Intergenerational and peer transmission of gender attitudes and their impact on educational expectations

We investigate the roles of parents and peers in the formation of gender attitudes among children and adolescents. Moreover, we examine whether gender attitudes bias lowers educational expectations for girls. We use data from the 2023 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills, comprising 14,530 students aged 10 and 15 across eight countries and three continents. We employ multilinear Mundlak-style and instrumental variables regression techniques controlling for individual, household, school, and country effects. As for gender attitudes, we focus on beliefs about innate sex differences in social and emotional skills. Findings indicate that both parental and peer gender attitudes are robust predictors of the gender attitudes of children and adolescents. Peer effects are found to be relatively stronger than parent effects. Moreover, when children perceive a more traditional division of labor at home, they are more likely to hold biased gender attitudes. Gender attitudes bias is found to lower educational expectations of adolescents, particularly among girls. These results point toward a key role that schools and parents play in tackling gender social norms bias and advancing gender equality.