Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to show how family characteristics and sibship composition affect educational attainment in Japan. In this paper, multilevel models are adopted to address the dependent observations from the same family. As a result, gender inequality is within the same family: daughters tend to attain lower levels of education than sons. In addition, birth-order rank and age spacing have a negative effect and the preference of firstborn sons and daughters has no effect on educational attainment. I also find that the mothers with higher education may hope their child to acquire higher educational attainment. With all these factors, educational attainment is affected by various causes and the effects of them are different between sons and daughters. In conclusion, we should think more carefully about the relation of gender inequality to education attainment in Japan.
