Media freedom and gender equality: a cross-national instrumental variable quantile analysis

We investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995–2004. Our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable. Using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income, we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0.25 and 0.50 quantiles of the conditional distribution. Countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom.