Dakar Are We There Yet

Jain, Chandan 

Abstract: In the present study, we use three rounds (2009, 2012 and 2014) of ASER data on learning outcomes from rural India in order to analyse gender gaps in performance on standardized tests of reading, maths and english reading ability. Despite the existence of a large body of literature analysing gender gaps in learning in the international context, the study of the same remains limited in the Indian context. Further, our data also allows us to compare these gaps for the pre and post Right to Education Act (RTE) period as well. Using siblings fixed effects estimation we find that, at the baseline level, boys outperformed girls across all the three tests for the 2009 round of survey and that these gaps have widened overtime in the post RTE period, except for the case of reading wherein girls seem to be performing better overtime. Additionally, we find that mother’s education tends to close in on the above gap and that girls belonging to educated mother tends to perform better in comparison to boys, while private school enrolment and tuition access tends to widen the gap as a result of a differential effect of the same on learning across gender. We attribute the latter effect to differences in expenditure across gender, using data for expenditure on tuitions, we find that on average the expenditure on tuitions for girls tends to be lower as compared to the same for boys. We also find that the gaps in learning tends to be lower across states that are more gender equal. Lastly, using data on enrolment to private school and tuition as proxies for household division of resources, we examine the change in the same overtime. We find that overtime the distribution of resources has moved more in favour of boys than for girls.

File: SNUECON_WP2016_002.pdf