Gender, social change, and educational attainment

Sociological research has focused much attention on processes of educational attainment. In part, this is because of direct benefits thought to result from education and, in part, because educational attainment is considered a key step in other processes of attainment, such as occupational attainment.1 Because education gives individuals opportunities to achieve status mobility, the links between ascribed dimensions of status, such as gender, race, and education, have always drawn sociologists' attention. The spread of mass education constitutes a fundamental social transformation and a watershed in attainment processes because it opens up previously unavailable status mobility routes. Rarely, however, do we have an opportunity to examine directly the relationship between ascribed dimensions of status and educational attainment during the very beginning of the spread of mass education. In this article, we use a unique set of measures from a setting in the midst of the spread of education to examine both the impact of gender on processes of educational attainment and the ways in which community-level social change attenuates the impact of gender on education. The setting on which we focus is the multiethnic, rural population of south-central Nepal. Rural Nepal provides an ideal setting for our study because secular education was entirely unavailable prior to the early 1950s but has become universal within the lifetimes of current residents. Simultaneously, the proliferation of education has been accompanied by dramatic social changes in the availability of wage labor employment, the spread of markets, and the distribution of transportation infrastructure. Historically, status attainment in this setting was in large part determined by caste and gender, whereas now these social changes have drastically transformed attainment processes. With detailed community-level measures of social change and equally detailed individual-level life histories of educational experience, we can now thoroughly examine the relationships among gender, social change, and educational attainment.