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Gender Gap in Intergenerational Educational Persistence: Can Compulsory Schooling Reduce It?

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Abstract

We analyze the impact of an increase in compulsory schooling policy on the gender gap in intergenerational educational persistence using the nationally representative Turkish Adult Education Survey. Prior to the reform, there is a gender gap in the association of parents’ educational attainment with their offspring’s. Daughters’ educational attainment is more dependent on their parents’ education background. We show that the education reform that increased compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years reduced the impact of parental education on completion of new compulsory schooling (8 years) and post-compulsory schooling (high school) for both sons and daughters. The gender gap in intergenerational education transmission has decreased by about 5 percentage points in the completion of new compulsory schooling level but remains unchanged at the post-compulsory schooling level after the reform. Heterogeneous effects of the reform indicate that mandating additional years of education is an ineffective intervention in the eastern regions with poorer economic conditions, larger rural population, and more traditional gender views in reducing the gender gap in educational mobility, even at the compulsory level of education.

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Notes

  1. Hertz et al. (2008) demonstrate that the global average correlation between parent and child’s schooling has held steady at about 0.4 for the past 50 years.

  2. For details, see the paper by Duflo (2012) that surveys the literature suggesting the limited spillover effects of policies targeting gender equality.

  3. Jensen (2010) shows the underestimation of returns to education in the Dominican Republic and argues that students and their parents rely mainly on the earnings of the workers that they can observe in forming their expectations on returns to education. Therefore, the residential and social segregation by income could lead to underestimates of returns to education in low-income low education settings.

  4. The female labor force participation in Turkey, at 28.9%, is the lowest among OECD countries and the 22nd lowest in the world (World Bank, 2018).

  5. Parents who do not comply with the law face only monetary penalties for the first two violations. In the third violation, there is the risk of additional penalties and incarceration. After four or more violations, parents can be sentenced to up to 6 months in prison. The local administrative body and teachers are responsible for tracking the compliance of the students. However, noncompliance with the law is common both before and after the policy (Dayioglu et al., 2016).

  6. We use observations from 2012 wave of the AES for our analysis relying on regional information.

  7. Altindag (2016) investigates the role of son preference on population and he shows that couples in Turkey exhibit son preference through son-biased differential stopping behavior that does not cause a sex ratio imbalance in the population. He finds that the demand for sons leads to lower (higher) ratios of boys to girls in large (small) families. We additionally confirm his finding using Household Labor Force Surveys conducted in 2004–2013, and find that the positive correlation between the number of children and the share of female children is higher for families with both parents having less than secondary education compared to families with at least one parent with secondary education.

  8. Several earlier studies (Erten & Keskin, 2018; Gulesci et al., 2020) using other datasets that the birth month is available assign the treatment status jointly by birth month and year. Due to the lack of data on the birth month, we rely on the year of birth and thereby a slightly cruder identification strategy similar to the studies by Dayioglu et al. (2016) and Aydemir and Kirdar (2017).

  9. Roodman (2020) suggest not to use standard errors for inference leading to our choice of presenting p values.

  10. According to NUTS-1 classification, TR1 to TR7 regions are determined as West, and TR8 to TRC regions are determined as East.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Asena Caner, Pelin Akyol, the editor, and two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and comments. We also thank the Turkish Institute of Statistics (TurkStat) for granting permission to use micro-data from the Adult Education Survey. We are indebted to Mehmet Alper Dincer for generously sharing the supplementary dataset that helped us to confirm our findings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Bilkent University, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Merve Demirel-Derebasoglu & Cagla Okten

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  1. Merve Demirel-Derebasoglu
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Correspondence to Cagla Okten.

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Appendices

Appendix

Regional Variation of Traditional Gender Views in Turkey

To study the relation of the traditional gender views with the effect of compulsory schooling reform on providing gender equality in intergenerational persistence, we draw on a new survey conducted by Konda, Research and Consulting company, in 2015 (KONDA, 2020). The sample of Konda survey was collected according to the address-based population system with stratified sampling according to the 2011 General Election Results. The survey is representative of adults (18 years old or older), similar to our main dataset in this study, at the NUTS-1 regional level. There are 12 regions at the NUTS-1 level in Turkey. The primary purpose of the Konda survey was to gather views and opinions on gender roles and domestic violence.

The survey has several questions on gender views, which we use to examine which regions have more equal gender views. Survey respondents are asked whether they strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree with the following statements: S1—The main responsibility of a woman is to raise children and run a household; S2—Women entering the labor force leads to unemployment among men; S3—Women cannot be good managers by nature; S4—Women are delicate, it is not appropriate for them to work in men’s jobs; S5—Women should be careful about their outfit in the workplace. We construct five gender view dummy variables for each statement that takes a value of 1 if the respondent agrees or strongly agrees with the given statement and 0 otherwise. We, next, define a gender view index variable by the first principal component of all five dummies constructed by the questions asked in the Konda survey on gender views.

Table 8 summarizes the mean levels for five gender view dummies and gender view index in 12 NUTS-1 regions. The higher means in the east part of the country than the west indicates that more traditional gender views are held by people residing in the east (Tables 9, 10, 11).

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Geographical classification: west vs. east

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Table 8 The gender view index at the NUTS-1 level
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Table 9 Robustness checks: alternative bandwidths and time trend controls
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Table 10 Robustness check with cohort 1986 is included in the sample
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Table 11 Robustness check with sample restricted to 2012 and 2016 waves
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Demirel-Derebasoglu, M., Okten, C. Gender Gap in Intergenerational Educational Persistence: Can Compulsory Schooling Reduce It?. Popul Res Policy Rev 41, 2037–2083 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-022-09741-3

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