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

Studies on the gender gap in enrolment and on educational attainment in India indicate a bias against girls. However, researchers testing for the presence of gender discrimination in education at the household level have failed to come up with strong evidence of gender discrimination. 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. Our study is an improvement over earlier studies as we test for discrimination at two levels using the same data set. Econometric models used comprise of OLS, Tobit and Hurdle models.