Although there is evidence that there was gender inequality in China’s education system in the 1980s, the literature in China has mixed evidence on improvements in gender inequality in educational attainment over the past three decades. Some suggest gender inequality is still severe; others report progress. We seek to understand the progress China has made (if any) in reducing gender inequality in education since the 1980s. To meet this goal, we use a meta-analysis approach which provides a new quantitative review of a relatively large volume of empirical literature on gender educational differentials. This article analyzes differences across both time and space, and also across different grade levels and ethnicities. Our results indicate that gender inequality in educational attainment still exists, but it has been narrowing over time. Moreover, it varies by area (rural versus urban) and grade level. There is nearly no significant gender inequality in the case of girls in urban areas or in the case of the 9 years of compulsory education (primary school and junior high school). Girls, however, still face inequality in rural areas (although inequality is falling over time) and when they reach high school or beyond. (JEL I24)

Officials in China claim that voting rates in rural village elections are high. Unfortunately, these rates are assumptions, not facts. The true voting rate is lower, and much lower for women. We postulate that this could be due to insufficient knowledge about their rights.

The objective of this paper is to test whether women and village leaders’ knowledge about women’s voting rights affects women’s voting behavior. We report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 700 women in China’s Fujian and Liaoning Provinces. Villages were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three intervention groups. One intervention provided voting training to women only, another provided training to both women and village leaders and the third provided training to village leaders only.

The data show that after women received training, their scores on a test of voting knowledge increased and they more fully exercised their voting rights. When only village leaders were trained, test scores and voting behaviors were not statistically different from the control villages.

Experts agree that computers and computing play an important role in education. Since the 1980s there has been a debate about gender as it relates to computers and education. However, results regarding gender differences concerning computer use in education are not consistent. In particular there is little work done in China on this issue. Therefore, the overall goal of this paper is to demonstrate whether girls and boys can gain equally from computer-based education in China’s elementary schools. To do so we analyze results from three randomized field experiments of a Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) program and one laptop per child (OLPC) program. The field experiments are carried out in three kinds of schools: Shannxi rural public schools; Qinghai minority public schools; and Beijing migrant schools. Although CAL and OLPC have been considered cost effective means to improve learning outcomes, it is not known whether the programs impact girls differently than boys. Our analysis shows that, in fact, there were no differences between female and male students in either the improvement in standardized math test scores or Chinese test scores with either the CAL or OLPC programs. Our study suggests that among disadvantaged students in China’s rural areas and migrant communities, there is reason to believe that computer based learning can benefit both girls and boys equally. This finding has possible implications for China’s ongoing efforts to integrate computers and computing technologies into the nation’s underserved schools.

In this paper we report the results of a randomized controlled trial designed to measure the impact of a parental training program on the nutritional status of primary school students in rural Shaanxi Province, in Northwest China. Using hemoglobin (Hb) levels as the outcome variable, we first measure the overall impact of a nutritional training program, then measure the impact separately by gender. We use both descriptive and multivariate analyses.

The results for the descriptive and econometric results were robust and consistent with the literature. Overall, we find no impact on students’ Hb levels when we trained their parents about undernutrition and anemia. In both the descriptive and multivariate results, there was no difference in the change of Hb levels between control and treatment students. Parents in the treatment group did learn more about anemia than parents in the control group, but this increased knowledge did not lead to sharp changes in behavior, in general. We did find, however, that there was a measurable impact of parental training on the Hb levels of female students. In both the descriptive and econometric results we found that the Hb levels of female students rose more than that of male students, and that this difference was statistically significant. We conjecture that the parents of female students may have recognized from the training that they were not providing their daughters with sufficient nutrition. Our data show that parents in the treatment group responded by increasing the daily provision of meat, fish, eggs and beans, relative to parents of girls in the control group.