Gender Gaps In Education Spending In Laos: What Teachers And Parents Should Know
The creaking ceiling fan in our rural northern Laos primary school office stirred the smell of jasmine tea and dried lemongrass as Mai’s dad leaned across the wooden desk, hat twisted in his hands. “The harvest was bad this year,” he said, not looking at Mai, who stood by the door twisting the hem of her frayed blue uniform. “I can only pay fees for my boy. Can Mai stay home this term to watch her younger sisters?” Mai finally lifted her chin for a second, then dropped her gaze back to her scuffed rubber sandals.
I’d only been at the school three months as a volunteer teacher, but I’d already heard this conversation 10 times that term. Every single time, the child pulled out for lack of money was a girl. I jotted that down in my notebook out of habit, and later when I looked back, I realized 10 of the 12 students who dropped out that year for financial reasons were female. That’s when I started paying attention to how households split their education money here, and how big the gap between boys and girls really is.
A week after that meeting with Mai’s dad, I walked three kilometers down the red dirt road to Seng’s stilt house to drop off her daughter’s homework. She was hulling rice in the shade of a mango tree, and we sat on bamboo mats to share sticky rice and pickled cucumber while her youngest kid crawled around our feet. I asked her why she’d bought a new math textbook for her 12-year-old son that month, but let her oldest daughter keep the tattered 10-year-old hand-me-down with half the practice pages torn out. She laughed like I’d asked a silly question. “That’s just how it works,” she said. “When a boy finishes school, he stays here or gets a good job that helps the whole family. When a girl marries, she goes to her husband’s village. Any money I spend on her education leaves with her. Why would I spend more than I have to?”
Later, when I got back to Vientiane for a break, I looked up the numbers from UNESCO and local Lao education groups, and that quiet, everyday choice adds up to a big gap. On average, households across Laos spend 30% more on a son’s education than a daughter’s, even when families have similar incomes and the same number of children. It’s not just school fees, either. It’s new uniforms, tutoring, university application fees, even bus fare to get to a better school that’s farther from home. Every little bit adds up, and almost every time, boys get the larger share.
Our head teacher, Mr. Souk, didn’t turn Mai away that day. He pulled out the small stack of scholarship money we’d gotten from a local eco-tourism group, and offered to split Mai’s annual fees into six small monthly payments, no extra charge. He also pulled out Mai’s test scores, showed her dad that she’d scored higher than her brother in every subject that term. “If she finishes primary school, the new tourist lodge in the next district is hiring front desk staff that speak English,” he told him. “They pay 1.5 million kip a month, more than most day laborers make here. That’s money that can help your whole family, even if she stays close.” Her dad thought for a minute, then nodded, and Mai got to start class the next morning.
That conversation stuck with me, because it’s a small change anyone can make, no big grant or government policy required. For teachers working in rural Lao schools, one simple thing you can do is track any scholarships or fee waivers by gender. Most of the time, when we hand out aid, we end up giving most of it to boys by default, because parents ask for them first. If you set a rule that half of all available aid goes to girls, you can catch kids like Mai before they drop out. You can also keep test scores handy when you talk to parents, and point out when a daughter is outperforming her brothers, to help them see the return on investing in her.
For parents, even if you only have a little extra money for education each year, there are small shifts that don’t cost anything extra. Instead of always buying new supplies for your son first, rotate. One year buy your daughter a new uniform that fits, the next buy your son’s. If you need to pull a child out for a few weeks to help with harvest or childcare, rotate weeks instead of pulling your daughter out for the whole term. Missing a few weeks won’t set a kid back much, but missing a whole term often means they never come back.
This isn’t just a rural problem, either. My cousin teaches at a private secondary school in downtown Vientiane, and she says the gap shows up there too. Families pay hundreds of dollars for extra tutoring for boys for the national university exam, but expect girls to get lower scores and go to cheaper community colleges or just get a job after high school, even when girls have better grades through secondary school. The spending gap just shows up differently when you have more money.
I got a text from Mr. Souk last month. Mai just took her end-of-year exams, and she got the highest math score in the whole district. She’s still on track to go to secondary school next year. That’s one win, but I know there are three girls in the next village over that pulled out of school this year after their dad got sick and couldn’t pay all the fees. The gap doesn’t change fast, and it’s tied to ideas about gender and work that have been around for generations. It’s not something one volunteer teacher or one head teacher can fix all at once. But what I saw this year is that every time a school or a family chooses to shift even a little bit of their education budget to a girl, it changes her whole future. It doesn’t fix the whole system, but it changes everything for that one kid.
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