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Current sandbox for Female Education and Development

Female education is an important component of economic development. In countries where girls receive less education than boys, there is a significant economic opportunity cost due to the increased income that females would earn if they received equal education. This cost is also manifested in social conditions that harm society such as increased pregnancy among teenage girls and higher infant mortality rates. Efforts in countries to increase female education have been shown to lead to significant economic growth. The benefits of increased female education also go up as time goes on, through benefits brought about by empowered women. Closing the gap between male and female education levels is thus an important strategy for helping a country to economically develop and is one of the U.N. Millennium Developmental Goals. According to notable economist Lawrence Summers, “investment in the education of girls may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.”

Methods for measuring effects

Several strategies and variables are used for analyzing the effects of female education. Typically, studies are concerned with the gender gap between the education levels of boys and girls and not the level of female education. This helps to distinguish the specific effects of female education from the benefits of education in general. Note that some studies, particularly older ones, simply look at females' total education levels. Education levels can be measured in a number of ways. One simple way is to look at what percentage of each gender graduates from each stage of school. A similar more exact way is to look at the average number of years of schooling a member of each gender receives. Another approach is to look at the literacy rates for each gender, as literacy is one of the earliest and primary aims of education. It provides an idea of not just how much education was received but how effective it was.

Development is also measured in several different ways. Most common is to look at changes in growth of GDP. In order to ensure that a connection holds, correlations are analyzed across different countries over different periods of time. Typically the result given is a relatively steady average effect, although variation over time can also be measured. The individual benefits of education can also be analyzed. This is done by taking the cost of education and the amount of income that would have been earned during years enrolled in school and subtracting the two from the total increase in income brought about by education. There are also a wide variety of social benefits of education, each of which has a rather distinct methodology associated with measuring it.

Effect of female education

Economic benefits

In general, investing in education is known to bring overall monetary rewards to an individual. According to one paper on the subject, “The profitability of education, according to estimates of private rate of return, is indisputable, universal, and global.” The principle holds particularly for females, who can expect a 1.2% higher return on the amount they invest in education than males. Providing one extra year of education to girls increases their wages by 10-20%, a figure 5% more than what doing the same does for boys.

This individual monetary gain turns into an increase in the overall economic gains of a country. Even without the 1.2% higher rate, given that investment in early education tends to produce the highest returns and girls are underrepresented in schooling, it follows that investments aimed specifically at educating women should produce bigger dividends. Data shows that when countries fail to invest adequately in female education, it is not because it is “simply an efficient economic choice for developing countries” to make but that instead, "countries that under-invest grow more slowly.” The effect of the educational gender gap is more pronounced when a country is only moderately poor. Thus the incentive to invest in women goes up as a country moves out of extreme poverty. Looking holistically at the opportunity cost from the lack of investment in girls, the total missed GDP growth is between 1.2% and 1.5%. When looking at different regions, it is estimated that 0.4-0.9% of the difference in GDP growth is accounted for solely by differences in the gender gap in education.

In addition to total economic growth, there is also the concern of distribution of wealth in a society. Increased female education is important for achieving this as well as it targets the impoverished and specifically females, a disadvantaged group within those ranks. There is also evidence in developed countries that lower gender disparity in educational attainment for a country correlates with overall lower income disparity within society.

Social benefits

Increased female education has many social benefits as well. While many of these benefits have an economic component, they also bring value to a society in other ways. Some of the most notable benefits include decreased fertility rates and lower infant and maternal mortality rates. Another important benefit is increased political participation among women. Educated women are more likely to engage in civic participation and attend political meetings, and have in several instances in the developing world successfully organized movements to secure benefits for themselves. Evidence even points to an increased likelihood of democratic governance in countries with well-educated women. These benefits also expand to the woman’s role in the household and their say in decisions. Having women play a more active role in the family in turn brings more social benefits. For one, children in a household where the mother is educated are more likely to attend school, with this being especially true for girls. In households where a mother is not educated, adult literacy programs can indirectly help teach mothers the value of education and encourage them to send their children to school. There are also a number of other benefits for children associated with having an educated mother over an educated father, including higher survival rates and better nutrition. Investing in female education also starts a cycle that leads to increased female empowerment. For example, higher income among women leads to a smaller gender gap in areas including education, leading to even higher female income and creating a positive cycle.

Reasons for education gap

Given the clear economic benefits of equal educational achievement for women, one area of interest is why these gender gaps exist in education. One important component is cultural traditions. Given that men are tasked in many cultures with running the family, their education is often seen as more important. The education of girls on the other hand is often seen as less important and frivolous. It is even hypothesized that in some cases a decision-maker in a family might have a strong preference for gender inequality and be willing to forgo a good deal of money to keep this social construct in place. Another contributing factor is that in some societies women are married off and leave the family, while men stay back and take care of their parents, making their livelihood more valuable to their parents. Girls are also expected to be involved with taking care of household responsibilities. Families will often view this role as more important and choose to teach girls these skills over giving them a formal education, especially when forced to choose between the two. Studies have shown that in countries where household activities take up a large portion of girls’ time, they are less likely to enroll in school.

One other issue is that while investing in female education has a higher overall return when looking at all levels of education, when looking at only primary education investing in males has a higher rate of return. Thus, even a family that is informed on the benefits of education for each gender may elect to only make sure that their sons finish primary school, failing to reap the benefits their daughters would have gotten had they made it to secondary school. At least one study has found data showing that in certain cases expected returns correlate to the likelihood of a family choosing to educate a child, supporting the idea that families do indeed have at least a rough idea of the economic returns a child’s education will bring. Reaching the U.N. Millennial goal of free primary education would help in part to solve this issue.

Criticisms

Problems do exist in the research of female education and economic development that cast some level of doubt on the quality of the results. One issue that researchers acknowledge is the difficulty in comparing education levels. The same number of years of schooling in two different countries may very be different, as might be what is termed ‘primary school’ in each country. Also, while extensive information for education in developed countries exists, data is only available for a small number of developing countries, bringing into question to what extent the results can be generalized for all developing countries. Additionally, while the pure economic benefits are relatively uncontroversial, there is some discrepancy over how to measure the social benefits, with some variability between studies.