Family Background, Parent’s Expectation And Gender Differences In High School Educational Attainment Of Their Children

With the expansion of education in China in the1990’s, people seem to gain more chance to school. But there are some arguments which exist between some researchers about whether the education expansion will help people to get equal chance to enter the high school. When the researchers tried to find the factors which will affect the educational attainment between male and female, although numerous existing researches focus on the perspective of the family, they just focus on the structural dimension of the family and didn’t consider the participation dimension of the family which involves parent’s education expectation and something else like Parent-Child Interaction.In this article, we try to study whether there is inequality between the urban high school male students’ educational attainment and the female students’ that from the perspective of family. We not only focus on the structural dimension of the family, but also focus on the participation dimension of the family which involves the parent’s education expectation. The analysis of the state of development of the high students in Nanjing at2010, we found that:compare with the female students, male students had the priority at the high school educational attainment, and the high school education gender inequalities still exist. When we explore the factors which influenced the high school education attainment, we found that the family background and parent’s educational expectations affect children’s high school education attainment. Besides, we find that parent’s educational expectation significantly reduced the differences between the male and female students in high school educational attainment. When parent’s educational expectation was controlled, gender differences in high school educational attainment disappeared. The analysis of which factors influenced parent’s educational expectation finds that:parents’ educational capital has largely determinate their educational expectation on their children; parents’ educational expectation on male were significantly higher than female. And finally, we found that the family income didn’t have significant effect on parent’s education expectation. On the interpretation of these results, this article emphasizes the role of the culture and family resources, and hoped that to invest some factors like family culture and social capital in the further research.