Tema
Sociedad y desarrollo de las humanidades

Palabras clave
Inequality, Ethnicity, Gender, Education, Ecuador

Introducción

Education has an essential and instrumental role in building capabilities, create private value and social opportunities, and living better. In addition, education has been seen as an important factor for social mobility, and at a global level, there have been advances towards equity and inclusion in access to education, with improvements in welfare and quality of life.

Objetivos

The purpose of this inquiry is to explore the variability and trends in educational outcomes among different ethnic groups and gender to understand the educational outcomes for the most disadvantaged population groups in Ecuador.  

Método

This study uses the most recent census of Ecuador, which was collected by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses. We build a linear multivariate regression model to estimate trends in access to education and difference in access between categories. The following variables are used to estimate the differences: years of education serve as a measure of educational outcome and is a dependent variable in the study, and independent categorical variables such as gender and ethnicity, and age which is a continuous variable, used as a control vector. Ethnicity collects the self-identification of individuals who answered the question, “How do you identify yourself according to your culture and customs?” For this research, we consider Mestizo as a reference group due to it being the biggest ethnic group in Ecuador. Gender is an indicator variable for whether a respondent was male or female. The population is grouped by cohort in order to obtain a distribution of education outcomes along the time.

Principales Resultados

We find that in Ecuador, females have an advantage in years of education compared with males, and every ethnic minority group except white has a disadvantage in years of education compared with Mestizo (the major ethnic group in Ecuador) which was used as a control group. In addition, the intersection of indigenous and gender identities presents a cumulative disadvantage for indigenous women in years of education. Even though women are more educated than males, females who are Indigenous face double disadvantage, both by gender and ethnicity. The average educational attainment among Indigenous females is lower compared to both Indigenous males and females from non-indigenous groups. 

Conclusiones