Education Improves Women's Status in Muslim Countries, but up to a Point
A large body of the literature in development and gender economics explores the effect of education on women's social and economic outcomes. Selim Gulesci (Department of Economics and IGIER) and Erik Meyersson (Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics) investigate this relationship in Turkish society in their working paper For the Love of the Republic. Education, Secularism, and Empowerment. In this paper they estimate the effect of schooling on religious expression and women's socio-economic status.
To assess this question, the authors analyze the effect of female schooling using a change in the compulsory schooling laws that was implemented in 1998. Up to 1998, 5 years of primary school were mandatory for all individuals while subsequent schooling was optional. In 1997, a new law passed in the Turkish parliament extended mandatory schooling to eight years. This implied that individuals born after September 1986 were required to complete at least 8 years of schooling while individuals born before could drop out of school after 5 years. The authors use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of education on social status and labor force participation of females. To implement this research, they use data from the 2008 Turkish Demographic Health Survey, thus exploring the effect of the new law 10 years after its implementation.
They find that the reform led to an average increase of one year in women's years of schooling. The results show an increase in the rates of secondary and high school completion for women, and a reduction in the education gender gap in Turkey.
This increase in education led to a reduction in indicators of religious expression (such as wearing the headscarf) among the affected women. The authors also find significant effects of education in women's decision rights on marriage and family planning. Moreover, there is evidence that women affected by the reform are more likely to live in richer families.
Another key question explored in the paper is through what channels education may have led to these social and economic empowering effects for women. The authors find that the effects work through different channels, depending on women's family background. For women whose mothers had no formal education, the reform resulted in them only finishing the compulsory schooling and exhibiting higher labor force participation. For women whose mothers had some formal education, the reform had persistent effects beyond compulsory schooling, and these women subsequently married more educated (and possibly wealthier) husbands but remained outside the labor force. The authors interpret these findings as evidence that education may empower women across a wide spectrum of a Muslim society, yet, depending on pre-reform constraints to participation in education, its effects may not be strong enough to fully overcome participation constraints (in education or the labor force).
This is particularly interesting for policy about the efficacy of education for increasing female labor market participation in Turkey, where, similar to many other majority-Muslim countries, female labor force participation is very low. The findings suggest that schooling might be important in terms of women's status even when women's participation in the labor market is low. However, despite the observed improved outcomes, in Turkey and perhaps also other Muslim societies, education may not alone serve as a magic bullet toward full emancipation of women and complementary policies to ease social and economic constraints may be necessary.