Between Returns and Respectability: Parental Attitudes towards Girls’ Education in Rural Pakistan

This article focuses upon perceptions of girls’ education in the family context within which decisions around children’s education and opportunities are made. The article presents a framework showing how parental attitudes to girls’ education are shaped by an objective logic framed by the notion of returns, relating to potential benefits of daughters’ education, and, respectability, relating to girls’ modesty and threats that education may present to normative expectations for girls. Drawing upon data collected in 2011 in rural areas of the Districts Faisalabad (Jaranwala town) and Chiniot (Tehsil Chiniot) in the province of Punjab, the study highlights how assumptions around the liberating effects of education implicit in global education programmes fail to take into account cultural values around gender norms which are central to informing parental attitudes towards their daughters’ prospects for education.