Measuring capabilities: an example from girls’ schooling

This chapter is primarily concerned with how the capability approach might be used to explore outcomes to girls’ education from a rights perspective, and subsequently how existing educational measurements might fit into this framework. In the first section, I briefly review a number of debates surrounding educational measurement. In the second section, I outline how we might theorize the relation between capabilities and educational inequalities, distinguishing between education as a functioning in itself, and education as a facilitator of other functionings. In the last section, with specific reference to gender concerns, I explore how the capability approach could be employed to investigate further how different capabilities are gained from different types of formal education, with particular attention to the confirmation or elimination of gender stereotypes through education.