Gender Disparity: Its Manifestations, Causes and Implications

Determinants of Work Participation
Apart from sex ratio which is not amenable to change in the short run, and which depends on many complex social processes relating to culture and other evolutionary phenomena, it is of interest to know the short run determinants of female work participation, which has immediate policy relevance. The results of regression on WPR are presented in Table 9(b) and 10(b) for rural and urban areas respectively. As in sex ratio, here also rural areas yield quite strong results with very high values of adjusted R² (about 50%). Unlike popular perception, female education exerts significantly negative pressure on female work participation. This type of finding typical of India’s complex pluralistic society may be plausibly explained through the following chain process. As is well known, gender equality is a common natural phenomenon in India’s so-called backward and tribal regions where women can not afford to remain idle in conventional definition of economic activities. In sharp contrast, in the more literate regions, which is synonymous with economic richness, lesser women are forced to earn their livelihood from the labour market. Similar reasoning applies to poverty ratio, purchasing power and gross gender inequality. Higher poverty pulls more women into the work force, higher purchasing power attenuates the compulsion of women to formally involve in the work process, and gender inequality induces more women to get involved in the market for livelihood. But all these women form bulk of the unskilled reserve labour force that supply their manual labour at a wage much below the market rate. They are the workers in the huge informal sector, which is rising at an amazing speed in India thereby causing further misery to women in the lower strata of the society. Unlike sex ratio, share of Muslim women yields significantly negative impact on work participation. That is, women from this cultural group are for some reason or other get away from the working population. Finally, some cultural communities (such as the Hindus, Jains and Sikhs) have been proved to be successful in strengthening the “theory of missing women” in urban areas, whereas other communities like Christians and Buddhists have acted in favour of balancing the number game, but the latter group due to their sheer insufficiency in numbers has failed to revert the sex ratio in India.

The above picture of rural India is partially altered in urban areas (Table 10b). Though the explanatory power of this set of regression is a bit weak, some of the IVs produce opposite signs. For example, higher purchasing power draws in more women to work (though regional dummy does not yield any significance in any combination), Christian female share significantly increases work participation, and the same is true for poverty and household industry.

Therefore, richer and developed regions work against gender equality. In sharp contrast, poorer and backward regions uphold gender equality. The demographic behaviour in urban areas has proved to be more detrimental to the natural law governing the proportion of female population.