Parents get more involved in girls’ study choices

South Asian parents say they are just as likely to send their daughters to Western universities as their sons despite fears about gender inequality in international education.

But new research found parents tend to be more protective when sending girls abroad, intervening in their decision-making in a way that the author said shows that gender is still subtlety shaping student flows.

South Asian parents living in the United Arab Emirates were interviewed for the paper, published in Migration Studies. Of the 48 parents whose children had enrolled in or completed university, 55 per cent of daughters had been sent to Western universities, compared with 42 per cent of sons.

“Statistically speaking, there was no disadvantage or advantage between daughters and sons when it came to university destination decision making,” said author Anju Mary Paul, professor of social research and public policy at New York University Abu Dhabi.

The findings contrast with a persistent gender gap in South Asian student migration. In 2021, women accounted for 47 per cent of international student migrants globally, compared with 53 per cent of men. Previous research on India and Pakistan has linked disparities to “patrifocality” and parental fears about female safety overseas.

But among the relatively affluent families interviewed for the new study, interviewees, “particularly mothers”, were “adamant that their daughters should have the same educational opportunities as their sons”, Paul told a webinar hosted by the Centre for Global Higher Education on 17 February.

Yet once daughters’ international mobility was accepted, what Paul described as “a clear narrative of gender protectionism” emerged. The paper argues that focusing solely on whether daughters are allowed to study abroad misses how gender shapes the decisions that follow.

“These sub-migration decisions ranged from vetoing certain countries or cities as unsafe, to choosing only those locations where a relative or family friend lived nearby, to requiring specific housing arrangements which they considered safer for their daughters,” the paper says.

From their “vantage point in the UAE”, the paper says, interviewees viewed “most of the world as more dangerous for their children”.

Parents placed destinations along a “spectrum of safety” that was “socially constructed based on the news and social media parents consumed, the destination information shared by their personal networks, and their first hand experiences of and second hand research on different countries”.

The UAE and Singapore were positioned as “very safe”, while the US and India were framed as “unsafe”. “These safety concerns were geographically specific and multidimensional,” the paper says.

Parents cited gun violence in the US and concerns about “drug abuse and sexual harassment” in India. The UK was described as “less safe”, “largely due to its reputation for having a relatively high incidence of robberies and knife crimes”.

Safety fears did not necessarily prevent outward mobility. “It wasn't as if they overwhelmingly decided to send their children to the UAE,” Paul said.

Parents also adopted a narrative previously reserved for sons: that exposure to risk fosters independence. “As a parent, I always fear for their safety, but a human being has to learn to take care of themselves. We’re not going to be around forever,” one mother says.

Paul described the UAE as “a very unusual case” and the sample as “rather small and somewhat privileged”. Further research will include interviews with children to “triangulate how the household negotiations actually work”.

What emerges, Paul argued, is a more nuanced picture of gender in student mobility. “Gender operates in much more subtle ways in international student migration beyond the question of are the girls going and studying overseas or not. We have to think much more deeply than that.”

tash.mosheim@timeshighereducation.com