The effects of family gender-roles on educational attainment and career choice of girls

Abstract: It is vastly documented how parent’s attitudes toward gender norms affect their children’s identity, preferences, and human capital accumulation. Recent literature for Denmark, Sweden and the US finds evidence that first-born girls, conditionally on being in a family with at least two children, have a penalty in their adult-life earnings when the second-born child is a boy instead of a girl. This would be explained by girls having larger conformity to gender norms when they have a brother, shaping their preferences for more traditionally feminine careers, even though it does not make a difference in their educational attainment. I intend to exploit this identification to explore the educational attainment and career choice of first-born girls in Peru, a developing country. I would also explore attitudes toward gender norms and time use of families of such composition using social and time use surveys. The main hypothesis is that I would find negative effects in educational attainment, unlike the case in the developed countries. In my setting, girls who face stronger conformity to gender norms in their families will have less time and access to educational resources.