Key indicators show women's equality in India has a long way to go

Wide gender differences in education, employment and access to basic facilities

Women are less likely to be taught to read and write and to secure employment in India, according to various indicators. A majority of them have never used the Internet.

The gender gap between men and women remains a problem for the country, shows an analysis of government data. Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned several areas of improvement in this regard in his Independence Day speech on Tuesday.

He noted that India had a greater number of women pilots than other countries. Around 15 per cent of India's pilots were women, according to a government reply in Parliament, compared to just 5 per cent globally. But this translates into only a small number of women pilots as total number of pilots in India is around 10,000.

The number of women studying science is indeed higher than men. There were 2.5 million women in undergraduate science courses compared to 2.3 million men, according to data from the 2020-21 All India Survey on Higher Education Report. However, the gap reverses in engineering and technology courses, which have 2.6 million men and only 1.1 million women. Men (0.5 million) also outnumber women (0.3 million) in information technology and computer science courses. There are 5.5 million male students in these science, technology, engineering, and computer science courses. Women number 3.9 million.

A more elemental measure of education is literacy, where women have continued to lag men since Independence. Fewer than 10 per cent of women were literate in 1951. This increased to 71.5 per cent in 2019-21. The corresponding figure for men rose from 27.15 per cent to 84.4 per cent (chart 1).

Women also have fewer opportunities than men if one includes all forms of employment. The female labour force participation rate, which measures the share of women working or available for work, is 24 per cent. This is lower than its South Asian neighbours like Pakistan (24.6 per cent) and Bangladesh (37.7 per cent). It is also lower than Brazil, Russia, and China, its Brics peers, which have a female labour force participation rate of over 50 per cent (chart 2).

 

Income tax data shows that men accounted for 62.84 per cent of PAN allotments as of March 2019, compared to 37.2 per cent for women.

Access to information, too, is limited for women. Only 33.3 per cent of women have used the Internet, according to a 2019-21 government survey. This number for men is 57.1 per cent. The gap is worse in rural India: 24.6 per cent for women against 48.7 per cent for men (chart 3).