The changing role of women in India

INTRODUCTION

The status of women in India has been subject to many great

changes over the past few millennia. From equal status with
men in ancient times through the low points of the median
period,to the promotion of equal rights by many reformers,
the history of women in India has been eventful. In modern
India, women have held high offices in India including that of
the President, Prime Minister, Speaker of the Lok
Sabha and Leader of the Opposition.
More modernisation have been evolved and they are as
follows.
THE THREE MODERNISATION:

The trajectory of a country is about three

modernisations: social, political and economic. Social
modernisation is about establishing freedom and
rights of individuals. Political modernisation is about
achieving democracy, where there is rule of law,
where State power is dispersed and restricted, where
elections generate contestability. Economic
modernisation is about achieving a high growth
modern market economy, about a government that
gets away from expropriation and central planning to
a government that is focused on solving market
failures.
All three modernisations interact in complex ways

and fuel each other. As an example, Milton

Friedman's `Capitalism and Freedom' hypothesis is
the idea that political modernisation fuels economic
modernisation and vice versa. This is a well
established idea in the discourse. I find it also
interesting to think about the other two legs of the
stool: the interlinkages between social modernisation
and the other two kinds of modernisation.
THE ROLE OF WOMEN

When we think of social modernisation and economic

modernisation, the big thing that leaps out is the role
of women. A society that does not respect women is
under-utilising half its labour force. We would expect
to see a causal impact of greater equality of women
upon growth.
We in India are sometimes complacent about the role
of women in India. India is famous for having women
in leadership roles. In a dinner meeting by Larry
Summers, I once said that India was world #1 on one
measure of the role of women: the fraction of the top
100 financial firms that are headed by women. I once
met Andre Beteille, and asked him: When compared
with 1947, in what aspect have things in India worked
out much different from what you expected. He said:
The role of women in the elite. He said that for upper
class women in India today, it's better than even
Japan, which is otherwise a very advanced country.
The daughters of the elite in India have no glass
ceiling, which is better than what we see in most

places.
On a population scale, however, things are vastly
worse. Paramita Ghoshreports, in the Hindustan
Times, on a crime victimisation survey of women with
scary results. The India Today survey (link,) shows
us that 79.3% of men believe that marital rape is
okay. We don't know how many men in India act out
on this belief, but the report Why do some men use
violence against women and how can we prevent
it? by the United Nations, shows us scary facts from
some Asian countries that have men who think
similarly to what the Indian data is showing. The
Supreme Court ruling of yesterday is a reminder of
the distance that we have to go on achieving social
modernisation.
THINGS ARE CHANGING DRAMATICALLY WITH
THE YOUNG

With human capital measures like literacy or

graduating high school, a person tends to achieve
them when young. If a person has not become
literate or graduated high school by age 20, things
are unlikely to change later on. Hence, the analysis of
the cross section in the population is tantamount to
looking at the history: what we see for (say) 50 year
olds today is a description of what things were like,
30 years ago, for 20-year olds. Age-specific rates are
like rings of a tree.

Literacy of the cohort aged 22.5

(Time-series reconstructed from age-specific rates visible in the cross
section)

The graph above shows the literacy of the cohort

entering the labour force, which I approximate as
being the cohort at age 22.5. The blue vertical line
stands for today. This is constructed using the crosssection visible in March 2013 from CMIE Consumer
Pyramids, a quarterly panel dataset with 150,000
households covering 700,000 individuals. With
children, high literacy rates are found early on, and
this yields projections for literacy of the age 22.5
cohort in the future.
We see that overall literacy of the cohort entering the
workforce has gone up from roughly 70% in 1990,
when India began opening the economy, to roughly
90% today and will go up to 100% in the coming 15
years. In addition, there was a big gender gap, which
has been significantly reduced and will fully go away.

Let's turn to high school graduation.

High school graduates in the cohort aged 22.5

(Time-series reconstructed from age-specific rates in the cross section)

It seems shocking to think that in 1990, roughly 7% of

the cohort starting off into the labour force, at age
22.5, had passed 12th standard. This has gone up
dramatically to 20%. Sharp growth is visible into the
future when today's 15 year olds become age 22.5,
and there is no gender gap with today's 15 year olds.
The third thing that I want to show from household
survey data is the ownership of mobile phones.

Age-specific rates of mobile phone ownership

All of us have been hearing about miraculous growth

of mobile phones in India for a while, and have
become a bit inured to the story. While a lot has
happened, however, a lot remains to be done. The
black line shows that with males, roughly 75% of the
young and 80% of the old have mobile phones. The
work is progress lies in taking this up to 100% for
everyone. What's striking is the women. The upper
red line, for March 2013, shows that 40% of girls
have mobile phones, and this decays to 20% at age
45. On a related note, Avjit Ghosh, writing in
the Times of India, talks about a paper by Yvonne
MacPherson and Sara Chamberlain which finds that
only 9% of adult women in Bihar have ever sent an
SMS. There is a high rate of change with mobile
telephony, in even the short timespan between the
latest data (March 2013) and the first data from CMIE
(June 2010) which is the lower red line.

SPECULATION

I feel that in the early decades after independence,

we had a progressive elite, which was able to bring
up daughters well and we made amazing strides at
the top. But social modernisation took place only in
the elite. For the bulk of the population, attitudes and
indoctrination and levels of violence remained
neanderthal.
M. N. Srinivas has emphasised the extent to which
the rest of society aspires to catch up with the
lifestyle and the values of the elite. In the early years,
there was little catch up on the treatment of women:
the elite and the proletariat coexisted like oil and
water. Perhaps budget constraints came in the way
of translating aspirations. Maybe poor households
shortchanged daughters on nutrition and education
and mobile phones and such like, thus encouraging
subservience in daughters. In my opinion, the
economic growth of the last 20 years is creating a
new wave of households within which daughters are
growing up differently. Daughters who have high
school education and a mobile phone are going to
engage with the world differently. As an example,
they are less likely to accept sexual harassment and
sexual assault. We may now be at the early stages of
something very big.
Economic modernisation has created this phase of
social modernisation. The rise of capable women

who will not be pushed around will, in turn, fuel

economic growth because we are then getting a
superior labour force. There is an enormous distance
to cover. In my opinion, it will be a story spread over
two generations (50 years) starting from 2000,
through which we will endup with something
satisfactory on the role of women. Economic growth
will create opportunities for women and for sensibly
bringing up daughters, and the rise of capable
women will fuel economic growth.
CULTURE

A sari (a long piece of fabric wound around the body)

and salwar kameez are worn by women all over India.
A bindi is part of a forehead does not signify marital
status; however, the Sindoor does. Rangoli (or Kolam)
is a traditional art very popular among Indian women.
Despite common belief, the bindi on the forehead is the
common tradition of Indian women.
CONCLUSION
As of 2011, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Leader of
the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the
parliament) were women. However, women in India continue
to face atrocities such as rape, acid throwing, dowry killings,
and the forced prostitution of young girls. According to a
global poll conducted by Thomson Reuters, India is the
"fourth most dangerous country" in the world for women, and
the worst country for women among the G20 countries.