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Strategic Life Decisions: Who Has the Final Say?
For those who have education, every single door is open. —Urban man, Kragujevac, Serbia
the community’s focus group in the study, these changes occurred due to constant negotiation and interaction with prevalent gender norms. The adolescents’ focus groups from Rafah pointed out that, in line with traditional gender roles, their fathers’ voice prevails in household decisions, including who stays in school and who must drop out. While some acknowledged that both parents decide about their schooling, the decision is largely out of their (girls’ or boys’) hands, regardless whether the parents consider their preferences or not. The parents participating in the Rafah focus groups gave similar reasons for pulling their children out of school that we find in other sample countries. In the case of boys, household financial problems often dictate breaking off their education: “The boy and his parents decide he should leave school in order to find a job and help provide for the family.” For girls, marriage trumps education: “If the girl is pretty, then her parents stop her schooling to get her married.” (This may also apply if the girl is a bad student.) If a suitable man asks for a girl’s hand, she no longer needs to be educated because her future is guaranteed. In decisions about education, gender norms are in full play—the father’s authority, the good boy who works and provides for his family like a good man, the good girl who becomes a good wife and manages the household. When a girl leaves her parents’ house, though, education is then negotiated with the new man in her life. One 20-year-old woman in Rafah lamented, “I was studying to be a veterinarian, but because I had to go out to the farms with men as part of the practical study, neither my husband nor his family would accept it. My only solution was to change my major.” These normative constraints, however, are now pushing up against people’s growing recognition of the value of an education, both as an investment for future well-being (e.g., getting a good job) and as a transformative power that opens up previously unattainable possibilities and expectations, or the capacity to aspire (Appadurai 2004). Educating children—including girls—has become a new norm and deemed necessary to ensure their future, as almost all our focus groups agreed. Yet, the results of educating girls and boys are not as straightforward as they seem: the new aspirations and opportunities for those with more schooling are not always enough to overturn longstanding social and gender norms. The impact of education on access to future opportunities for boys and girls is undeniable. We know that the parents in our focus groups place high value on their children being good students and getting an education because they told us. But did the adolescent boys and girls agree? We asked the 670 adolescents in our study, who were 12–17 years old and lived in 41 urban or rural communities in 9 countries.3 According to their average school enrollment, almost all of them go to school, but the girls aspire to higher levels of education than the boys (figure 3.1). On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3