Volume 31, Number 1 (Winter) 1996
Alderman, Harold, Jere R. Behrman, David R. Ross, and Richard Sabot. 1996. "Decomposing the Gender Gap in Cognitive Skills in a Poor Rural Economy." Journal of Human Resources 31(1):229
Girls lag markedly behind boys in education in many developing countries, which may slow economic growth and increase inequity. This paper uses indicators of the output of the education production process, cognitive skills, to characterize and to investigate the determinants of the large educational gender gap in rural Pakistan. Local school availability accounts for about a third of the total cognitive achievement gender gap and over two-fifths of that in numeracy, which implies that policies that increased local school availability for girls could reduce substantially the gender gaps in cognitive skills. To further reduce these gender gaps will require policies that focus on the demand side of the market, where, our results suggest, the response to modest changes in incentives may be high.
Harold Alderman is a researcher at the World Bank; Jere R. Behrman is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania; David R. Ross is a professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College; and Richard Sabot is a researcher at the World Bank and a professor of economics at Williams College. The authors are grateful to Mary Bailey, Emily Mellott, John Putnam, Mark Radin, Matthew Tropp, and Amy Whritenour for able research assistance; to the World Bank and USAID for financial support; and to Marito Garcia, Shahrukh Khan, Sohail Malik, Duncan Thomas, anonymous journal referees, and participants in seminars at Harvard University, IFPRI, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Williams College, and Yale University for useful comments. The views presented here are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of IFPRI, USAID, or the World Bank. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in August 1996 through July 1999 from David R. Ross, Department of Economics, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010.
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