Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.

Keywords:

• Child labor
• gender roles
• intrahousehold inequality

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the Department for International Development, UK, for funding the project that made this research possible. I am also grateful to participants in the Econometrics Society Australasian Meeting 2006, and in the International Association of Feminist Economists Conference in Sydney, 2006, for extremely useful comments. Any errors that remain are mine alone.

Notes

¹ The poverty line in India is set by the Indian government separately for rual and urban areas. It indicates the income level required to survive at subsistence level and is used to calculate the level of poverty in the country. In 1992, it was Rs.296 per capita per month in urban areas and Rs.276 per capita per month in rural areas.

² Figures in Appendix A appear to bear this out with the proportion of girls in the sample being 48.2 percent in high gender equity regions, while in low gender equity regions it is 45.5 percent.

³ Thus, if the norm in a region is to educate girls, then even a household that traditionally would not educate its girl children may succumb to societal pressures. Conversely, if regional norms dictate that women do not go out unless accompanied by someone from their household, this would increase the obstacles to the education of daughters.

⁴ ILO conventions recommend a minimum age for admission to employment or work that must not be less than the age for completing compulsory schooling, and in any case not less than 15 years. Lower ages are permitted – generally in countries where economic and educational facilities are less well developed. The minimum age for those countries is 14 years, with 13 years permitted if the child is engaging in “light work.” The minimum age for “hazardous work,” however, is 18 years.

⁵ Note, however, that this result depends on both father and mother being unwilling to send the child out to work.

⁶ Households in this dataset are defined as all people living and eating under one roof and cooking in one kitchen. However, in the study, we are concerned with the kinds of decisions that fathers and mothers make with regard to child schooling and work. Our concern in this context is with the nuclear family but it is likely to be affected by other family conditions, including the existence of wider family members. We attempt to allow for this by including the number of older dependents in the household and also the overall family income (so that mother's income is a proportion of total household expenditure). We also allow for the possibility that some children live in female headed households by including a dummy to indicate these households.

⁷ While including the mother's wage relative to the father's wage seems to be an obvious choice here, this study included mother's wage relative to household expenditure for several reasons. First, if father's wage is zero, the resultant variable is indeterminate, even though it is clear that in this case, the mother's wage might increase her power within the household. Also, since household expenditure is the final variable to which all wages are contributing, the mother's contribution to expenditures might be expected to determine her power. In cases where the household has no nonwage sources of income, this variable collapses to being simply mother's wage relative to father's wage. However, in households where there are nonwage income sources, such as income from goods sold at market or rental income, then this variable provides more information than simply mother's wage as a proportion of father's wage.

⁸ For this measure I am using the Gender Disparity Index produced by the UNDP. I have renamed it the Gender Equity Index because the higher the index, the more equitable are gender relations and therefore the name change helps clarify discussion of the study results.

⁹ Children who do two activities – work and study, for instance – are classified either within school or within work, depending on which activity they spend more time doing. This either-or classification is useful because it considers the child's primary activities in binary terms. However, it does not allow us to consider children who are doing another activity as a secondary activity. This possibility does not seem to present a major problem in the sample because summary statistics indicate that a majority of the children (85 percent of boys and 71 percent of girls) who did some work worked full time, that is, 7 days a week.

¹⁰ As this is the rural sector, there are very few parents with tertiary education, especially among mothers in this sample (only 0.7 percent of the mothers and 3 percent of the fathers in the entire sample have tertiary education).

¹¹ It is endogenous because it is partly determined by the level of household income. This can bias the estimates and therefore we need to use instruments for these endogenous variables.

¹² Results for the former model are available upon request from the author.

¹³ Since there are so few mothers with tertiary education in the below poverty line households, the standard errors of this variable are very high in the work equation. This study therefore interprets this result with caution.

¹⁴ Note that it is in the work equations that the coefficient of mothers' tertiary education has very high standard errors. So, these probabilities must be interpreted with caution.