Sex-segregated Schools, Female Education and Fertility: Evidence from Jordan

Girls in the socially conservative Islamic society face an additional obstacle to attend school because of the hesitance of some parents to send their daughters to coed schools, particularly at the secondary school level. The proposed project will estimate the effect of the availability of different types of secondary schools (whether girls-only or coed) on girls’ educational attainment in Jordan by exploiting differences in the supply of schools by type, region, and cohort. To our knowledge, this will be the first study on the role of sex-segregated schools in increasing girls’ schooling in the Islamic society. Furthermore, relying on the exogenous variation in women’s schooling induced by differences in school availability across regions and cohorts, the proposed project will also extend the investigation to the causal effect of women’s education on fertility.