Gender differences in the link between family scholarly culture and parental educational aspirations

This study investigated family scholarly culture’s effects on parental educational aspirations, with special attention paid to gender differences based on the ideas of stratified parenting and a sociocultural approach to parenting. Two-level structural modeling was applied to nationally representative Czech Household Panel Survey data from 2015 – 2016. Overall, our analysis did not find an independent effect from scholarly culture on parental educational aspirations after controlling for several socioeconomic characteristics. However, we demonstrated that scholarly culture stratifies gender differences in parental educational aspirations. Families with weaker scholarly culture hold higher aspirations for daughters than for sons, while families with stronger scholarly culture have similar aspirations for both boys and girls. Thus, we observed that scholarly culture stratifies gender differentiation of educational aspirations for boys and girls.