Banning veils and headscarves in schools leads to significantly better educational outcomes for Muslim girls. According to The Daily Telegraph, a Paris School of Economics study.
“For female students who veiled, the veiling ban may have harmed those who clung to it. It may have led them to stop going to school. However, the ban may also have positively affected female students who were forced to cover up or suffered stigma and discrimination at school because of it,” said study co-author Professor Eric Maurin.
He and his colleagues analyzed Muslim women attending school before 1994, from that year to 2004, and after.
Before 1994, girls were allowed to be veiled at school. In 1994, public schools were told to ban veils. Ten years later, the law prohibited veils in schools altogether.
Muslim girls who attended school before 1994 were one-eighth less likely to complete high school than non-Muslim girls.
This difference fell to just seven percent for Muslim women born between 1987 and 1990, during whose schooling some form of veiling ban was already in place.
“The more years Muslim women spent in secondary school after the ban, the higher their educational attainment,” Maurin says