The Effect of a Universal Primary Education Reform on Gender Attitudes in Uganda

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines whether greater access to primary school education for girls and a decreased gender gap in primary school education affects gender attitudes, by studying a Universal Primary Education reform in Uganda that eliminated primary school fees. We conduct a Two-Stage Least Squares regression where we use exogenous variation in exposure to the reform as an instrumental variable to estimate the effect of educational attainment on gender attitudes. Our findings show that the reform increased educational attainment for both genders and decreased the gender gap in education, but did not appear to change gender attitudes. The implications of these findings are important for future policies and academic work on the shaping of gender attitudes.