Teen Fertility and Gender Inequality in Education

Previous studies in developed countries have found a micro-level association between teenage fertility and girls’ educational attainment but researchers still debate the policy implications of these associations. First, are these associations causal? Second, are they substantively important enough that policy efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy among teens would pay off in terms of narrowing national gender gaps in education? Third, if such policies do pay off, under what contexts are the payoffs likely to be most important? This paper focuses on the latter two questions. We begin by proposing a contextual hypothesis to explain cross-national variation in the gender-equity payoffs from reducing unintended teen fertility. We then test this hypothesis, using DHS data from 38 countries. 1 Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University Please direct correspondence to Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue 318 Warren Hall, Department of Development Sociology, Ithaca, NY 14850. Email: [email protected]. Phone (607) 255 3189/ Fax (607) 254 2896. 2 Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University Demographic Research – Volume 11, Article 11 306 http://www.demographic-research.org