The Case for Prioritising Female Education

A famous African proverb tells us that “if you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a nation”. Should we take this claim seriously? There is a lot of evidence to suggest we should, which together forms a case for prioritising female education.

Workforce Emancipation

First, education emancipates women by increasing their chances of entering the workforce. For example, Erten and Keskin (2018) show that women induced to get more education in Turkey by a 1997 reform that increased compulsory schooling from five to eight years were more likely to work outside the home. Grepin and Bharadwaj study a similar reform in Zimbabwe that relaxed constraints on black Zimbabwean’s access to secondary school to find that each additional year of education led to a 3-percentage point increase in the probability of a woman working outside the home. This is good not just for women but for the economy as a whole, as it diversifies the talent pool of its workforce which, in almost all countries, is predominantly male (OECD).

An increase in female labour force participation can also have a positive feedback loop via the effect it has on the aspirations of younger generations. There are numerous studies that show how ‘mould-breakers’ can move social groups out of self-reinforcing low-aspirations traps. For example, in 1993 India passed a law that reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils. Policy changes like these are gold dust to social science researchers – the randomisation of the intervention creates a nice ‘natural experiment’ whereby we can viably compare ‘treated’ and ‘non-treated’ villages. Beaman et al. (2012) exploit this to show that in villages assigned a female leader, the gender gap in aspirations was closed by 32% and the gender gap in adolescent educational attainment was completely erased. Educating girls today can create leaders tomorrow; the effects of which can echo through generations.

Health Spillovers

While increased education usually increases female labour force participation, in some countries this is not the case. For example, in Malawi, Baird et al. (2016) show that out-of-school females who were prompted to re-enter school by a cash transfer were not more likely to be working two years after the transfers ended.

Even in contexts such as these, a case remains for prioritising female education. Educated mothers know more about nutrition (UNICEF), health and sanitation (Glewwe, 2009) and are more likely to immunise their children (Keats, 2014), leading to substantial health spillovers in the household. These spillovers are likely to be far greater for women than for men for the simple reason that in developing (and developed) countries, women almost always do the lion-share of domestic duties (UN Women).  

A specific example helps illustrate this point. A recent chart published by Our World in Data shows that 3% of global deaths (~1.7 million) are caused by diarrhoea: more than suicide, homicide, conflict and terrorism combined.

Figure 1: Annual Number of Deaths by Cause, 2016

Source: Our World in Data

In a separate study, Datta and Mullainathan (2014) show that 35-50% of Indian mothers surveyed believed that the correct treatment for diarrhoea is to withhold fluids, due to a faulty mental model that associates it with ‘leaking’. This is one of the saddest but simultaneously most hopeful findings I’ve come across. How many of these 1.7 million deaths could have been prevented by extremely basic maternal education? The welfare implications of this are difficult to comprehend.

Cool Heads, Warm Hearts: A Foray into Moral Philosophy

Of course, there is also a moral dimension to this debate that is hard to ignore. Another of the most memorable (but harrowing) statistics in Economics is Amartya Sen’s (1990) calculation that there are 100 million ‘missing’ women in the world: a result of sex-selective abortions, female infanticide and inadequate healthcare and nutrition for female children. This is not just an artefact of the present day: in almost every society that has ever existed, women’s claims to equal rights, freedoms, authority and resources have been systematically violated (Harari, 2015). This is particularly the case in contemporary developing countries, which almost exclusively languish towards the bottom of cross-country gender parity indexes (UNESCO).

              

Faced with a world like this, how should we react? Economics offers little guidance on normative questions like these: we need to venture into the field of moral philosophy. In a world where the returns to male and female education were equal across every dimension, women would still command a greater claim to society’s resources due to both present day inequalities and historic injustices bestowed upon them.[1] It is worth reemphasising that this claim holds even in absence of the ‘instrumental’ arguments I have outlined thus far.

Who is responsible for meeting this claim: the state, the firm or the individual? While all three have the capacity to redistribute resources, the ability of states to move resources and coordinate people en masse is unparalleled – which makes their obligation correspondingly much larger. This does not absolve individuals (particularly men) and firms entirely: both certainly have a role to play in challenging unfair gender norms and practices in the workplace and home. However, this does not change the fact that states are the most suitably placed to fulfil women’s moral claim to a greater share of society’s resources. States can fulfil this claim by – amongst other things – prioritising female access to education and other public goods.

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References

• Baird et al. (2016), ‘When the Money Runs Out: Do Cash Transfers Have Sustained Effects on Human Capital Accumulation?’
• Beaman et al. (2012), ‘Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India’
• Datta & Mullainathan (2014), ‘Behavioural Design: A New Approach to Development Policy'
• Erten & Keskin (2018), ‘For Better or for Worse?: Education and the Prevalence of Domestic Violence in Turkey.’
• Glewwe (2009), ‘Why Does Mother’s Schooling Raise Child Health in Developing Countries? Evidence from Morocco’
• Grepin & Bharadwaj (2015), ‘Maternal Education and Child Mortality in Zimbabwe’
• Harari (2015), ‘Sapiens’
• Keats (2014), ‘Women’s Schooling, Fertility and Child Health Outcomes: Evidence from Uganda’s Free Primary Education Programme’
• OECD: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54741
• Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/what-does-the-world-die-from
• Sen (1990), ‘More than 100 Million Women are Missing’
• UN Women: http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures
• UNESCO http://uis.unesco.org/en/glossary-term/gender-parity-index-gpi
• UNICEF: https://www.unicef.org/nutrition/burkinafaso_35979.html

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[1] Theories of distributive justice can be roughly split into two camps: ‘time-slice’ theories (a la John Rawls) say that the justice of a distribution depends on present-day inequalities: all that matters is what people get. ‘Historic’ principles of justice (a la Robert Nozick) instead argue that all that matters is how a particularly distribution came about (i.e. did it violate anyone’s rights?). Crucially, the distribution of resources in most countries is unfavourable to women and came about via the violation of their rights. Therefore, women deserve a greater share of society’s resources, regardless of what camp you are in