Towards global gender equality in education? Economic incentives, global cultures and IO policy recommendations

• In Event: The Changing Dynamics of Global Education Reform: Globalization and Variation Mechanisms in a (Post-)Neoliberal Era

Proposal

The basic goals and policy recommendations of leading International Organisations (IO) in the area of education have recently shifted towards the perspective of social needs and the empowerment of marginalised groups. Yet, neoliberal ideas are still present, especially regarding female agency: Education is still seen as an investment in human capital.

We explain the partial shift by drawing on the theory of sociological neo-institutionalism. Neo-institutionalist theory highlights the normative pressure in states’ (global) environment, but at the same time reflects on strategies of “de-coupling”: nation states learn to distinguish between actual performance, and “myth and ceremony”. In this view, the individualistic approach to humans and their decision-making might be still present in IOs’ policy recommendations, despite the perceived normative pressure against neoliberalism in recent decades. IOs like the World Bank (WB) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) now increasingly recommend providing incentives for women to participate in education, in particular they emphasize equal payment laws (EPL), and thereby implicitly follow a rational choice approach to human behaviour. In this regard, economists often assume a rational homo oeconomicus who responds to incentives when making decisions. From a human capital perspective (G.S. Becker, J. Mincer), an important incentive to female labour market participation, and thus to invest in education, is equal payment compared to men. Accordingly, the prospect of greater expected labour market benefits should motivate women’s decisions on educational participation.
In this paper we analyse how policy recommendations of globally influential economic IOs impact on national policies of gender equality, and, in addition, whether these policies actually affect the inclusion of girls and women in educational institutions.
The empirical part of our study tackles the topic of gender equality in education in a global perspective from three different, yet interconnected, directions. First, based on the sociological neo-institutionalism we investigate the changing global discourse on measures aimed at producing gender equality in education from the early 1980s onwards. We qualitatively analyse the policy recommendation of two influential IOs, namely the WB and the OECD. Secondly, in a quantitative network diffusion study we focus on the global adoption of EPLs starting in 1918. Thirdly, we quantitatively examine the outcome of global and national efforts towards gender equality by estimating the effect of EPLs on the share or female students using fixed effects models with group-specific slopes. According to the human capital approach, which is presumably still dominant in the WB and the OECD, we expect to find significant influences of IO engagement and payment equality on the enrolment of girls in secondary education. However, we presume these effects to be moderated by so-called ‘cultural spheres’ related to gender role orientations. It is yet not clear whether economic incentives trigger the expected decisions at the micro-level, or whether the implicit behavioural assumptions are rather specific to specific national and cultural configurations.

Authors

• Fabian Besche-Truthe, University Bremen

• Kerstin Martens, University of Bremen