Gender Specific Statistics
Neetha N
A GENDER ATLAS OF INDIA: WITH SCORECARD by Radha Kumar Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2019, 618 pp., 4995
February 2019, volume 43, No 2

Ensuring gender equality has been an articulated commitment, and the goals for gender equality have been defined, redefined and refined over time. Affirmative policies and programmes have facilitated important changes with crucial implications for the status of women. However, it has been difficult to arrive at definite conclusions on the impact of these interventions towards the attainment of a gender-equitable social, economic and political order due to contradictory trends and patterns. For example, while literacy among women has increased considerably across the country, many States continue to struggle with the challenges of adverse child sex ratios and increasing incidents of violence against women. In this context, the initiative taken by the Delhi Policy Groups Governance Program under the leadership of Radha Kumar to come out with an Atlas analysing and mapping the performance of the country and the States is commendable.

The first challenge faced by those who want to specifically assess and address women’s status or advocate gender-sensitive policies is the lack or inadequacy of gender specific statistics. Statistics are essential for analysing the relative positions of women in various contexts and to understand whether and how their conditions are changing. Furthermore, women-specific analysis of statistics can play an important role in improving the comprehensiveness of the statistical system, by expanding its scope to hitherto unaddressed gender dimensions in social development. Despite the fact that the importance of gender statistics is now well-acknowledged, the limited data available to study women’s issues and gender dynamics is still often overlooked. Lack of awareness on the data sources and specifics of the available data is common, which even the authors of the book admit saying, we ‘were pleasantly surprised to discover the wide range of data on gender issues.’

The Atlas looks at women’s status through a set of thirty-eight sub-indicators, across seven broad themes such as sex ratio, education, health, political participation, decision making, employment and crimes against women, giving both all India and State wise data. The indicators used not only give a one-time statistical picture but also provide insights on changes over time. The efforts to select or develop gender indicators to assess the status of women have to, however, confront some inherent challenges: First, the challenge of attempting to reflect the many dimensions of living conditions through a limited number of objective measures. Second, for a country as large as India, steep variations in demographic, social and economic processes are inevitable in the face of the vast spatial diversity in physical, social, and economic dimensions.

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