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Abstract
Despite improvements in women's work opportunities and educational achievements, women's survival disadvantage is a demographic reality of urban India. A temporal and cross-sectional analysis of the data from the 1991 and 2001 census of India, while reaffirming the positive association between women's employment and the birth and survival of more girls, fails to reconfirm the oft-emphasized positive connection between women's education and increased survival of girls. Relatively high levels of women's education, by being indicative of household socioeconomic status, may be associated with increased ability to discriminate against girls through prenatal sex selection, especially in the presence of cultural biases resulting in low women's rates of participation in paid work, persistence of dowry payments, and lack of women's property rights. As the educational achievements of urban Indian women improve, gender discrimination in the birth and survival of girls may intensify as a cumulative effect of socioeconomic factors continuing to favor sons.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the editors of Feminist Economics and the anonymous referees for their detailed comments and suggestions.
Notes
Indian censuses define overall sex ratio as the number of females per 1,000 males. This paper, however, uses the more conventional definition of males per 100 females. In this paper, CSRs are defined as the number of male children per 100 female children in the age cohort of 0–6 years, while SRBs are defined as the number of male children per 100 female children at birth.
Data on SRBs were also previously difficult to obtain, leading researchers to rely on indirect estimations (S. Sudha and S. Irudaya Rajan 1999). The 2001 Census of India, by providing information on the number and sex of children born in the year previous to the census, allows for the computation of SRBs for the first time.
There are 1,756 towns listed in the 2001 census. Municipal corporations are the urbanlocal governance bodies for cities with populations above three million. Municipalities, municipal councils, committees, and boards govern smaller towns. After adjustments for comparability, I used data for 1,704 towns for which comparable data are available. Data for some towns were not available for 1991, when towns did not exist or were located in areas, such as the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where the 1991 census was not conducted. Also, the dataset does not include smaller towns variously called census towns, gram panchayats, nagar panchayats, and so on.
The overall sex ratio in urban India declined from 111.88 in 1991 to 111.05 in 2001 (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India 2001). While comprehensive data from the 2011 census of India is not yet available, provisional data indicate a sustained decline in the total urban sex ratio to 107.9.
National and state-level calculations supporting this have not been presented here and are available on request from the author.
In contrast to a 0.41 percent increase in girls and women over the age of 7 years compared with what was predicted by the sex ratio in 1991, there was a 0.79 percent decrease in the corresponding number of girls 0–6 years in urban India between 1991 and 2001 (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India 1991, 2001).
It should be mentioned here that Sikhism is the main religion in the state of Punjab, where CSRs are the highest in the country. While 1.78 percent of the urban Indian population is comprised of Sikhs, Sikhs constitute nearly 37 percent of urban Punjab's population. Apart from having its roots in Hinduism, Sikhism is also a religion characterized by a strong sense of male chivalry and patriarchy, possibly reflected in the high CSRs and SRBs in Punjab.
The 2001 census of India provides data for 593 districts. Some districts do not have any urban regions and have been left out from this analysis. Also, additional districts have been carved out of existing districts for the 2001 census, accounting for a greater number of districts in the later census. Data on the new districts have been added together to ensure comparability with the 1991 districts.
Census data on women workers are used to capture women's participation in gainful economic activity. This study uses the 2001 census definition of work as “any economically productive activity with or without compensation, wages or profit, which is physical or mental in nature. This also includes the supervision or the direction of work” (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India 2001). Frequent changes in the definition of work have made longitudinal studies based on census data difficult. However, definitions of work did not change noticeably between 1991 and 2001, allowing the comparable use of the census data on workers across these years. Further, the narrowness of the definition of work used by the census of India and the consequent under emuneration of women workers engaged in “invisible” work has also been under criticism. However, there is reason to believe that the census gives a fairly good estimate of women workers engaged in activities that are associated with monetary gain. While measuring invisible women workers is vital for understanding their contribution to the economy, remunerative work is important for guaranteeing a command over resources leading to women's greater worth. Thus urban women's paid work participation rates used in this analysis have been computed using census data. The census of India defines literacy as the ability to read and write any language with understanding (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India 1991, 2001).
The TFR is the number of children who would be born to an average woman who experiences each of the age-specific fertility rates of a population in a given year as she progresses through her reproductive lifetime. Age-specific current fertility rates for urban women below 49 years of age have been used to compute the TFR.
As noted earlier, behavioral differences between SCs and STs make it unproductive to group them together. Given that the ST population comprises only 2 percent of the urban Indian population and that it is totally absent from some states like Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi, where girls are most disadvantaged, this study only includes the percentage of the SC population.
The biologically established higher sex ratio at conception, or the primary sex ratio, is estimated to be around or above 110 males per 100 females (Sanford Winston Citation1931). Though greater vulnerability of the male embryo and fetus results in higher numbers of male stillbirths and spontaneous abortions, more male infants are born relative to female infants (Alan C. Stevenson and Martin Bobrow 1967; Michael S. Teitelbaum and Nathan Mantel 1971).
The districts of Jammu and Kashmir have been omitted to maintain comparability with the previous analysis. Additional districts have been carved out of existing districts for the 2001 census, accounting for a greater number of districts in the later census. Data on the new districts have been added together to ensure comparability with the 1991 districts in the previous analysis but have been considered separately in the analysis based on the 2001 data alone.
Denominators for the categories of primary and above have been computed on the basis of census data. For example, the census does not provide any data for primary school–level literacy below the age of 9, and so this ratio has been calculated as a percentage of the population above 9 years, and so on. I have considered different age groups for creating variables representing women's education at different levels in order to remove the effect of differing age compositions in the different districts.