Paper short abstract:

The struggles faced by the ‘second sex’ or by women have been theorized and brought up in activism as the state of women globally, remains dismal. The paper uses the human development and capabilities approach to understand the patterns of women’s employment, women’s education, and how it is intertwined with the level of economic performance and the growth of human development across countries.

Paper long abstract:

The struggles faced by the ‘second sex’ or by women have been theorized and brought up in activism as the state of women globally, remains dismal. There have been various methods and to capture the deprivations faced by women, however, it has been argued that a household-based measure of poverty limits the reality of women, and does not talk about the ‘Invisible Inequalities.’ Women take the lion’s share of unpaid work with increases digital divide, creating hurdles for knowledge and skill enhancement. On the contrary, there is increasing evidence that women are more likely to attain higher education than men. Due to this anomaly, where education attainment is gender-equal (at the primary level), but employment attainment is even more unequal across gender, there is a need to re-look at the role of education. Durkheim (1956) believed that the education system has two key roles: the socialisation of the young into society, including preparation for their future adult roles, and selection into the occupational structure based on individual achievement. The latter seems to be a bone of contention with movement towards education, but not as much towards employment. Within education, this not only represents further symptoms of the ‘diploma disease’ but a social revolution that fundamentally challenges our understanding of education, efficiency and social justice.

There is also a correlation between social class origins and education is at least as high as that between years of schooling and earnings, implying that the intersections of gender and economic capabilities might further make certain women more vulnerable and limit access to economic opportunities. The evidence for India shows that the generational mobility exists in terms of education and occupation, wherein the occupational mobility is lower than the educational mobility, implying that the changes in occupations have not occurred as frequent as the transitions in educational outcomes. When poverty combines with gender inequality, the result is acute failure of central human capabilities.

The human development and capabilities approach allows an understanding of how complex the state of women is, and the capability deprivations and inequalities in accessing labour markets, access to social opportunities and knowledge. The capabilities approach will provide a theoretical base to engage with the functionings (education, employment) at the national level, and further deep-dive into specific case analysis to detangle and identify the access and process disconnects for women’s empowerment.

The paper aims to understand what is the employment of women and education pattern for women, and how it is intertwined with the level of economic performance as well as the growth of human development. The paper will use Data from UNDP – Human Development, Gender Development, Gender Inequality as well Social Norms, across countries to capture the same. The paper will apply basic statistical analysis to determine the interlinkages of women’s education, women’s employment, growth of human development and economic performance; identify the patterns and draw out “achievement” or “well-performing” country cases for a deep-dive analysis.

(Note: The work presented here is an independent research effort and does not represent the institute.)