EUGENY KOCHKIN TOOK PART IN A CONFERENCE ON SOUTH ASIA
11:16 August, 25 2011
The Third Nordic Conference on South Asian Studies for Young Scholars took place from the 16th to 18th of August in Sweden.
This conference was organized for the third time at
Lund University by Swedish South
Asian Studies Network, SASNET.
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (Copenhagen) was the main partner of SASNET
this year. The aim of the conference was to gather masters, PhD students and
young scholars from Scandinavian universities who conduct research in South
Asia (India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka). 15 experts, professional scholars, NGO representatives
who work in Asian countries participated in the conference along with 27 students
from different European countries. The main topics of the conference were
gender issues, climate change and cultural and social transformations in South
Asian countries.
SESL was represented by Eugeny Kochkin, whose
report was called «Gender bias in Educational Expectations: Evidence from Rural
India». This work was based on the data of joint research by SESL The Bombay
Mother’s and Children Welfare Society. The research project was carried out in
one of the Indian rural towns. The project’s database includes data on 574 10th-graders
of three rural schools. One of the work’s
aims was to look at how personal children’s qualities, family and school
characteristics influence the boys’ and girls’ educational expectations from a
given town. It was revealed that the children’s and
families’ characteristics affect boys’ and girls’ expectations in different
ways. Regression analysis (binary logistic regression method) was applied in
order to calculate three equations with children’s educational expectations (1
– higher education, 0 – lower than higher education) depending on families’
capital and children’s personal characteristics. The equations were computed
separately for boys, girls and all respondents in the sample. It was found out that
there is a significant effect of parental educational expectations on both
boys’ and girls’ educational expectations.
Apart from that, families’ income influences boys’ expectations, while school
performance significantly affects girls’ expectations.
Several suggestions how to interpret the obtained results were based on the interviews collected in this town. Due to widely spread (in rural area in particular) social norms stating that sons must stay with their parents and take care of them in their old age while daughters are to move to their husbands’ families, parents are more motivated for investing money into sons’ education. If a family possesses some resources, parents will seek to provide their sons with higher education. The sons’ success won’t influence parents’ decision whether to spend money on their education or not. Owing to a widely spread tradition to provide daughters with a rich dowry, investment of money into education might lead to additional expenses. A wedding of an educated daughter will cost much more, because, most probably, the bridegroom will be an appropriate one. Therefore, parents spend money on daughters’ education only when they perform well at school. Moreover, if there is more than one daughter in a family, parents will choose the one who performs better and pay for her further education. That is why girls’ school performance is a significant factor of their educational expectations.
By Eugeny Kochkin
