"Girls are like leaves on the wind": How gender expectations impact girls’ education - A closer look from West Nile, Uganda

This study confirms that school dropout among adolescent girls in the West Nile region of Uganda is very prevalent: Thirty percent of the girls we surveyed had left school, with most of these leaving school before transitioning to secondary school. Less than 50 percent of these girls age 14 to 18 knew how to prevent a pregnancy, but nearly 25 percent had already had sex. The qualitative findings demonstrate the negative effects of poverty, disease and parental death on schooling attainment in this region. The findings also highlight the role of gendered beliefs and expectations in determining girls’ dropout: a heavy domestic burden alongside girls’ and their parents’ beliefs about the roles and expectations for girls, as compared to boys, profoundly alters their life trajectories. Girls’ departure from school coincides with other important life events that are also influenced by gendered expectations and beliefs; however, the sequence of these events is not as straightforward as often assumed. Romantic relationships often precede but do not appear to cause dropout; in fact, qualitative data suggest that sometimes romantic relationships help provide social and material support for girls to remain in school. The relationships between first sex, pregnancy and dropout are not straightforward. The findings regarding the role of pregnancy in dropout are in line with previous research demonstrating the complexity of the relationship between pregnancy and dropout. For those girls who become pregnant while in school, dropout is nearly universal, and reflects the lack of a specific retention or re-entry policy in Uganda for pregnant schoolgirls. These findings can be contrasted with those from South Africa where policies are highly inclusive, and where studies have found between one- to two-thirds of adolescent girls who have had a pregnancy return to school. The authors’ estimates indicate that 14.5 percent of dropouts can be attributed to pregnancy in this study. However, it also should be noted that among all of the girls in the study who reported ever being pregnant, nearly half became pregnant after dropping out of school, emphasizing that pregnancy is not always a cause of dropout, but also may be among its consequences. Sexual activity alone does not appear to predict dropout, once we account for other household and individual factors.These findings differ from other studies in how explicitly the autohors model and demonstrate the role of gendered expectations at the household and individual level on dropout. They show that these expectations are in many ways related to life events, such as sex or marriage, that have been shown in other studies to strongly determine dropout for girls in particular. This analysis revealed that, overall, a girl’s own gendered beliefs (or understanding of what she can and should be), alongside her own self-rated school performance, her family’s gendered expectations for her, and the education level of her mother are the strongest determinants of whether or not she will stay in or drop out of school. Each of these areas represents opportunities for strengthening policies and programs related to girls’ education and social development.