002, Claure 1989). In the realm of education specifically, historical accounts point to a divide between the way Aymaras and other indigenous groups have reacted to the state’s push for rural and indigenous education since the 1930s. Because Aymaras have historically faced more land disputes with the post-colonial governments, they have generally viewed Western education and Spanish proficiency as instruments for pushing back against dispossession of their land, for understanding land legislation, and for navigating the legal system (Howard-Malverde and Canessa 1995). Other indigenous groups, including Quechua, have generally experienced a top-down introduction to post-colonial education, resulting in a more ambivalent view of its relevance and compatibility with local culture. These ethnicity-based differences, combined with generally lower levels of education observed among Bolivian women, invite an intersectional analysis of gender education gaps _within_ the indigenous population of Bolivia.

That educational disadvantages in Bolivia might accumulate at the intersection of gender and indigenous identity, and that the size of these cumulative disadvantages may vary within the indigenous population, is relevant for policy. Educational gaps not only affect current wellbeing and human capital, but can also carry over to other outcomes and to future generations. Labor market outcomes in Bolivia, for example, show significant variance by gender and between indigenous and nonindigenous groups (Patrinos and Psacharopoulos 1993), with the difference being driven by educational gaps across these categories (Jiménez et al. 2006, Ñopo et al. 2010, Canelas and Salazar 2014). As such, differences in education _within_ indigenous groups may translate into further heterogeneity in labor market outcomes. In addition, education has been found to be correlated with health outcomes (Breierova and Duflo 2004), likelihood of living in poverty (Jiménez et al. 2006) and economic growth (Klasen and Lamanna 2009), as well as being transferred across generations, as the children of disadvantaged parents tend to have worse

> 3 The percentage of indigenous population in Bolivia is based on self-reported ethnicity variable in the 2012 census. Previous censuses in Bolivia estimated the share of indigenous population to be over 60 percent (see Molina and Albó 2006, Jiménez et al. 2006). This is consistent with the literature on self-reports of ethnicity, which shows that race, color and other self-identification indicators tend to vary across time, place, economic status and even according to race or color of the interviewer who asks the question during data collection (Telles and Paschel 2012).

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