POST-CAIRO POPULATION-POLICY - DOES PROMOTING GIRLS SCHOOLING MISS THE MARK

One emphasis of the new population paradigm that emerged at the 1994 I nternational Conference on Population and Development in Cairo concern s gender inequality in education and the need to promote girls' school ing at the secondary level, both as a goal of human development and as a means to encourage lower fertility in. developing countries. A crit ical weakness of this approach to population and development policy is that it fails to address the socioeconomic inequality that deprives b oth boys and girls of adequate schooling. Such unbalanced attention to one dimension of inequality detracts from the attention accorded to o ther dimensions. Moreover, while female disadvantage remains an import ant feature of educational access in some regions, there are numerous countries, even within the developing world, where the gender gap in e ducation is absent or modest, and in almost all countries it has been diminishing substantially over the last few decades. By contrast, the authors contend, inequality in education based on socioeconomic backgr ound is nearly universal and, in most cases, more pronounced than gend er inequality. Data from various developing countries, especially Thai land and Vietnam, document this situation.