Economic Development and Gender Inequality in Work Participation: A Spatial Assessment of the Relationship in India

Abstract

It is often alleged that the benefits of economic development are not evenly distributed among the all sections of the society and particularly among the women. The behavioural pattern of work participation among male and female are different and situations are seemed to be bias towards male. This paper uses the indicator of per capita consumption expenditure to refer the economic development and to infer the gender inequality, the difference in the worker population ratios between male and female has been used. The National Sample Survey data on consumption expenditure, employment and unemployment for the states and union territories of India are used in the study. The study attempts to find out the relevance of the established ‘U- shaped' relationship found in the literature between female labour force participation and economic development, in case of the women workers of Indian states and union territories. This paper tries to find out the relationship between the monthly per capita consumption expenditure and gender gap in the worker population for the all India level as well as for the states and union territories of India. The study uses the xy scatter diagram and Karl Pearson's method of correlation to find out the relation. It is found that in rural areas as household monthly per capita expenditure increases, the female worker population ratio decreases and the male-female difference in the worker population ratio increases. While, in urban areas the gender gap in worker population ratio does not increase with the increase in the household consumption expenditure. To find out the effect of household income in terms of household consumption expenditure on gender gap in worker population ratio, simple linear regression model has been used in the study, where the model gets a bad fit with very low R²