Abstract
Gender-sensitive analysis of education-related government projects and ways to improve their effectiveness
Young-Sook Kim
Hyo-Joo Kim
Youn-Sun Chang
So-Jung Kim
The gender budgeting system in Korea is well established, legally and institutionally, despite its short history. However, no empirical research has been conducted to verify the effects of the gender budgeting system on specific budget areas. Therefore, we conducted gender-sensitive analysis of education-related government projects which mainly belong to higher education and lifelong and vocational education. The analysis is to show that the gender budgeting contributes not only to gender equality, but also to project performance.
This research consists of two parts. First, we conducted a literature review and an econometric analysis using the structured numeric data of national gender budget statements for 2016 and balance sheets for 2014. Project performance data assessed during 2013-2015 was also used to measure project efficiency. Second, case studies about education-related projects were undertaken. We interviewed experts, government officials, and the project participants in order to incorporate diverse opinions into the case studies.
Our main findings are as follows; in terms of gender equality, we found that there tends to be more men than women in the number of project targets and beneficiaries in the higher education-related projects. This appears to be due to the fact that the projects focused on the major fields of study where women have difficulty in getting a job, such as engineering. Regarding project performance, it was found that the results of the higher education-related projects were worse than those of other education-related projects, when other characteristics of education-related projects were controlled for. We also found that the performances of projects submitting gender budget statements were improved compared to projects without gender budget statements. In conclusion, we suggest that there is a possibility that gender budgeting could improve the effectiveness of education-related projects as well as their gender equality.
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