The 1995/1996 Household Income, Expenditure - (PDF, 101 mb ...

VILC Characterizing Young Pupils
VII.6
Concentrating on primary education in a country where half the
population is under 20 years of age means more than acting with enlightened
interest. But resources are constrained, and especially where males earn a
premium in later life, the household's preference towards males in education
spending is often explained as efficient behavior. The efficiencies are
misconstrued and short-lived. Gender differentials in education are known to
be associated with eventual pathological outcomes in health, and the creation
of welfare dependency. But more directly, a male gender bias in education
decreases the overall quality of education; an unnatural separation of the
sexes at early stages of learning is a poor precedent for nurturing free
thought, not to mention developing sexual identity.
Table VIL3 presents the frequencies of enrollment by sex and category
for the 6 to 14 year-old age bracket. The numbers shown comprise only the
enrolled, not the total number of persons in each classification. For the
entire 6 - 14 year age bracket, the enrollment comparison of females to males
is 93%. Increasing age does not appear to be related to the ratio. The Upper
Urban region has the lowest female-to-male ratio, 88%. Qena, Aswan, Darahlia
governorates have rates lower than that. In all normal government schools,
females are 15% less likely to be enrolled than males. Females are staying
away from school, and in many cases are being kept at home, during their
very impressionable early years. Households in the higher expenditure
quintiles appear to encourage female enrollment more.
VII.C.l The Probability of Being Enrolled
What household and demographic factors are correlated with being
enrolled if one is a child between 6 and 14 years of age? The probability
that a student in the household is enrolled in school can to be associated with
a number of demographic characteristics: sex, place of habitation, education
level, household income group, education level of the household head,
household habitation space (measured in square meters per person), the
household distance to both market and the workplace of the household head,
household amenities (electricity, television, phone), and the total household
expenditure on education. Again, any variable which may impinge on
alternatives to being enrolled in school is fair game for inclusion in the right
hand side. The probit likelihood equation creates an overall index probability
of response for the dependent variable. Positive signs on the unstandardized
coefficients indicate that that right hand side variable contributes to the
student's probability of being enrolled in school. A negative sign means that
the factor negatively influences the student's enrollment.
Tables VIlA and VIL4a are, respectively, the underlying probit equation
and adjusted index coefficients for the probability of being enrolled in school.
On the surface, being female decreases the probability of being enrolled by
.23 index points, all other effects equal. Also, the variables measuring the
education level of the 6 - 14 year old student are negative and statistically
significant. The coefficient on "illiterate" is so strongly negative that
measurement error is likely involved, at least in the definition of "illiterate."
The negative coefficients on the expenditure quintiles support a similar
interpretation of a tradeoff between household earnings (measured by
expenditures) and the percentage of children enrolled. Each additional year