Gender differential in educational attainments in India: comparing results of individual-level and household-level analysis

Zakir Husain, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Charanjit Kaur, University of Delhi
Mousumi Dutta, Presidency University

Studies on the gender gap in enrolment and on educational attainment in India based on analysis of individual outcomes indicate a clear bias against girls. However, another line of research that attempts to test the presence of gender discrimination in education by comparing the level of household expenditure on education has been less successful. In this study, we re-examine this problem using data from National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) 64th round data (2009) on “Participation and Expenditure in Education”. We first start by testing for gender differences in educational expenditure at the individual level; in the second step we shift to the household level and test for the persistence of our results on gender differentials using the Rothbart-Engels curve approach. Our study is an improvement over earlier studies as we test for discrimination at two levels using the same data set.