Maybe early marriage is not as bad as low education”? The independent contribution of early marriage and low education on women’s life outcomes in Ten Asian Countries

Numerous studies have reported huge adverse effects of early marriage (marriage before age 18) on women’s life outcomes in adulthood. Others have shown that low education is a hindrance to women’s whole self-development. However, current literature is unclear about the direct individual and interacted effects of low/high education and early/late marriage on women’s socioeconomic life outcomes. In the current study, we borrowed retrospective cross-sectional data covering a total of 129,519 women from ten Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Yemen; and showed differences in the following individual’s current life outcomes, based on low education and timing of first marriage: gender ideologies and attitudes towards wife-beating, employment status, occupational position, the experience of marital dissolution, and poverty, using both descriptive bivariate (chi-square) and multivariate analyses. The result shows that early marriage was rampant in all countries studied, ranging from 14% in Kyrgyzstan to 76% in Bangladesh. However, women who married early but had high education (secondary or post-secondary) had better life outcomes in all compared to their counterparts who though married late (>18 years) but had low education. Our findings again emphasized the need for female education amidst global campaigns to end early marriage.