Socioeconomic impact of female education

The socioeconomic impact of female education constitutes a significant area of research within international development.

Increases in the amount of female education in regions tends to correlate with high levels of development.

Educating girls leads to a number of social benefits, including many related to women's empowerment.

International development is an academic discipline concerned with the social and economic progress in impoverished regions.

Women's education is one of the major explanatory variables behind the rates of social and economic development,[1] and has been shown to have a positive correlation with both.

[3] One way to measure education levels is to look at what percentage of each gender graduates from each stage of school.

A similar, more exact way is to look at the average number of years of schooling a member of each gender receives.

The difference between the sum of these two quantities and the total increase in income due to education is the net return.

"[6] The principle holds particularly for women, who can expect a 1.2% higher return than men on the resources they invest in education.

Girls are underrepresented in schooling, meaning that investments aimed specifically at educating women should produce bigger dividends.

[9] Although investment in women's education is not present everywhere, David Dollar and Roberta Gatti have presented findings that show that this decision, along with other failures to invest in women are not "an efficient economic choice for developing countries" and that "countries that under-invest grow more slowly.

[3] In addition to total economic growth, women's education also increases the equitability of the distribution of wealth in a society.

[14] Women with an education are also more involved in the decision-making process of the family and report making more decisions over a given time period.

Economically, the benefits of investing in women are much smaller in areas facing high levels of poverty.

As a result the country suffers a major problem, which is a high unemployment rate of educated women.In societies where women are married off and leave the family while men stay back and take care of their parents, investing in sons is more valuable to parents.

[5] Communities throughout India can be used as valuable case studies to illustrate the complex relationship between education and socioeconomic systems.

Comparison of states can also illustrate the complexity in education being both a cause and effect of social and economic factors.

[22] This can be seen in comparative women participation and some autonomy in academia and the arts, playing roles in politics, administration, festivals, and social reform.

[23] Women have the power to inherit land and choose their spouse, which provides Kerala with one of the lowest early marriage rates in India.

This shows regional contradictions in the theory that increases in female education can drive development and exposes the complexity of this discourse.

Paradoxically, while child labor is the largest contribution to keeping children out of school in Rajasthan, improved access to and condition of educational facilities could in help break the vicious cycle of poverty that is attached to child labor.