Kenya is at a pivotal moment in advancing prosperity for adolescent girls. With a solid educational base already established, the country has a unique chance to broaden its efforts toward comprehensive empowerment by addressing both economic and social dimensions. Prioritizing school-to-work...

This paper studies the impact of access to state-run religious schools on girls' outcomes in Türkiye. These schools, offering religious instruction and a conservative school environment, became accessible to girls following a 1976 court ruling. Exploiting variation in exposure to religious...

Girls and young women in Sub-Saharan Africa face multiple, inter-related challenges. In Zimbabwe, the odds are stacked against too many girls from an early age. The survey explores the aspirations and challenges faced by girls and young women aged 15 to 35, revealing that while eighty percent...

In poor countries, the interaction of early marriage, early motherhood, and low educational attainment disempowers women and limits their life opportunities. Even as countries grow richer, gender inequality is often sustained by social norms, thereby limiting welfare gains from women's...

Education levels in Burkina Faso, especially among women, remain low despite efforts made by government authorities and development partners to implement priority area 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This situation presents difficulties for women in terms of their being...

We examine colonial-era primary education as a determinant of modern-day attainment and gender disparities in education. We construct a novel dataset from the French Protectorate in Morocco, combining archival data on colonial school locations in 1931 and 1954 with the most recent Demographic...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, multiple interrelated challenges hinder the potential of girls and young women. Girls and women are more likely to live in poverty than men, have less access to education and health services, and rarely benefit from productive economic opportunities. Restrictive social...

Vulnerable adolescent girls and young women need a broad set of support to reduce barriers to access, participation, retention, progression, and completion of secondary education. The Keeping Girls in School (KGS) program under the World Bank-funded Girls' Education and Women's Empowerment and...

Using the Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards, we show that the household education spending on girls was higher than for boys in the period following independence. This pattern contrasts with that in the neighboring and politically interrelated country of Indonesia. We explore how religious...

Prior research has found that boys often outperform girls in high-stakes math exams, raising the question of whether these gender differences under pressure stem from nature or nurture. This relative female disadvantage can influence access to selective university programs and subsequent career...

Couples in which wives have more education than their husbands have been found to be more likely than other couples to divorce. But this relationship varies across time and place. We compare the relationship between spouses' relative education and marital dissolution across four birth cohorts...

Does education make people more or less religious? The previous literature offers mixed findings on the relationship between education and religiosity. This may be due to endogeneity bias: education and religiosity can be caused by a third variable such as culture or upbringing. We instrument...

The purpose of the study is to assess if a policy of female inclusive education should be complemented with a policy of female ownership of bank accounts to fight female unemployment. The study therefore examines how female ownership of bank accounts moderates the incidence of female education...

Affirmative action is a promising solution to the crucial challenge of bridging the gap in women's access to higher education in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This paper uses public universities' matriculation data from 2013-2018 and difference-in-differences estimators to examine...

Excessive work among adolescents may compromise educational development. Without home appliances, household work can take over 50 h a week and an additional 30 h when an infant is present. School-aged girls are often tasked with doing laundry, which is time-consuming and inflexible without a...

Gender-based violence (GBV) at schools is a pervasive problem that affects millions of adolescent girls worldwide. In partnership with the Ministry of Education in Mozambique, we developed an intervention to increase the capacity of key school personnel to address GBV and to improve students’...

Abstract: Educating girls has a myriad of benefits ranging from greater empowerment and economic opportunities to improved health outcomes and reduced poverty. In Pakistan, school-age children, especially girls, lack quality educational access and attainment. Girls, in comparison to boys, are...

Evidence shows that Guinean women and girls face important barriers across all dimensions of well-being that prevent them from having access to opportunities on an equal footing with men. The poor agency of women and girls, as reflected in the high prevalence of discriminatory legal and social...

Overlapping crises such as climate change, the ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, regional conflicts and rising global food insecurity exacerbate the inequalities faced by adolescent girls, making them particularly vulnerable in these critical times. For many girls, these circumstances...

This study investigates the impact of single-sex versus coeducational schooling on students' decisions to pursue STEM fields at the university level. Using administrative data from eight undergraduate cohorts (2012-2019) at a prominent Australian university, we compare students with similar...

We study the effect of educational attainment on family formation using regression discontinuity designs generated by centralized admissions processes to both secondary and tertiary education in Finland. Admission to further education at either margin does not increase the likelihood that men...

The gender gap in education has been a significant concern for Moroccan policymakers and researchers, but the quantitative measurement of this gap has often been overlooked. This study specifically examines the gender gap in academic achievement in reading and mathematics at both the national...

Autocrats often control social organizations to disseminate their ideology. We examine the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), where conservative military forces controlled female social organizations to promote traditional roles for women as mothers and housewives. Partnering with...