Abstract
Using data from the ‘Youth in India: Situation and Needs’ survey, this article provides perhaps the first estimates of inequality of opportunity in schooling outcomes for males and females separately for six Indian states. The inequality of educational opportunity in completion of primary (and secondary) schooling among females is more than twice (and nearly twice) that among males. Further, among females, only 20 per cent of total schooling opportunities needed for universal completion of secondary schooling are available and equitably distributed, a figure substantially lower than that for males (35 per cent). We also find stark inter-state variations in gender differential in inequality of educational opportunities.
Abstract
A l’aide de données issues de l’enquête Youth in India: Situation and Needs (« Jeunesse en Inde: situation et besoins »), cet article fournit des estimations – probablement les premières de ce type – de l’inégalité des chances entre les genres en matière de réussite scolaire dans six Etats indiens étudiés séparément. L’inégalité des chances d’achever le cycle primaire (et secondaire) est plus de deux fois (et presque deux fois) plus élevée chez les filles que chez les garçons. En outre, parmi les filles, seulement 20 per cent des possibilités de scolarisation nécessaires à l’achèvement universel des études secondaires sont disponibles et distribués équitablement, un chiffre nettement inférieur à celui pour les garçons (35 per cent). Enfin, l’inégalité des chances scolaires selon les sexes varie fortement entre les Etats.
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Notes
In spirit, our theoretical approach is in line with both Roemer (1993, 1998) and Van de gaer (1993). However, it might be considered relatively closer to Van de gaer’s (1993) approach, because in a way we are measuring inequality of opportunities in terms of difference in available opportunities (access to primary education and access to secondary education) based on the circumstances of the individuals.
It is worthwhile to mention here that the empirical estimation followed in this article belongs to the ‘Parametric Approach’ family. There are studies that have used only ‘non-parametric’ approaches, as well as studies that have used both ‘parametric’ and ‘non-parametric’ approaches. The main difference between a non-parametric and a parametric approach is that in the non-parametric approach individuals are generally partitioned into groups/cells based on their circumstances (such that individuals in a particular group have the same circumstances but circumstances differ by groups) and the difference in outcomes between the groups is taken as inequality of opportunity. In the parametric approach, a model (a functional form relating the outcome to the circumstance variables) is estimated in order to derive predicted probabilities or scores and so on conditioned on the circumstances of individuals, and then inequality of opportunity is obtained based on these predicted values. See Ferreira and Gignoux (2011) and Singh (2012b) for details.
See Barros et al (2008) for a formal proof and other properties, especially the range (0–1) of DIEop and the insensitivity of DIEop to a ‘balanced increase’ in the outcome analysed. A balanced increase is a situation in which new educational opportunities are assigned to the circumstances groups in the same way as the pre-existing ones were in the past.
HEOp was also first developed by Barros et al (2008) to measure inequality of opportunity in access to basic services among Latin American and Caribbean children.
The results of the logit regressions that have been used to generate the inequality of opportunity and human opportunity indices for primary and secondary schooling have been provided in Appendices A and B, respectively.
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Acknowledgements
We express our thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. This article was written when Ashish Singh was a PhD candidate at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, India.
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Singh, A., Singh, A., Pallikadavath, S. et al. Gender Differentials in Inequality of Educational Opportunities: New Evidence from an Indian Youth Study. Eur J Dev Res 26, 707–724 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2013.35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2013.35