Education and Gender Role Attitudes

This paper examines whether education plays an important role in shaping individuals’ gender role attitudes. We exploit exogenous variation in temporal and geographical impacts of the 1986 Compulsory Education Law in China, which reduced inequality in compulsory school attendance across regions. Using the data from the China General Social Survey, we find that the extra schooling induced by the compulsory schooling reform leads to more egalitarian gender role attitudes. Education’s liberalizing effect is concentrated among females and urban residents. However, education’s impacts on gender-equal behavior are much weaker than impacts on attitudes. Finally, we discuss the potential channels through which education shapes individuals’ gender-role attitudes.