来自兄弟的“让渡”和母亲的“馈赠”:校外教育投入中的女孩占优现象与家庭偏好逻辑

“Concession”from Brothers and“Gift”from Mothers:Predominance of Girls in After-school Education and the Logic of Family Preferences

不同于传统社会“男孩优先”的家内资源分配模式,当代中国家庭的校外教育投入呈现出女孩占优的特征。本文聚焦于这一未被深入研究的经验事实,尝试探讨其关键影响机制,并从代际偏好模式演替的视角出发,提出“家庭性别偏好转变”与“父母偏好分异”两种解释性假设。通过对CEPS数据的分析发现,总体上,兄弟的存在并不会挤占女孩的教育资源,城市家庭甚至更偏向于增加女孩的校外教育投入;同时,与父亲相比,母亲受教育程度的提升对女孩教育资源的获得有显著促进作用。这一现象表明,在社会变迁过程中,女孩家庭效用替代性的增强和母亲家庭地位的提升推动了家庭性别偏好逻辑的转变。

The gender gap in access to family educational resources is an important social determinant in gender inequality.Contradicting to the conventional“boy first”model of household resource allocation,many studies find that Chinese families nowadays invest preferably on girls in after-school education.This study focuses on this empirical fact that has not been examined in depth and attempts to explore its key influence mechanism as well as the relationship between macro-level family structural changes and micro-level family behavioral orientations.Its aim is to complement the current research debates and explanations on gender preference.Starting from the theoretical context of intergenerational resource allocation,the article suggests two explanatory hypotheses of“child utility change-gender preference shift”and“mother’s status enhancement-parental preference divergence”in the analysis of the succession of intergenerational preference patterns.An analysis of the China Education Panel Survey(2013-2014)data is conducted of families with male siblings and different education levels of parents.The statistical results show robustly that the presence of brothers in the family does not negatively impact girls’access to after school educational resources and that girls in urban families has a pronounced advantage over boys,and overall there is a tentative shift from“male preference”to“female preference”in Chinese families.In addition,under reciprocal controls,advancement of father’s education has no significant effect on children but a significant positive effect of mother’s educational advancement is observed on girls’access to after-school educational resources,and this effect is even more prominent with younger parents,exhibiting a clear pattern of“dual preferences”.These findings,at the empirical level,reveal the increased family utility of girls compared to boys in the process of social change and the opportunity for gender preferences to emerge as a result of the enhanced status of mothers.