FEMALE EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT WITHIN SOCIO- ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

Abstract

The role of females’ education in the social and economic growth of a country is well recognized. In Rural Pakistan, females are far behind in their education. The present study attempts to identify the community, household, parental and cultural determinants of the female educational attainment in the rural setting of Punjab, Pakistan. The households with at least one female child who had attained final educational level within the past five years in the rural areas of Jhang and Faisalabad constitute the population of the study. Triangulation approach consisting of quantitative and qualitative survey has been deployed for the study. For qualitative analysis, 50 information rich cases were selected from the population area using the snow-ball sampling technique. For quantitative analysis, a sample of 700 female children was selected from the rural areas of two districts (Faisalabad and Jhang) of central Punjab. Two towns (Lyallpur town and Chak Jhumra town) from district Faisalabad, while two tehsils (Jhang and Chiniot) were selected from district Jhang using the simple random sampling technique. The findings of qualitative approach reveal that distances of educational institutions for females, mothers’ illiteracy, poverty, child labour, unawareness of the heads of the households about the benefits of girls’ schooling and traditional attitude in terms of gender bias towards female schooling are the major hindrances in the educational attainment of rural females. The descriptive, inferential and qualitative analyses demonstrated that community, parental, economic and cultural factors are vitally important in explaining the female educational attainment in rural areas. The study found a negative effect of school distances on the educational attainment of the units of analysis. Higher Female Education Ratio (FER) of the village, better education of mother and father, higher income of the household, and innovative attitude and better awareness level of the Head Of the Household (HOH) emerged as significant predictors of the educational attainment of the units of analysis. A lower caste status of the family, child labour, higher chances of early marriage, and high gender bias level of the heads of the households had negative effect on the response variable.. Late age at enrolment of units of analysis caused their early dropout from schools. The results of the study are in close agreement with the theories of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu’s theory & Bernstein theory) and feministic approaches (radical, liberal and socialist feminisms). The research concluded that the trajectory of poverty, traditional thinking and low awareness viiiabout the benefits of females’ education are the close approximation of low educational attainment of rural females in the selected areas. Low education of parents, low social statuses of families and higher opportunity costs of girls also have a dampening effect on the females’ schooling in the study population. The qualitative descriptions of the key informants stressed establishing more secondary level schools for girls in rural areas. They also proposed introducing the ‘anjumans’ mean ‘local NGOs’ to increase the demand for female education among parents and to improve the situation of supply side factors in the community. The findings of the study suggest to plan programmes for poverty alleviation and to control the child labour in the rural areas. To change the perceptions of society about females and their education is the need of the hour. Government-private partnership campaign to increase the awareness about benefits of female education among male heads of the households and the families of low social status can increase the schooling participation of rural females.