Crossing Boundaries: Gender, Caste and Schooling in Rural Pakistan

Abstract

Social constraints are an unexplored dimension of schooling decisions in developing countries. We focus on two such constraints in the context of rural South Asia: seclusion practices limiting female mobility and stigma based on caste affiliation. Using a novel data-set from Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social structure of their constituent settlements, we uncover two main findings: First, controlling for distance to school, the odds of ever enrolling in school are substantially lower for girls who would need to cross settlement boundaries to attend, an e¤ect not present for boys. Second, low-caste children, both boys and girls, are deterred from enrolling when the most convenient school is in a settlement dominated by high-caste households. Low-caste girls, the most educationally disadvantaged group, would achieve substantially higher enrollment rates if given access to caste-concordant schools, whether these schools are placed inside or outside their own settlement. Indeed, we find that a policy of providing schools in low-caste dominant communities would increase overall enrollment far more cost-e¤ectively than a policy of placing a school in every unserved settlement. Our analysis also suggests that stigma, not low aspirations or meager perceived returns to education, explains the comparatively poor enrollment rates of low-caste girls in rural Pakistan