Association Between Parental Gender-Equality Attitudes and Reported Support for Girls’ Education
Evidence from a Rural Indonesian Village
Keywords:
Gender Equality, Girls’ Education, Parental Attitudes, Reported Support, Rural AreasAbstract
Parents’ gender-equality attitudes may be associated with the support they report providing for girls’ education. This article presents an exploratory reanalysis of de-identified data from a 2021 cross-sectional survey of 145 parents of school-age daughters in Waleddesa Village, Indonesia. It examined the association between parental gender-equality attitudes and reported support for girls’ education. Gender-equality attitudes were measured using five Likert-type items, whereas reported educational support was measured using three Likert-type items. Spearman’s rank correlation was specified as the primary analysis, with Pearson correlation and simple linear regression reported as supplementary analyses. The findings showed a positive association between parental gender-equality attitudes and reported support for girls’ education (Spearman’s rho = 0.600, p < 0.001; Pearson’s r = 0.552, p < 0.001). The supplementary regression model was statistically significant, F(1, 143) = 62.560, p < 0.001, and accounted for 30.4% of the variation in reported support. Parents strongly endorsed the importance of education for children’s futures, whereas endorsement of girls’ access to higher-status careers was comparatively lower. This pattern suggests that support for education may coexist with reservations about women’s future social and economic roles. The findings should be interpreted as exploratory because the data were cross-sectional, self-reported, and based on short scales with limited construct-specific internal consistency. The study contributes rural Indonesian evidence that gender-equitable parental attitudes and stronger reported support for girls’ education tend to co-occur.
Downloads
References
United Nations General Assembly, Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Resolution A/RES/70/1, New York, NY, USA, Oct. 2015.
Global Education Monitoring Report Team, Global Education Monitoring Report 2024: Gender Report—Technology on Her Terms. Paris, France: UNESCO, 2024.
R. B. Kattan, M. M. Khan, and M. Merchant, “Achieving gender equality in education: Examining progress and constraints,” Washington, DC, USA: World Bank, 2023, doi: 10.1596/40595. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1596/40595
Global Education Monitoring Report Team, Global Education Monitoring Report 2025: Gender Report—Women Lead for Learning. Paris, France: UNESCO, 2025
D. K. Evans, A. M. Acosta, and F. Yuan, “Girls’ education at scale,” World Bank Res. Observer, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 47–74, 2024, doi: 10.1093/wbro/lkad002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/wbro/lkad002
S. Surbakti and T. Devasahayam, Women and Girls in Indonesia: Progress and Challenges, Jakarta, Indonesia: United Nations Population Fund Indonesia, 2015.
United Nations Children’s Fund, Child Marriage in Indonesia: Progress on Pause, Jakarta, Indonesia: UNICEF, 2020.
UNICEF Indonesia, Building Back Better for Women and Girls in Indonesia: Unlocking Opportunities for Gender Equality in the Post-COVID-19 Recovery Agenda, Jakarta, Indonesia: UNICEF, 2023.
National Development Planning Agency (BAPPENAS), Review of a Decade of Gender Mainstreaming in Education in Indonesia: Summary Report, Jakarta, Indonesia: BAPPENAS, 2013.
World Bank, Inclusion in Indonesia’s Education Sector, Washington, DC, USA: World Bank, 2020.
UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report 2020: Inclusion and Education—All Means All, Paris, France: UNESCO, 2020.
United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, Plan International, and Transform Education, Gender Transformative Education: Reimagining Education for a More Just and Inclusive World, New York, NY, USA: UNICEF, 2021.
United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, Advancing Gender Equality Through Education: A Research Agenda for Gender-Transformative Education, New York, NY, USA: UNGEI, 2025.
A. Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall, 1986.
P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, R. Nice, Trans. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507
N. Kabeer, “Gender equality and women’s empowerment: A critical analysis of the third Millennium development goal,” Gender & Development, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 13–24, 2005, doi: 10.1080/13552070512331332273. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13552070512331332273
R. Likert, A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes. New York, NY, USA: Archives of Psychology, no. 140, 1932.
K. A. Boateng, T. B. Neilands, E. A. Frongillo, H. R. Melgar-Quiñonez, and S. L. Young, “Best practices for developing and validating scales for health, social, and behavioral research: A primer,” Front. Pub. Health, vol. 6, e149, 2018, doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2018.00149. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2018.00149
J. C. Nunnally and I. H. Bernstein, Psychometric Theory, 3rd ed. New York, NY, USA: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
M. Tavakol and R. Dennick, “Making sense of Cronbach’s alpha,” Int. J. Med. Educ., vol. 2, pp. 53–55, 2011, doi: 10.5116/ijme.4dfb.8dfd. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5116/ijme.4dfb.8dfd
K. Sijtsma, “On the use, the misuse, and the very limited usefulness of Cronbach’s alpha,” Psychometrika, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 107–120, 2009, doi: 10.1007/s11336-008-9101-0. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11336-008-9101-0
G. M. Sullivan and A. R. Artino, Jr., “Analyzing and interpreting data from Likert-type scales,” J. Grad. Med. Educ., vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 541–542, 2013, doi: 10.4300/JGME-5-4-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-5-4-18
G. Norman, “Likert scales, levels of measurement and the ‘laws’ of statistics,” Adv. Health Sci. Educ., vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 625–632, 2010, doi: 10.1007/s10459-010-9222-y. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-010-9222-y
P. Schober, C. Boer, and L. A. Schwarte, “Correlation coefficients: Appropriate use and interpretation,” Anesthesia & Analgesia, vol. 126, no. 5, pp. 1763–1768, 2018, doi: 10.1213/ANE.0000000000002864. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1213/ANE.0000000000002864
B. Efron and R. J. Tibshirani, An Introduction to the Bootstrap. New York, NY, USA: Chapman & Hall, 1993. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-4541-9
J. M. Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach, 7th ed. Boston, MA, USA: Cengage, 2020.
World Medical Association, “World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects,” JAMA Network, vol. 310, no. 20, pp. 2191–2194, 2013, doi: 10.1001/jama.2013.281053. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.281053
K. V. Hoover-Dempsey and H. M. Sandler, “Why do parents become involved in their children’s education?,” Rev. Educ. Res., vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 3–42, 1997, doi: 10.3102/00346543067001003. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543067001003
W. H. Jeynes, “The relationship between parental involvement and urban secondary school student academic achievement: A meta-analysis,” Urban Educ., vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 82–110, 2007, doi: 10.1177/0042085906293818. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085906293818
J. L. Epstein, School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Preparing Educators and Improving Schools, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO, USA: Westview Press, 2011.
Global Partnership for Education, Evidence for System Transformation: Improving Education Access and Completion for Marginalized Learners. Washington, DC, USA: Global Partnership for Education, 2024.
Q. Wodon, C. Montenegro, H. Nguyen, and A. Onagoruwa, Missed Opportunities: The High Cost of Not Educating Girls. Washington, DC, USA: World Bank, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1596/29956
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2026 Sheila Naovallia, Leni Anggraeni, Sehan Rifky Arfanaldy

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.









