Department of Economics, Finance and Real Estate, University of South Alabama, Mobile, USA.
Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California, 635 Downey Way, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-333, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Apr 5;12(1):5684. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-09641-8.
In social environments characterized by high levels of gender inequality, women fare worse than men in human capital accumulation and health. We examine the association of gender inequality with female disadvantage in late-life cognitive function, using newly available data from Wave 1 (2017-2019) of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI), representative of the Indian population over the age of 45. We find a substantial female gap in cognition among mid-aged and older adults in India; early life socioeconomic conditions and education explain up to 74 percent of the female disadvantage in cognition, and model predictions suggest that it takes nine years of education on average to overcome this deficit. However, further contextualizing the environment, we find that the level of education at which differences in late-life cognition between women and men become negligible increases with the degree of gender inequality.
在性别不平等程度较高的社会环境中，女性在人力资本积累和健康方面的状况比男性差。我们利用来自印度纵向老龄化研究（LASI）第一波（2017-2019 年）的新数据，考察了性别不平等与女性在老年认知功能方面处于劣势的关系，该数据具有代表性，涵盖了 45 岁以上的印度人口。我们发现，在印度，中年和老年人群中女性的认知能力存在显著差距；早期的社会经济条件和教育程度可以解释认知能力中高达 74%的女性劣势，模型预测表明，女性需要平均九年的教育才能弥补这一差距。然而，进一步从环境方面进行分析，我们发现，女性和男性在晚年认知能力方面的差异变得微不足道的教育水平，随着性别不平等程度的增加而提高。
