The value of education for girls’ employment and leadership
Global gains in girls’ secondary education correspond with declines in early marriage and early childbearing, but this is not transferring to women’s employment and leadership. Data from India offer a glimpse into what is holding girls back from the benefits of education.
Anita Raj, Tata Chancellor, Professor of Society and Health, and Director of the Center on Gender Equity and Health at UC San Diego, shares results on parental aspirations for children in India. This study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted by UC San Diego, in partnership with India’s National Institute of Research on Reproductive Health and Population Council India.
Ten years ago this week, the International Day of the Girl was established by the UN to prioritize adolescent girls’ development, with the initial theme dedicated to ending girl child marriage. At that time, India had the largest number of girls marrying as minors in the world. Girl child marriage prevalence in the country has since been reduced by half — from 45 percent to 22 percent, based on 2005–2006 and 2019–2021 estimates. That’s remarkable progress.
Keeping girls in secondary school is viewed as a key driver of this reduction. Today, rates of secondary school attendance for Indian girls are high and most recent data indicates the gender gap is closing. In their 2022 Global Gender Gap report, the World Economic Forum ranked India first in terms of women’s enrollment in tertiary (higher) education. Nonetheless, the same report showed a national decline in women’s equality, largely because of low rates of labor force participation, wage equality, and leadership positioning.
The gender gap is worst for adolescent girls and young women in rural areas. Recent data suggests that adolescent boys are five to six times more likely than girls to be employed. This differential is greater for married young people. Young married women also have less control over household earnings than their husbands. Similarly, these young women are less likely than their older peers to report freedom of movement — to go to the market, a health facility, or locations outside of the local community — and less likely than men their age to hold assets such as land or mobile phones, particularly in rural areas.
New research
What is limiting adolescent girls’ transition from secondary education to employment and on to leadership? Data is limited, but traditional gender norms, established early in a girl’s development, are likely responsible for the unequal participation and positioning of women in the workplace. The UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health conducted a recent study with couples in a rural district of India that offers some insight into parental expectations on these issues. As part of EMERGE — an open access gender empowerment measurement platform funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — the study deployed newly-developed survey measures on parental aspirations for children. The research site reflected a rural, middle class, and largely agricultural population of parents, where education participation for girls and boys is normative but women’s employment beyond agriculture is rare.
What we found
A gender gap in education aspirations exists at the tertiary education level. While almost all parents aspired for their children to complete secondary education, regardless of the child’s gender, parents were more likely to desire a higher education for boy children than girls (54 percent to 46 percent). This gender gap in educational aspirations was more likely to be reported by fathers than mothers.
Parents gender the importance of good-paying jobs for their children’s futures. Parents largely reported aspirations of college and a good-paying job for their children. However, when asked what is most important to support the happiness and success of a child, separately for girls and boys, parents focused more on good-paying jobs for boys compared to girls (36 percent to 19 percent).
No gender gaps in parental aspirations to start families. We found that the majority of parents believed their child should have two children by age 25, regardless of gender. Given strong expectations, in this context, that children should be born in marriage, these aspirations point to a greater chance of young marriages with early childbearing and, consequently, little birth spacing. Interestingly, 18 percent of parents desired no grandchildren from their girl children by age 25, while 20 percent did so for their boy children.
What does this mean for girl’s leadership?
Despite holding more gender equal ideologies and goals regarding the education of their children, parental aspirations for this generation of children are reinforcing traditional norms and gendered expectations. Retention of girls in secondary school may support delayed marriage and first birth, but is not helping girls transition from school to vocation to leadership in a climate of norms that still centralize marriage and family as the follow-up to education.
In this context, success for adolescents transitioning to young adults is defined by marriage, and marriage remains an immediate precursor to family creation, mothers’ increasing domestic responsibilities, and fathers’ increasing pressures for income generation. Would these children choose these lives without the normative expectations and pressures from family and community to marry and procreate? Could there be more space for girls to lead and women to use their education for employment, and for boys to take more space as caregivers for their children, if these norms were reshaped to allow for these choices?
To answer these questions, the EMERGE platform has placed more gender norms measures into multinational surveys — in partnership with Afrobarometer, the Violence Against Children Surveys, World Values Surveys, and others — to start assessing and tracking these gendered expectations. We want to determine if in fact transformative change at scale can improve gender empowerment for women and girls. Hopefully, the next decade of progress for the International Day of the Girl will reach beyond indicator advancements to achieve comprehensive, global change for women and girls’ full participation and contribution.
