Education and Incentives: A woman’s perspective
When I was sixteen, my parents (who had never allowed me to spend a night away from home) said they would send me to a hostel if I got an admission into India’s top technology institute. It was a huge incentive - a time to live my life, my way, before I was married into a family which may be even less permissive than mine.
At nineteen, I was top of my class in IIT (India’s top technology institute, like MIT in the US). My peers congratulated me- my grades were setting me up for an ivy league scholarship to the US. My parents were not open to my leaving the country before I was married. With no incentive for further academic achievement, I devoted myself to living my short ‘independent’ life to the full. Theater, literature, advocacy, student politics drew me to them, and three years later, I finished a ‘good-enough’ middle of class.
This Tuesday, Mr. Zafiris Tzannatos, a senior advisor on macroeconomics to the ILO showed the clear link between education attainment and incentives at the Doha Forum on Decent Work and Poverty Reduction. Focusing on the desire to emigrate as an incentive, he showed amazing correlations between country rankings by young people’s desire to emigrate (Silatech Index, 2010) and their educational achievement . His analysis resonated with my own experience.
He was puzzled though, that 77% of the university students in Qatar were women - three times as many women as men! The fact that men go abroad to study more often explained a very small percentage of this difference, he said.
He had just given us the answer, but did not know it. I did, having lived it. Education achievement offers significant incentives for women. Good grades help us make the case for further education with parents. University education gives us freedom: it delays marriage and provides the opportunity to find and express ourselves before being transferred from one ‘guardian’ to another.
Thank you Zafiris, for asking the most important question there is in education reform as only an economist can. What is the student’s aspiration? What is her incentive to succeed? With that lens, we can not only understand women’s educational attainment but also explain their low workforce participation.
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