Gender Disparity: Its Manifestations, Causes and Implications

IV. Summary, Limitations and Future Research Agenda

The main purpose of this study was to link gender disparity particularly sex ratio with purchasing power, education, female work participation and cultural background separately for under rural and urban areas of Indian districts over different time spans in the post-reform period. Our findings are really very shocking if thought in the context of the deadline of the MDGs. Additionally, our observations on Thai provinces are typical of higher freedom of women there compared to other South Asian nations. Given severe regional heterogeneities in India, rural urban differences even within a district are not only intense but also opposing in some situations depending on the strength of cultural weight of the populace. Occupational priority of a given community coupled with cultural orientation substantially influences sex selection and work participation rate. Poverty or purchasing power alone, or education or work participation alone may not necessarily matter much in equalizing the natural number. Every smaller region has different occupational priorities depending on overall resource endowment and historically determined cultural compulsions and role of women agency vis-à-vis male power. The major findings are briefed below.

1. Whereas supply of unskilled female agricultural workers has been rising in poorer states in post-reform period compared to their male counterparts, gender-wise earnings have been moving against women labourers across Indian states. Therefore, minimum wages legislation as well as proactive wage policy for the most vulnerable classes of unskilled female population has not been uniformly implemented across Indian regions particularly in rural areas.

2. Women’s freedom as an agency in terms of sex ratio has recorded widespread retrogression in Indian states as well as districts even under democratic governance, legislative support towards female and free press. This increasing failure to get equalized in terms of sheer number has many negative repercussions in coming years. Sex ratio for all ages has increased in rural areas of most of the 84 districts except Gujarat from 1991 to 2001. But the urban areas of the districts have recorded disperse picture with falling sex ratio in most districts. In large majority of districts in 2001, infant sex ratio in rural areas was higher than that in urban areas. Crime against women is executed at the time of birth of a girl child in the so-called developed regions in India thereby undermining the natural law of sex selection.

3. Gender inequality estimated from 22 indicators is not uniform between rural and urban areas. In most cases, estimated urban disparity is higher than that in rural areas, though there is a tendency towards decline from 1991 to 2001. In the districts of Kerala and some tribal states, gender disparity is found to be in favour of women. History and cultural social intercourse play hugely positive role for such finding. Atrocities against women are not a static phenomenon in the post-reform period alone, and the richer regions have powerfully acted against the female population both in rural and in urban areas of India. There is no change in our attitude towards girl child even in the family over last one decade.

4. There is hardly any doubt that female education and work participation contribute positively towards sex ratio irrespective of spatial difference between rural and urban areas over last one decade. But the so-called richer and developed regions have acted against gender equality in India. And this is more so in urban areas than in rural areas.

5. The most important finding of this study relates to the impact of cultural orientation of a society on the preference of a girl child. 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. It is no less than a shock to note that unlike rural India,, 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 strongly 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. 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.
These findings bear adequate testimony to the unpopular suspicion about the fulfillment of the MDGs in many regions of India within the professed deadline. Given the favourable results toward women across Thai provinces, it is important to draw attention to the Thai results for future gender related policy issues to be addressed in Indian regions which may be of help in reducing high gender disparity across Indian districts.
Limitations of specific data worked as the major hindrance for testing any defined hypothesis in this study. Given the limitations of the present study, further improvements can be made at ease if some controlled experiments could be undertaken with the help of randomized sample survey, or unit level data as available with NSSO, GOI. One could also introduce some institutional variables with reference to gender disparity.

Gender equality with empowerment of women through education and earning appear to be the most effective ways to combat gender disparity, rural poverty, hunger and disease, and also to stimulate development that is sustainable. It is believed that elimination of gender inequality in occupational opportunities can contribute to rise in national income. This may occur in three inter-linked ways. First, the more women are given appropriate working environment, they can involve themselves more into productive activities in ways, which are expected to be less corrupted. Second, they will be able to spend more time in works, which have more monetary value. Third, the more they have freedom of choice, they can choose works which fit their faculties best, given their specific skills, which were hitherto largely unrecognized and completely neglected, without the default choice of household work against no recognition and payment. These phenomena are endemic in any urban region of India particularly the developed parts. Civil society and voluntary organizations should play a more effective role in the event of large scale market failure and governmental limitations. Even the rate of growth of rural development can be increased thereby making dent on chronic poverty, if women are allowed to engage in diverse fields of activities relating not only to the food economy but also education, food processing, health care and other social service sectors in which women fit certainly more effectively and less corruptibly than do men. Where women are respected and empowered, families and communities are strengthened, citizens are better represented, corruption is reduced, and peace is prioritized. There is no denying the fact that if creative abilities and future aspirations of about half of the human species are subjugated by thankless and unpaid domestic works over a few millennia, many social opportunities and specialization which would otherwise suit women are lost for ever from many layers of the social process.

Notwithstanding the fact that India’s statistical system is theoretically quite satisfactory, we have confronted two crucial limitations with regard to gender study. First of all, there is no official income statistics of the people. So the question of male female distinction in terms of income can not be thoroughly addressed. Some sample survey could to a large extent positively supplement the present effort. Given such a simple limitation of income or expenditure statistics, there is no other known proxy variables by which to represent or translate more sophisticated concepts and ideas like ‘freedom of women’, ‘capabilities’, ‘opportunities’ ‘institutional mechanism’ and the like under Indian socio-economic and family system. Second, we must also admit that national level or state level aggregation in a country like India essentially misses many fundamental features of finer analytical reasoning on gender disparity. Finally, more sophisticated functional specifications may be tested with more disaggregated level information on complex social, cultural and economic life in India.


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