Gender Equality in India : What works and what doesn’t?
India’s progress towards gender equality has been disappointing, despite fairly rapid rates of economic growth in the country.
In the past decade, where Indian GDP has grown by around 6%, there has been a large decline in female labor force participation that is from 34% to 27%. As well as the male-female wage gap has been stagnant at 50%.
Crimes against women have been on the rise in brutal crimes like rapes, dowry deaths, and honor killings. These are disturbing, as one believes that with growth comes education and prosperity, and one hopes a possible decline in following of traditional institutions and socially prescribed gender roles that hold women back but nothing as such happened.
A culturally innate parental preference for sons — emanating from their importance as caregivers for parents in old age — is linked to poorer consequences for daughters.
The dowry system, from the bride’s family to the groom’s at the time of marriage, is another thing that affects the lives of women. This often results in dowry-related violence against women by their husbands and in-laws in case the dowry is considered insufficient or as a way to demand more.
These practices make parents not to wish to have a girl children or to invest less in girls’ health and education. These parental preferences result in increasingly masculine sex ratios in India.
Therefore, there is a clear need for policy initiatives to empower women as gender disparities in India persist even against the backdrop of economic growth.
Some policy changes that have worked so far are — One in village-level governance that mandated one-third representation for women in positions of local leadership has shown promising results.
The villages led by women, there the preferences of female residents are better represented, and women are more confident in reporting crimes that earlier they may have considered too stigmatizing to bring to attention.
Female leaders also serve as role models for other women and raise educational and career aspirations for adolescent girls.
Another policy change was aimed at equalizing land inheritance rights between sons and daughters.
Recent initiatives on training and recruiting young women from rural areas to cities to work in factories provide economic independence and social autonomy to them that they were not allowed in their parental homes.
For India to maintain its position as a global growth leader, more efforts are needed to be made at local and national levels.
Increased representation of women in the public spheres is needed. Educating children from an early age that how important is gender equality it could be a meaningful start in that direction.