Trends in Female Schooling in 92 Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Coherence Across Data Sources

Kristen Jeffers , University of Minnesota
Albert Esteve-Palos, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED), Universitat de Barcelona
Joan García-Román, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED), UAB

Over the last several decades, substantial investments have been made towards achieving gender parity in education. In many countries, fertility decline is a secondary goal of policies that support female schooling. Evidence suggests the impact of female schooling on fertility and other family formation outcomes varies among countries. Disparate national contexts explain some of this variation, but it is important to consider the role of measurement in inconsistencies across time and place. Scholars considering education at the global level have grappled with and developed methods for dealing with issues of comparability across data sources, but none has systematically evaluated these issues across the main sources of demographic data and shared findings with the research community. We fill this gap by providing a systematic evaluation of trends in female educational attainment across three sources of demographic data in low and middle income countries: censuses, DHS surveys, and UNICEF MICS surveys.

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 Presented in Session 169. Flash Session: New Directions in Economy, Labor Force, Education, and Inequality