Outcome of Banning the Veil in French Schools

"For students who wore the veil, the ban may have had a negative effect on those who were most attached to it, as it may have led them to drop out of school."

"But the ban may also have had a positive effect on students who were forced to wear the veil, and on students suffering from stigmatization and discrimination in school because of it."

"When comparing women in the Muslim group to those in the non-Muslim group, the data reveal a very significant increase in educational attainment in the Muslim group for the cohorts that attended middle school and reached puberty after the ban."

"This increase clearly coincides with the implementation of the circular – the more years the Muslim group women spent in middle school after the circular, the higher their educational attainment."

Eric Maurin, Paris School of Economics, study co-author

State schools in France were asked to ban "ostentatious religious signs" -including Islamic veils - in 1994, but it was not forbidden by law until 2004. Photo by FRED DUFOUR/AFP via Getty Images

Im 1994 the government of France emphatically recommended that state schools ban "ostentatious religious signs", the customary Muslim girls' veils included. This was not a mandatory order but a recommendation. It became law in 2004 however, when despite warning from religious leaders that the law would persecute Muslims and encourage fundamentalism, it became lawfully illegal for French Muslim girls to wear the veil while attending state schools.

Now, researchers have produced results from a decades-long study with the finding that positive effects resulted after all, from the state initiative of removing the veil in schools. It was found that educational outcomes for Muslim girls were significantly improved once the law was formally implemented. There was also seen to have been an increase in mixed marriages.

Academic accomplishments of Muslim and their non-Muslim female counterparts in France were compared with the use of data extracted from the French Labour Force Survey which had been conducted between the years 2005 to 2019. Born between 1970 to 1974, Muslim women who completed school before the 1994 guideline on veils were 12 percent less likely to graduate from high school in comparison with their non-Muslim coevals.

Among women born between 1980 to1984 that gap in school completion was seen to shrink to 7 percent. For those who spent their education with some form of veil ban in place between 1990 to 1994 the gap in high school completion was seen to shrink once more to 6.5 percent. As well, the number of Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men increased from 13 to 22 percent, during that same period.