Education and Gender Inequality

Overview
In this project, you will bring together data on educational outcomes to study gender inequality within countries and income inequality across countries.

We will be using country-level data to compare educational outcomes by the income level a country is. We are also going to compare educational outcomes in each country by gender. Finally, we will compare gender differences by the country’s level of income.

I have made a worksheet that you will use for the final project. I have also posted a video with detailed step-by-step instructions on Blackboard.

Starting point
The World Bank categorizes countries as low income, lower middle income, upper middle income, and high income. The classifications are updated each year on July 1 and are based on GNI (Gross National Income) per capita in current USD (United States dollars).

Group GNI as of July 1, 2023
Low income $1,145 and under
Lower-middle income $1,146 – $4,515
Upper-middle income $4,516 -$14,005
High income > $14,005

Everyone will use the United States as their high-income country.

Additionally, you must choose one country from each of the following categories

Upper middle income: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Namibia, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine

Lower middle income: Bolivia, Egypt, Ghana, Honduras, Jordan, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Vietnam

Lower income: Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda

Sources you will use

World Inequality Database in Education https://www.education-inequalities.org/ This is the main source of data for your project.

CIA World Factbook https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/
You will get some additional information about your countries from this source

Steps
You will be filling out the project worksheet that I created, writing interpretations of the data, and drawing conclusions about patterns of gender inequality, and countries’ income inequality, as they relate to educational outcomes. Everything can be done on the worksheet; no additional paper is necessary.

1. Fill out the top of page 1 of the worksheet indicating the countries that you have chosen.
2. Briefly explain why you chose the upper-middle income, lower-middle income, and lower income countries out of the options that I provided. There is no right or wrong answer for this.
3. Use the CIA World Factbook to get information on the urbanization, fertility rate, mother’s mean age at first birth (if available), and government type for each country and fill in the worksheet. This information will be found in the People and Society and Government sections for each country.
4. Use the World Inequality Database in Education to get information on the population, gross national income per capita (NOTE that this doesn’t always match with a country’s classification as low/low-middle/upper-middle/high income by the World Bank, but that’s okay), and population living on below $3.20 per day for each country and fill in the worksheet. This information is at the top of each country’s page. NOTE: Afghanistan does not have population living on below $3.20 per day. It is fine to leave it blank.
5. Write a paragraph describing your first impressions of the countries based on the information you just filled out. How do the countries compare to each other?
6. We will be studying four outcomes
   “Never been to school” – percentage of children who are 3-6 years older than the standard age for entering primary school who have never attended school. NOTE: If a country does not have data for “Never Went to School,” then use “Out of School Children” instead.
   “Primary completion rate” – percentage of children aged 3-5 years above the standard primary school graduation age who have completed primary school; OR young people aged 15- 24 years who have completed primary school
   “Higher education attendance” – percentage of people aged 18-22 attending higher education (in the US, it is “tertiary completion rate” – percentage of people aged 25-29 who have completed at least 2 years of higher education and percentage of people aged 26-30 who have completed at least 4 years of higher education)
   “Less than 4 years of schooling” – Percentage of the population living in education poverty: with less than four years of education for the age group 20-24 years.
7. Go to your first country. Make sure that on the right-hand side, “latest” is selected for the year. Make sure that only “gender” is checked off under Disparities. Look up the four outcomes mentioned above and fill them into the worksheet. You will want to get information for “average” as well as “males” and “females.” You can hover over the graphics to get the percentages, or if it is hard to see because everything overlaps, click on each gender separately on the right-hand side to look at it by itself.
8. Follow step 7 for your other 3 countries.
9. Write responses to the questions that are asked of you on pages 3-7 of the worksheet, using the information that you just filled in.