Determining the Extent of Gender Discrimination in Education Sector: A case of Pakistan Paper No.04

Abstract

Gender bias in developing countries may restrict educational opportunities for girls in comparison to boys. This paper attempts to measure the gender disparity in education amongst children from 5 years to 18 years of age across Pakistan. Using the data from PSLM 2010-2011 and applying Oaxaca decomposition with probit estimation we measure the gender gap. The results interestingly show that although a strong bias exists against females in overall enrollment rates, but as we explore further, we see that males drop out of private schools more as compared to females and the accumulated level of schooling of the male adults is also lower than that of females. We find that much of these differences are not due to the endowment effects. Large negative deviation for males may be attributed to the unobservable pressure and society’s norms regarding the role of males that affect them in an adverse manner.