Economic survey 2018 on women’s employment and ‘preference’ for Indian sons

Economic survey presented today shed light upon gender equality and employment issues in India. The survey has questioned whether ‘development was an antidote’ to the prevailing gender problems in society.

The report revealed India has ranked 14 out of 17 indicators relating to agency, attitude, and outcomes. This was on par with other countries.

Agency relate to women’s ability to make decisions on reproduction, spending on themselves, spending on their households, and their own mobility and health.

Attitudes relate to attitudes about violence against women/wives, and the ideal number of daughters preferred relative to the ideal number of sons.

Outcomes relate to son preference (measured by sex ratio of last child), female employment, choice of contraception, education levels, age at marriage, age at first childbirth, and physical or sexual violence experienced by women.

However in the case of women’s employment and contraception, the country has far to go.

“On 10 of 17 indicators, India has some distance to traverse to catch up with its cohort of countries,” the survey said.

On contraception, the survey said, nearly 47% of women do not use any contraception, and of those who do, less than a third use female controlled reversible contraception.

The percentage of women who were employed has registered a decline over time. Documented responses of women in the age group 15-49 questioned on whether employed in 2005 stood at 36%. In 2015-16, this figure dropped to 24%.

The female workforce registered a decline in the financial year 2015-16, as revealed by Ministry of State for Labour and Employment in a reply to Lok Sabha questions in the winter session of Parliament.

Worker population ration revealed by the Minister showed that male workers in FY16 stood at 73.3%, while females stood at 25.8%.

In the first four months of 2017, while jobs for men increased by 9 lakh, 24 lakh women fell off the employment map, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). 

"On the supply side, increased incomes of men allows Indian women to withdraw from the labour force, thereby avoiding the stigma of working; higher education levels of women also allow them to pursue leisure and other non-work activities all of which reduce female labour force participation,” economic survey suggested.

Love for sons

India always had a great love and preference for sons being born into the family, which the economic survey suggested was a ‘matter for Indian society as a whole to reflect upon’.

"The skewed sex ratio in favor of males led to the identification of 'missing' women. But there may be a meta-preference manifesting itself in fertility stopping rules contingent on the sex of the last child, which notionally creates 'unwanted' girls, estimated at about 21 million," the survey said. 

“India’s sex ratio during this period (1970-2014) also increased substantially even without the one-child policy from 1060 to 1108 whereas if development acted as an antidote, it should have led to improvements in the sex ratio,” the survey pointed out.

“It is striking that there is a general upward drift in sex ratio and the regression line is also upward sloping, indicating a negative correlation between income and sex ratio (a worsening in development time). Most striking is the performance of Punjab and Haryana where the sex ratio (0-6 years) is approaching 1200 males per 1000 females, even though they are amongst the richest states,” the survey said.

Once again turning the focus on technology, the survey said, “It is not clear whether it (sex ratio) resulted from changes in societal preferences or due to increased state regulation of sex-detection technology.”

Child sex ratio, which shows the number of girls per 1000 boys between the ages 0-6, came down to 918 for India in 2011 from 927 in 2001.

In 2011, for every 1,000 boys aged 0-6 years, there were 852 girls in Mumbai, 832 girls in Delhi and 942 girls in Hyderabad, data by Kanya research revealed.

The sex ratio is projected to decline further in India in the coming years to 904 in 2021 and 898 in 2031, as per World Bank estimates.

India slipped 21 slots on the Global Gender Gap Index of World Economic Forum in 2017 to rank 108th.

However, the survey labelled gender indexes such as WEF, the Gender Inequality Index (GII) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as ‘pervasive methodological problems’.

“Another reason to take stock is to correct a possibly pervasive methodological problem afflicting assessments relating to gender and other social issues. The problem is one of conflating ‘development time’ and ‘chronological time.’ Gender indexes such as the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum (WEF) or the Gender Inequality Index (GII) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) rank countries in chronological time,” the report added.

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