Gender Disparities in Household Education Expenditure

Gender disparities in the allocation of household resources to education remain a pervasive feature of many societies, where entrenched norms and economic priorities influence the relative investment in boys’ and girls’ schooling. Across regions, this gap widens at higher levels of education, with families often directing more funds towards secondary and tertiary education for sons. Key drivers include parental gender preferences, the perceived returns on investment in each child, and the decision-making power of household members. Variations in expenditure patterns are also shaped by institutional factors such as the type of school (public or private), the education level of the household head, and geographic disadvantage. These disparities not only undermine efforts to achieve universal and equitable education but also carry long-term consequences for labour-market outcomes and gender equality.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent analyses of large-scale survey data in South Asia have quantified the gender gap in per-capita education spending, revealing that differential allocations begin in primary schooling and expand sharply by higher secondary and tertiary levels. Decomposition methods demonstrate that the choice of private versus public institutions explains a substantial proportion of this gap, while the education of the household head contributes to narrowing it at advanced levels of study. The findings highlight behavioural bias in intra-household decisions, persisting across economic strata and geographic regions, and point to the potent effect of institutional context in either reinforcing or mitigating gendered spending patterns.

Gender Disparities in Household Education Expenditure publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in gender disparities in household education expenditure across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Intra-household allocation: The process by which household resources are distributed among family members, reflecting bargaining power, preferences and needs.

Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition: A statistical technique that partitions observed differences between groups into components attributable to characteristics (endowments) and to coefficients (returns or discrimination).

Coarsened exact matching: A quasi-experimental method that creates matched samples by grouping observations into strata based on key covariates, improving causal inference in observational data.

References

1. Gender Discrimination in Education Expenditure in Nepal: Evidence from Living Standards Surveys. Asian Development Review (2018).
2. Predictors of the gender gap in household educational spending among school and college-going children in India. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
3. Gender Differences in Intra-Household Financial Decision-Making: An Application of Coarsened Exact Matching. Journal of Risk and Financial Management (2021).