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From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing

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Demography

Abstract

In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a country cohort who ever attended school) on the relationship between a woman’s educational attainment and her marital timing. In contexts where access to education is prevalent, the marital timing of uneducated and highly educated women is more similar than in contexts where attending school is limited to a privileged minority. This across-country convergence is driven by uneducated women marrying later in high-education contexts, especially through lower rates of very early marriages. However, within countries over time, the marital ages of women from different educational groups tend to diverge as educational access expands. This within-country divergence is most often driven by later marriage among highly educated women, although divergence in some countries is driven by earlier marriage among women who never attended school.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this article, “convergence” and “divergence” refer exclusively to a narrowing or widening of the gap in across-group means, rather than to a reduction or increase in variance.

  2. Two countries in our sample implemented policy changes during the observation period that altered their years-to-credential requirements. In Kenya, an eighth year of primary school was added; in Ethiopia, years seven and eight, previously part of junior secondary school, were reclassified as primary school. We allow the relationship between years of schooling and educational attainment categories to change across cohorts in order to reflect these policy changes, while acknowledging that these changes may themselves influence our outcome.

  3. See Bongaarts et al. (2017) for a recent application of decomposition to examine marital age trends.

  4. We tested this assumption separately for each country using Schoenfield residuals for individual-level educational attainment. Of 90 country-specific education categories, this assumption was violated nine times. In these nine cases, graphs revealed that the education-level residual trend lines did not cross one another and were sloped only at extreme ends of the marital age distribution (less than 14 and greater than 35). Thus, even in these cases, the estimated parameters still yield a weighted average of the effect over most of the observed age range but will conceal how the effect differs for very early or delayed marriage ages (Lundborg et al. 2016).

  5. For a more extensive investigation of differences by urban/rural status, see online appendix 1.

  6. This model, which estimates clustered standard errors at the country-cohort level but does not include frailty terms for countries or cohorts, is presented in online appendix 4. The mean absolute difference in hazard ratios between our main model and this alternate specification is very small (0.01), so survival estimates from this model are instructive for understanding our main results.

  7. This conclusion can also be drawn from the fact that in the full model, between-country variance is substantially larger than within-country, between-cohort variance (Table 1).

  8. We find this result puzzling, but we suggest two possible explanations. First, our data reach back further in time for Namibia (to women born in 1942) than for most countries, and educational differences may have been less distinguishing in this era. Second, this earliest cohort of women contains only 34 women with completed secondary school, so the estimate is based on an unusually small cell size.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for helpful feedback from Sarah K. Cowan, Amal Harrati, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Jayanti Owens, Hyunjoon Park, Will Lowe, and Kenneth Wachter. Previous versions of this research were presented at the Population Association of America Annual Meeting (April 2017, Chicago, IL), the International Union of the Scientific Study of Population Annual Meeting (October 2017, Cape Town, South Africa), and the African Studies Works in Progress Series at Princeton University (April 2017, Princeton, NJ); and benefitted greatly from suggestions from members of the audience. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P2CHD047879. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 500 State St., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48109, USA

    Margaret Frye

  2. Department of Social Sciences, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93407, USA

    Sara Lopus

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Frye, M., Lopus, S. From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing. Demography 55, 2371–2394 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0722-3

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