Unveiling Gender Gap in Educational Performance: Evidence from India

Abstract

This paper aims to answer if there is a gender-based disparity in educational performances due to the children’s background characteristics. What are the factors that cause a gender gap and the extent to which these factors contribute to the gap in educational performance? The study attempts to approach these questions using the fourth round of Young Lives survey data for the older cohort. Based on the results of a simple linear regression model and gender-based means of the explanatory variables, we adopted the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition technique. Regression results show gender, time to study, social background, mother’s education, expenditure on education and years of education significantly influence the children’s mathematics performance and ceteris paribus. The majority of the performance difference, using the Oaxaca–Blinder technique, was explained by the differences in the variation of the mean outcome of male and female children, applied to the impact of female children. The entirety of the coefficient effect is explained by the body mass index and years of schooling a child has received. JEL Codes: I21, I22, I24, I25, I26, I29