Economics of Gender: Why are women ‘unequal’

Why does gender matter? Surely, we shouldn’t be asking this question in 2020. We all know it does. We see the inequalities women face all around us, among our friends, families and peer groups. But how does Economics, more specifically development economics, dabble with questions around gender?

There is much debate and discussion surrounding declining labour force participation of women, and gender pay gaps. However, we often forget to discuss the limited opportunities and accumulated disadvantages that lead to these unequal outcomes. In this article, we try to take you through some interesting evidence on how households and markets limit women’s educational, health and labour market opportunities.

Economic theory was designed with the intention to inform policy targeting certain ‘desirable’ outcomes. Part and parcel of this is the bid for improving the welfare of a population. Over time and considerable debate, welfare as minimisation of inequality has become more or less an accepted idea. The study of inequality however is a continual conversation.

While colloquially we are well aware of gender as a key feature that determines inequality in a population, economists seeking to inform policy cannot assume the answer to the question –why does gender equality matter?

The normative argument for gender equality is largely agreed upon today. Society ascribed roles for men and women based on valuations of gendered-ability, determining the existing hierarchy of power. This is reflected in unequal ‘agency’, and poorer welfare outcomes of women (Sen 1990).

From an instrumentalist approach, many make the ‘equality-efficiency’ argument – the idea that greater equality of opportunity makes optimum use of human capital (Klasen 1999; Esteve-Volart 2004), by bringing previously excluded populations into “productive” markets. For example, the ‘human capital approach’ posits that educational attainment of women is linked to higher quality of human capital in the long-run (Kabeer and Natali, 2013).

Much of the gender disadvantage is rooted in the household unit. Women exist in an unequal paradigm, facing higher barriers to accessing resources compared to men – attainment of education and retention in schools (Kingdon 2002), poorer health outcomes (Jayachandran and Pande 2017) and lesser wages (Kingdon and Unni, 2001), to name a few.

Regardless of the approach we take to motivate gender equality as a target for welfare policy, that gender inequality is pervasive in our society is undeniable.

Disadvantages start early and accumulate

From even before they are born, girl children are disadvantaged due to the perceived ‘burden’ they pose to their families. Gender-ascribed roles write girl-children off as potential care-givers who will be married into another family, failing to support their parents in old age.

Sons, on the other hand, are considered an asset. Akin to the instrumentalist approach taken by policy-makers, parents within a household choose to invest resources on their sons for the return on that investment in old-age.

Apart from the economic return from sons becoming the bread-winner of the household, this includes the idea that their wives will take-over the care-burden of the house. The burden of having a daughter is further intensified by dowry-practices that incentivise parents to “save” for their daughters while they “invest” in their sons.

This leads to girl children being breastfed lower amounts (Jayachandran and Kuziemko, 2011), have poorer dietary intake during adolescence (Aurino 2017), and attending schools that require lesser investments (Maitra et al. 2016), among other unequal allocations.

Later, these disadvantages manifest into men and women having differential “abilities”. Coupled with existing beliefs and biases, they disadvantage women further. For example, disadvantages of girl-children in the classroom are heightened by age-old stereotypes – such as that boys are better at science and mathematics, while girls are better at humanities and languages. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s been found that teachers concentrate on teaching male-children sciences and mathematics more than they do on girls, and male children might receive greater support on school-work from their parents; girl children face higher ‘anxiety’ during mathematics related tests; and further high performance of women is attributed to “hard work”, while of boys is attributed to “capability” and “intelligence” .

The pervasiveness of son-preference means that households continue to have children until they have at least one son . Due to this, girl children are often born into poorer households with more siblings, decreasing their chances of receiving adequate investments for their welfare.

Restricted physical mobility

Concerns for safety of girl-children influence the quality of schools they attend, where parents might choose a poorer quality school if it is closer to their home . Similarly, this affects how long a girl-child stays in school altogether. This is exacerbated once the girl-child hits puberty as the question of her honour and impending marriageability becomes the key focus of people around her. While the issue of safety for women, even young girls, is not a myth, the reason that public spaces are so unsafe for women seems to be rooted in the very idea that a woman’s place is “within the household”.

Studies have even found that women use public spaces differently from men – rarely for leisure, and mostly functionally. Even women with relatively greater mobility and privilege often choose to study or work in places that involve travelling safer routes. For example, they attend lower quality colleges than men (in Delhi University) to avoid unsafe routes/sexual harassment (Borker, 2017).

Intra-household bargaining power

Concerns for women’s honour and her consequent immobility are often intensified in the post-marital household. Rather than women enjoying greater agency as adults, the baton of control passes from her father, to her husband and his household members.

The institution of marriage in India favours men in many ways- through patriarchal kinship norms, patrilocality (i.e. residing in the husband’s parents’ house), and inheritance (Bhalotra et al. 2018). By doing so it strips women of any/ most of her “fall- back options” .

Women’s access to employment in India, for example, is impeded by such kinship norms and interrelated social considerations of status. A woman working is considered a signal of her family being under financial distress, which lowers the status of her family in society (Quisumbing and de la Bri‘ere 2000). Patrilineal systems mean women receive no inheritance from their natal homes when they marry, and the prevalence of patrilocality means women are often isolated from the social capital associated with their natal residence.

As a result women have little bargaining power to make decisions within the post-marital household. Further, women are unduly burdened by household and care-work , which further reduces their possibility of entering the labour market. This is only heightened with the birth of children.

Labour market participation

Having dissected aspects of the various disadvantages women face throughout their lives it is easy to guess the impact of this on their ability to participate in the labour market.

For girl-children who are able to pursue higher education, socialisation about differential abilities has a bearing on the subjects they choose to study and the sectors they might be employed in. Gendered labour markets are problematic for various reasons including the fact that they often allow for greater exploitation of employees or are based on supposed differential abilities (for example, preference for women for jobs requiring ‘nimble fingers’ (Elson and Pearson 1981)).

Further, the various disadvantages faced by women throughout childhood and adolescence often limit the inputs available for them to compete for several kinds of jobs. This coupled with institutional prejudice and discrmination, translate into unequal outcomes in the form of wage-gaps and ‘glass ceilings’ in the labour market. The wage gap may not only reveal discriminatory practices in the labour market, but also capture accumulated disadvantages.

Finally, when searching for answers on how to address these inequalities, it is important to add an ‘intersectional lens’ to recognise that disadvantages faced by women of different classes, castes and religions might differ. For example, women from poorer households, and those from Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/Ts) are more likely to be “allowed to work” by their husbands and in-laws than wealthier women from upper caste Hindu .

While a gendered lens might suggest that women of lower castes then have greater agency or bargaining power to join the labour-force, the nature of disadvantages they face only differs. For women from lower caste-groups, finding gainful employment is an economic necessity stemming from the fact that they are more likely to hail from economically poorer households that require two incomes for survival (Kodoth 2005). Due to this necessity, these women are far more likely to accept jobs that are unsafe and/or pay low wages.

Thus the inequalities of opportunity that women face are compounded when factoring intersectional disadvantages of gender with caste, class, and religion.

We look forward to your comments and thoughts.

Some researchers whose work we love: Amartya Sen, Ashwini Deshpande, Bina Agarwal, Diane Elson, Julie A. Nelson, Naila Kabeer, Rohini Pande, Seema Jayachandran

For short summaries of economics research on gender in India and rest of the world:

1. Ideas for India: https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/social-identity.html

2. VOX (CEPR Policy Portal): https://voxeu.org/content/topics/gender

Further Reading:

1. Aurino, E. (2017). Do boys eat better than girls in India? Longitudinal evidence on dietary diversity and food consumption disparities among children and adolescents. Economics and Human Biology, 25, 99-111.

2. Bhalotra, S., Brulé, R., and Roy, S. (2018). Women’s inheritance rights reform and the preference for sons in India. Journal of Development Economics.

3. Bhalotra, S., Chakravarty, A., Mookherjee, D., and Pino, F. J. (2019). Property rights and gender bias: Evidence from land reform in West Bengal. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 11(2), 205-37.

4 .Borker, G. (2017). Safety first: Perceived risk of street harassment and educational choices of women. Job Market Paper, Department of Economics, Brown University.

5. Deshpande, A. (2002). Assets versus autonomy? The changing face of the gender-caste overlap in India. Feminist Economics, 8(2), pp.19-35

6. Elson, D. and Pearson, R. (1981). ‘Nimble fingers make cheap workers’: An analysis of women’s employment in third world export manufacturing. Feminist review, 7(1), pp.87-107.

7. Esteve-Volart, B. (2004). Gender discrimination and growth: Theory and evidence from India. SSRN

8. Jayachandran, S., and Kuziemko, I. (2011). Why do mothers breastfeed girls less than boys? Evidence and implications for child health in India. The Quarterly journal of economics, 126(3), 1485-1538.

9. Jayachandran, S., and Pande, R. (2017). Why are Indian children so short? The role of birth order and son preference. American Economic Review, 107(9), 2600-2629.

10. Kabeer, N., and Natali, L. (2013). Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is there a Win‐Win?. IDS Working Papers, 2013(417), 1-58.

11. Kingdon, G. (2002). The gender gap in educational attainment in India: How much can be explained?. Journal of Development Studies, 39(2), pp.25-53

12. Kingdon, G. G., and Unni, J. (2001). Education and women’s labour market outcomes in India. Education Economics, 9(2), 173-195.

13. Klasen, S. (1999). Social exclusion, children and education: conceptual and measurement Issues.

14. Kodoth, P. (2005). Fostering insecure livelihoods: dowry and female seclusion in left developmental contexts in West Bengal and Kerala. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.2543-2554.

15. Maitra, P., Pal, S. and Sharma, A. (2016). Absence of altruism? Female disadvantage in private school enrollment in India. World Development, 85, pp.105-125

16. Myrdal, G. (1953). The political element in development of economic theory. London: Routledge Kegan Paul.

17. Quisumbing, A.R. and De La Brière, B. (2000). Women’s assets and intrahousehold allocation in rural Bangladesh: Testing measures of bargaining power. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

18. Sen, A. (1980), ‘Equality of What?’, in S McMurrin (Ed.), Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. I, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

19. Sen, A. (1990). More than 100 million women are missing. The New York Review of Books, 37(20), 61-66.

By Karan Singhal and Nisha Vernekar.
Karan Singhal (karansinghal1993@gmail.com) is a research associate at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Nisha Vernekar (nisha03100@gmail.com) is a research assistant with Institute for Fiscal Studies, London.

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