Going to School in Purdah: Female Schooling, Mobility Norms and Madrasas in Bangladesh

This paper looks at the determinants of secondary school attendance in Bangladesh with a focus on the interaction between community gender norms and relative supply of madrasas (i.e. Islamic schools). It presents a theoretical framework where the probability of children’s school participation varies with respect to a non-economic factor – how the community observes social norms regarding female mobility – conditional upon the types of available schools. Household data from the Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey (BDHS) is combined with community information on the availability of non-religious secondary schools and madrasas to test our theoretical predictions. It is found that in communities which are more 'progressive', in the sense that women have a relatively high level of mobility, the effect of availability of non-religious school on attendance does not vary by gender. However, in the more ‘conservative communities’, female schooling is more sensitive to the availability of madrasas.