Gender Differences in High-School Dropout: Vulnerability and Adolescent Fertility in Chile

Abstract The original concerns about the consequences of adolescent fertility assumed that pregnancy is a turning point, which altered teens’ life trajectories in terms of school progress, human capital accumulation and labor force participation, placing them on a path of vulnerability. However, several years of research have shown that teenagers who become pregnant are not a random sample of the population, but a selective sample, more likely to have limited socioeconomic resources and other characteristics that made them a vulnerable group to begin with. This paper studies the association between adolescent fertility and high school dropout in Chile taking that selectivity in consideration. We analyze the dropout of teen men and women, considering their socioeconomic status, sociodemographic characteristics, and characteristics of their sexual debut. Data comes the VIII Chilean Survey of the Youth, a nationally representative survey of people 15 to 29 years old applied in 2015. In order to deal with selectivity issues, we use a combination of propensity score weighting techniques and adjusted generalized linear models for estimating the effect of teen parenthood on high school dropout (ATT), for men and women separately. Our best estimates of the effect of teen parenting on the probability of high school dropout is 16 to 18 percent for women and ten percent for men, which implies that the educational setback of parenthood for women is about twice as high as the setback of men. These findings suggest the need of policies and interventions aimed both to reduce adolescent fertility, but also to facilitate the high school completion of those who already are parents.