Gender Disparity: Its Manifestations, Causes and Implications

2. According to World Economic Forum Report 2005, the Nordic countries followed by New Zealand, Canada, UK, Germany and Australia, have done the best job in closing the gender gap. India, Korea, Jordon, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt are among the countries making the least progress.

3. It is difficult to find more convincing justification to that complexity than what Nussbaum (1999, pp.36-37) says, “It verges on the absurd to treat India as a single culture, and a single visit to a single Orissa village as sufficient to reveal its tradition. India, like all extant societies, is a complex mixture of elements. Hindu, Muslim, Parsi, Christian, Jewish, atheist; urban, suburban, rural; rich, poor, and middle class; high caste, low caste, and aspiring middle caste; female and male; rationalist and mystical. ------Its tradition contain views of female whorishness and childness that derive from the Laws of Manu; but it also contains the sexual agency of Drapadi in the Mahabharata, who solved the problem of choice among Pandava husbands by taking all five, and the enlightened sensualism and female agency of the Kama Sutra, a sacred text that foreign readers wrongly interpret as pornographic. It contains women like Metha Bai, who are confined to the home; ----- What, then, is “the culture” of a woman like Metha Bai?---- What is “the culture” of Chinese working women who have recently been victims of the government’s “women go home” policy, which appeals to the Confucian traditions about woman’s “nature”?

4. The origin of the Indian idea of appropriate female behavior can be traced back to the rules laid down by Manu in 200 B.C.: "by a young girl, by a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in her own house". Women's lives are shaped by customs that are centuries old. "May you be the mother of a hundred sons" is a common Hindu wedding blessing. Quite opposing examples can be found in The Mahabharata, where some women characters are portrayed as independent even before marriage. One could trace extreme adventurous role of women in the world of Kamasutra and Anangaranga regarding their sexual behaviour much before the West could imagine even democratic rights for women. So examples can hardly be generalized in India. See Sen (2005) for further interest.

5. The matter is more complex in East, North East, South and South East Asia, though it is dangerously intense in the Middle East (Kynch and Sen, 1983; Dasgupta, 1987; Sen, 1989 and 2005; Coale, 1991; Bardhan, 1988; Anand and Sen, 1997; Banerji, 1998; Dreze and Sen, 2002; Klasen, 1999; Krishnaraj et al. 1998; Papola and Sharma, 1999; Perkins, 1992; Agarwal, 1993; Udry, 1996; UNO, 2000; Nussbaum, 2000; Beneria and Bisnath, 2001; World Bank, 2003; Rustagi, 2005).