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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Women in India: Bringing in the Other Half by Sruthi Gottipatti and Nikhila Gill

When put in charge, women in India are better than men at providing clean water and adequate sanitation for their communities. And despite the gains women have made in the developed world, they’re still doing about as much of the housework and childcare as women in India.

The World Bank’s recently released 2012 World Development Report on gender equality and development shows progress in some areas, while in others gaps in inequality between men and women stubbornly persist.

India Ink spoke to Sudhir Shetty, the co-director of the report, to find out more.

In a field that tends to focus on the glass-half-empty side of issues, those who worked on the report say there is still some reason for cheer.

“In all developed countries and 60 out of 90 developing countries, there are more girls in universities than boys, which is pretty striking,” Mr. Shetty said.

There are other heartening indicators. Mr. Shetty points out that in the United States, it took about 110 years for the number of children a woman has, on average, to drop from six to three. It took just 35 years in India to make that stride. Iran managed it in eight.

Still, there are sobering facts: Mr. Shetty said that although the lifespan of women has improved over time, women and girls in developing countries still tend to die sooner than their counterparts in rich countries. Each year about 4 million women “go missing” as a result of either sex-selective practices, early childhood death due to malnutrition or lack of access to clean drinking water, or during childbirth.

It’s not just the maternal mortality rate that’s staggering. Jishnu Das, a senior economist who worked on the report, said that women still primarily take care of their homes and families as compared to men. And this is true across the world.

Women in India do about as much of a share of the household work and child care (81 percent) as the women in a developed country like Italy (77 percent), according to the report. (Page 219 of report)

In terms of productivity in the economy, Mr. Shetty said the gap between men and women doesn’t come from gender differences but from disparity in their access to resources. For example, if access to fertilizers, credit and land was controlled for, female farmers were as productive as their male counterparts, the authors of the report found.

In India, the team discovered that measures like the introduction of quotas for women in the Panchayati Raj, or village level, led to better access to clean water and sanitation, crimes against women being reported more often, and a jump in prosecution for those crimes. Women make up one-third to one half of all Panchayats, or village governments.

The authors of the report, however, refrained from saying if such a quota system for women would work in Parliament, and stressed that it was still a temporary measure.

“Governments cannot wait only for growth to take care of the problems. There needs to be active intervention,” said Anna Maria Munoz Boudet, a gender specialist who worked on the report.

Mr. Shetty points out that it’s also smart policy to bring in the talents of the other half of the population since it boosts productivity. Moreover, “it’s just wrong to deny that share of the population the same opportunity, the same access as the other 50 percent,” he said.