Education Gender Gaps in Pakistan: Is the Labor Market to Blame?

The paper explores the labor market returns for both men and women and intends to ascertain whether differential returns in the labor market explain gender gap in schooling within Pakistan. Private economic returns are estimated through ordinary least squares (OLS), Heckman two-step procedure, two-stage least squares (2SLS) and household fixed-effects whereas data has been extracted from Pakistan Integrated Household Survey 2002. The analysis indicates that contrary to the popular notion, returns to additional years of schooling are higher for women (13%-18%) as opposed to men (7%-11%) and therefore returns to education are not responsible for the gender gaps in schooling. The differential treatment can be explained by the fact that total labor market returns for men are significantly higher than for women and while returns to sons education are realized by parents, returns to daughters education are realized by in-laws.

Furthermore, social norms of the society and nonexistent social security system mean that elderly parents live with sons rather than daughters. Higher opportunity cost of education for girls and conservative values might also contribute towards low levels of girls enrollment rates. The study concludes that no explicit explanation can be derived for gender inequality between males and females in Pakistan and plausible explanations suggest changes within policies whereby provision of subsidies and incentives to girls schooling along with raising quality of education can aid in reducing the sharp gender gap that is persistent in Pakistani society.