Women in India | CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon

25/07/2014

What Happened to India’s Girls? A New U.N. Report On Sex Selection Offers Some Answers – India Real Time – WSJ

India’s census data consistently shows two things: the country’s inexorably expanding population and its deep preference for sons over daughters.

A new United Nations study takes a deep look at how parents keep choosing boys over girls, despite laws that seek to block the use of ultrasounds and other pre-natal tests to determine the sex of an unborn child.

India’ child sex ratio – the number of girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 — has deteriorated sharply over the past 20 years, dropping to 918 in 2011 from 945 in 1991.

India’s sex gap “demonstrates that the economic and social progress in the country has had minimum bearing on the status of women and daughters in our society,” said Lakshmi Puri, an Indian who is a U.N. assistant secretary general.

Here are five significant takeaways from the U.N. study, written by Mary E. John, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Development Studies.

Improvements in the Overall Sex Ratio are More Nuanced Than You Think

Since 1991, the number of women per 1,000 men has been rising, though it remains far below normal. In 1991, there were 927 women for every 1,000 men. In 2011, the year of the most recent census, that number had risen to 943. The U.N. study argues that much of the improvement isn’t because fewer girls are being born and surviving into adulthood. In India, in the past, women had a shorter life expectancy than men – unlike the situation in most of the rest of the world. That has changed. Indian women now outlive men, in part because of lifestyle changes and “diseases that take a greater toll on” men.

via What Happened to India’s Girls? A New U.N. Report On Sex Selection Offers Some Answers – India Real Time – WSJ.

Posted in Economics, Gender imbalance, Gender issues, India alert, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Child sex ratio, Girl, India, Indian women, Lakshmi Puri, New Delhi, Sex ratio, United Nations, Women in India

19/06/2014

New Women’s Helpline Widens Efforts to Stop Sexual Violence in India – India Real Time – WSJ

Some of the first calls to a new women’s crisis center in central India were from six women who said they were being hunted in their villages after being branded as witches.

In response, the center sent an emergency team of social workers to the district of Hoshangabad in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to investigate the claims and rescue the women, who have gone into hiding, said Sarika Sinha, regional manager of the non-profit Action Aid India, which helps run the center called Gauravi.

Among the minefield of issues that women in India navigate, including abuse, violence and torture, single women in rural India who inherit property are sometimes branded witches so that male members of their community can seize the land, said Ms. Sinha.

If these women agreed to be rescued, the first priority would be to get them out of danger and bring them to the center in Bhopal, Ms. Sinha said.

The Gauravi center, which was inaugurated Monday by India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and Bollywood actor Aamir Khan is the latest in a string of initiatives to protect women that have started to operate since New Delhi created its own 24-hour helpline for women a week after a 23-year-old student was gang-raped and murdered in December 2012.

Sexual violence has since been widely discussed in India, and the law has been changed to protect women.

The Gauravi center shines a spotlight on women’s issues that seems to be filtering from the capital to other parts of the country. The Delhi helpline is being expanded nationally, including most recently to the central state of Chhatisgarh, according to a news report in the Times of India.

via New Women’s Helpline Widens Efforts to Stop Sexual Violence in India – India Real Time – WSJ.

Outrage over India ‘rape’ remarks

Posted in Gender issues, India alert, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Aamir Khan, Action Aid India, Bhopal, Delhi, Hoshangabad, India, Madhya Pradesh, New Delhi, rural India, Sarika Sinha, Sinha, Women in India

30/03/2014

Accomplished women in India face higher risk of domestic violence: study | India Insight

Women in India who are more educated than their husbands, earn more or are the sole earners in their families face a higher risk of domestic violence than women who are more dependent on their partners, according to a new study.

Much of India is still deeply patriarchal and there are wide gaps in the status of men and women. And this form of violence could be a way for men to reassert their power or maintain social control over their wives to preserve the “status quo” in the relationship, said the study’s author Abigail Weitzman.

Weitzman, a graduate student at New York University, looked at data from the female-only module of India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS) collected between 2005 and 2006, concentrating on married women.

The study found that compared to women less educated than their husbands, women with more education face 1.4 times the risk of violence from their partners, 1.54 times the risk of frequent violence, and 1.36 times the risk of severe violence.

The study appeared in the latest issue of the Population and Development Review, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Population Council, an international non-profit organization that conducts research on development issues.

“The result of such violent responses may in turn prevent some women from pursuing employment or greater earnings opportunities either because they have been injured or because the material benefits of such opportunities no longer outweigh the physical costs at home,” the study said.

via Accomplished women in India face higher risk of domestic violence: study | India Insight.

Posted in Economics, education, Gender issues, India alert | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Domestic violence, Education, India, India’s National Family Health Survey, married women, men and women, National Federation of State High School Associations, New York University, Population Council, Risk, Women in India

02/03/2014

The Right to Inherit Isn’t Working for Indian Women, Says U.N. Study – India Real Time – WSJ

As their husbands, fathers, and brothers migrate to cities in search of work, women across India have become the backbone of the country’s agricultural sector. Nearly 80% of all rural women in India labor in the fields.

A study released Sunday by United Nations Women India and Landesa, a U.S.-headquartered nonprofit working to improve land rights for women and men, found that despite their time spent working in orchards, cotton fields, and rice paddies, and changes to inheritance laws, women rarely inherit the land that has sustained them and that they have sustained.

In 2005, the government of India amended its inheritance laws to ensure daughters enjoyed equal rights to inherit their parent’s land and property. But the law seems to be having little impact.

The survey of more than 1,400 women and 360 men in agricultural districts with large numbers of women farmers in three Indian states, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, found that just one in eight women whose parents own agricultural land inherit any of it.

This has significance far beyond intra-family squabbles over divvying up the family fortune. It is fundamental to India’s rural development and progress on a host of development indicators.

Simply, if women farm the land but don’t own it, they are little more than migrant laborers tilling fields owned by others. Without legal control over the land, or any documentation that they have rights to the ground they farm, they can’t access institutional credit, such as bank loans. Nor can they take advantage of agricultural extension programs, such as government offers of subsidized seeds and fertilizers. All of this stymies agricultural development.

It also limits agricultural production. This doesn’t just mean women have fewer tools for climbing out of poverty, it can also mean that their children are stuck there too: Researchers have found that women simply direct more of their income than men towards their children’s education and nutrition, which in turn lowers child mortality and helps reduce diseases of poverty.

The 2005, Hindu Succession Amendment Act giving sons and daughters equal rights to inheriting family land and property was heralded as an important step forward for India’s women.

The study published Sunday, is the first substantial evaluation of the impact of that amendment and indicates that many women have yet to benefit from the legal changes.

via The Right to Inherit Isn’t Working for Indian Women, Says U.N. Study – India Real Time – WSJ.

Posted in agriculture, Economics, India alert, inheritance | Leave a Comment »

Tags: agricultural development, agricultural land, agricultural sector, agriculture, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, India, inheritance laws, Land law, Landesa, Madhya Pradesh, rural women in India labor, United Nations Women India and Landesa, Women in India

17/12/2013

Why India is sitting on a social time-bomb of violence against women

There are 37 million more men than women in India, and most of them are of marriageable age given the relatively young population. A social time-bomb is now setting off there with terrifying consequences, and until the gang-rape in Dehli a year ago, very little attention was paid to this.

Imagine a world where the proportion of girls being born is so low that large proportions of males just cannot find partners when they come of age. In such a world they are more likely to congregate in gangs for company. In turn, that means they are more likely to engage in risky behaviour: i.e. commit crime, do drugs and engage in violence against women. In gangs, men are more likely to harass women and even commit rape.

But this isn’t some dystopian fantasy – there are 37 million more men than women in India, and most of them are of marriageable age given the relatively young population. A social time-bomb is now setting off there with terrifying consequences.

While researching for my e-book on violence against women in India, earlier this year I came across an extraordinary article on why some brothers living in the same household were sharing a wife rather than marrying separate women.

Let that sink in for a moment. The Times of India reported in 2005 on instances where between two and five brothers living in a house, in rural areas in the state of Punjab, had married the same woman. It was extraordinary not just for what was in it, but for what was left out.

The article – \”Draupadis bloom in rural Punjab\” – cited two reasons for these polyandric arrangements: they prevented the household from splitting into multiple families and therefore dividing the meagre land they owned; men just could not find wives to settle down with. [The women are called \”Draupadis\” in reference to the princess who married five brothers in the Hindu epic The Mahabharata]. Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh told the Times of India: “the small landholdings and skewed sex ratio have abetted the problem.\”

via Why India is sitting on a social time-bomb of violence against women.

Posted in Gender imbalance, Gender issues, India alert, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Delhi, India, Indian epic poetry, Punjab Pakistan, Violence against women, Women in India

20/11/2013

Indian women in business: has the glass ceiling been shattered? – The New Silk Road, Stephenson Harwood

From: The New Silk Road, Nov 13 to Jan 14; Stephenson Harwood

http://f.datasrvr.com/fr1/413/26346/NSRissue17-interactivePDF-v15.pdf

India is a country of acute contrasts; and perhaps nowhere is the divide more pronounced than in the status of women. In terms of the big milestones, the country has a reputation for leapfrogging others – Indira Gandhi became the world’s second ever female prime minister way back in 1966 (pipped to post by Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka), and women have since served in multiple senior political roles.

They’ve also stormed ahead in the professions (notably medicine and law) and in the international corporate world. One might cite Indra Nooyi, who beat all comers to secure the top job at Pepsi-Co; ot her aptly named Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco Systems. Meanwhile, a generation of newly-empowered and highly-educated young women are going out to work in larger numbers than before.

Set against these achievements, however, is the increasingly troubling situation facing Indian women more broadly. A recent Reuters Trustlaw investigation – examining a wide variety of measures from male-to-female pay disparity, through female foeticide, to deaths in dowry disputes – ranked India as the worst country in the G20 to be born female.

Assushma Kapoor, South Asia deputy director for UN Women sums up: “There are two Indias: one where we can see more equality and prosperity for women, but another where the vast majority of women are living with no choice, voice, or rights.”

Although more than two decades of economic liberalisation has opened up opportunities in progressive cities such as New Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore, large parts of the country – particularly in the north – remain entrenched in feudalism. The upshot, according to The Economist, is that just 29 per cent of Indian women are currently in the workforce, compared with two-thirds of women in China.If deep-rooted changes in social attitudes are needed, who better to lead them than India’s companies? The willingness with which multinational companies (especially in the IT sector) have embraced the female graduates of India’s management schools is surely indicative of their quality. As well as Vanitha Narayan of IBM (profiled overleaf) the managing directors of both CapGemini India and Hewlett-Packard India are women. Female representation at the top of the banking profession is also much higher in India than many other countries.

The sectors in which women are currently thriving at senior levels – FMCG, retail, IT and retail banking – tend to be consumer-centric, says headhunter Ronesh Puri of Executive Access: reflecting the fact that household buying decisions are usually made by women and companies feel the need to ‘connect’. In more labour-intensive industries like mining, oil and gas, and aviation, women are still under-represented – as they are in the west – though that is beginning to change.

Indeed, demand for female directors at Indian companies across the board is growing at an estimated rate of about 10 per cent each year. That’s partly the result of new legislation mandating at least one board for certain classes of companies. But it’s also a response to the growing body of research suggesting a link between business growth and profitability, and gender diversity.Many women in corporate India might protest that there’s a long way to go. But the same is true in virtually every other developed nation. And one thing India is not short of is distinguished role models. Here we profile four inspirational women, who’ve made their mark across very different sectors.

Shubhalakshmi Panse

Chairman and managing director, Allahabad Bank

When Shubhalakshmi Panse’s became the first woman to lead India’s oldest bank last year, it marked the culmination of a near 40-year career at the financial coal-face. It almost never happened. Panse, 59, was pursuing a doctorate in embryology at Pune University when she stumbled across a recruitment advert from the state-owned Bank of Maharashtra. She took the qualifying exams “just for fun”. Having successfully climbed the professional ladder, Panse made the most of a sabbatical in the US in the early 1990s, completing a three-year MBA in twelve months flat before returning to India. The sizeable challenge she was hired to tackle at Allahabad Bank was to turn round the struggling institution in a year, ahead of her retirement next January. Panse admits “networking” isn’t her forte. She credits her success to her work ethic (“my commitment has always been 200 per cent”); and her parents. “We were raised as independent individuals. My mother would say ‘you can do it’.

Ishita Swarup

Founder, Orion Dialog and 99.labels.com

Ishita Swarup knew from an early age that she wanted to do “something of my own” rather than get stuck in “the cog in the wheel syndrome”. After completing her MBA, she joined Cadbury’s Indian brand management team, but stayed in the corporate cocoon just three years before starting the online phone marketing firm, Orion Dialog, in 1994 aged 27. The firm, which numbered Citibank among early clients, caught the rising tide of business process outsourcing. In 2004, Swarup exited in style: selling out to Aegis BPO (part of the Essar group). Still, she’s had much a choppier time with her second big venture, the ecommerce outfit 99.labels.com. Launched in 2009, the site was India’s first ‘flash sales’ shopping portal. But a proliferation of ‘me too’ competition and profitability concerns have dogged the firm and, in May, a big investor pulled out. Swarup hasn’t given up. She’s rejigging the business model and looking for new backers. “Seeing a venture take shape from idea to reality, and then taking it to a growth level, motivates me,” she says. “Making mistakes is part of that process.”

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Founder, Biocon

India’s wealthiest self-made woman started Biocon aged 25 in 1978, out of the garage of a rented house with the bare minimum of capital because she could not get financial backing. The decision to strike out on her own – becoming India’s first biotech entrepreneur – was taken almost by default. She had hoped to get a job at Vijay Mallya’s United Breweries, but was shocked to hear that male colleagues wouldn’t accept her. “That’s when the hard fact hit me. There is a gender bias.” Biocon began life as an enzyme specialist, before moving whole sale into the lucrative bio-pharma sector in the late 1990s, ahead of the great ‘off patent’ bonanza. IN 2004, Mazumdar-Shaw too the company public, Now 60 and worth US$625 million, according to Forbes, she lives in an estate outside Bangalore. “You could be in California”, she said last year. “Then you step outside and see poverty. That’s not a nice feeling.” She has pledged to five away three-quarters of her wealth.

Vanitha Narayanan

Managing director, IBM India

In contrast, one woman who has thrived on corporate life is Vanitha Narayanan, an IBM ‘lifer’ who became responsible this year for all Big Blue’s operations in India and South Asia – one of the company’s fastest-growing regions. With 150,000 people on the payroll, IBM is the largest multinational employer in India. Naraythan, a graduate of the University of Madras, cheerfully admits that, apart from a brief stint in a department store, “IBM is my only job”. She joined the company’s US telecoms group as a trainee after taking an MBA at the University of Houston, and made her name working with just one client, the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. “It helped me lay a foundation – you respect the industry of your client, and sometimes the client is your best teacher.” That certainly proved true in her case. She went on to become a global vice-president of IBM’s telecom solutions, and in 2006 moved to China to run the Asia Pacific Unit. At 54, Narayanan is modest about her achievements, preferring the word “influence” to power. “She’s no pushover,” says a colleague. “But she can build trust very easily”.

See also:

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Posted in Banking, Culture, Economics, Gender imbalance, Gender issues, Good news, India alert, IT, Pharma, poverty, Retail, Social & cultural, Technology, wealth, Women's rights | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Allahabad Bank, Cisco Systems, IBM, India, Indian women, Indira Gandhi, Indra Nooyi, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Padmasree Warrior, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, UN Women, Vanitha Narayan, Vanitha Narayanan, Women in India

09/03/2013

* Work-Life Balance a Challenge for Indian Women

WSJ: “Yes, the number of women opting for MBAs in India is increasing. And yes, India Inc. is consistently working to hire more women, who are young, ambitious and increasingly qualified.

But can these women strike a good work-life balance?

Even though India Inc. has been encouraging a greater number of women in the workplace, that number is still low. A new study by Grant Thornton, a global accounting and advisory firm, shows that on average, women make up only 15% of the workforce in Indian companies. Globally, this figure stood at 35%. Today, only 1.8% of CEOs in India are women.

How to enhance the role of women in India Inc. was a question addressed by many of the businesswomen who gathered in New Delhi’s Habitat Center on Women’s Day, Friday.

Sunita Cherian, vice president of human resources at Wipro, speaking on the sidelines of the event, said that her company tries to meet the changing priorities of their women employees depending on their stages of life.

For instance, the company is more flexible on working hours for women after they get married, says Ms. Cherian. Wipro Ltd. is also determined to persuade women to stay in their job, even if they may be tempted to quit and rely on their partners’ incomes instead.

“This is the stage where a woman might feel that a dual-income is not a necessity,” she says.

Ms. Cherian, who has spent 17 years working at Wipro Ltd., believes that her “ambition was fuelled” by the fact that she stepped into the right organization and the right family after marriage.

Srimati Shivashankar, who is in charge of promoting greater gender diversity at HCL Technologies, says she had to work harder than others as she was climbing the corporate ladder. Cracking stereotypes like “think director, think male” was not easy, says Ms. Shivashankar.

Striking a good work-life balance is much more important for women than for men. A new global research by Accenture, a consulting firm, found that around 70% of female respondents in India said that work-life balance was key to their definition of “success” in their career, while only 40% of men felt that.

The study also found that the difficulty of balancing life and work is a key reason why women in India leave their jobs. While 24% of Indian men surveyed said they quit their jobs because of long or inflexible working hours, for women that figure was 48%.

via Work-Life Balance a Challenge for Indian Women – India Real Time – WSJ.

Indian women want flexi-hours for work-life success (zdnet.com)
Women’s Day sets hope for Indian women (bigpondnews.com)

Posted in Economics, employment, Gender imbalance, Gender issues, higher education, India alert, Politics, Technology, Women's rights | 3 Comments »

Tags: HCL Technologies, India, International Women's Day, New Delhi, Wipro, women, Women in India, Work–life balance

30/12/2012

* How India treats its women

BBC News: “People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India’s Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.

When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?

Female foetuses are aborted and baby girls killed after birth, leading to an an appallingly skewed sex ratio. Many of those who survive face discrimination, prejudice, violence and neglect all their lives, as single or married women.

TrustLaw, a news service run by Thomson Reuters, has ranked India as the worst country in which to be a woman. This in the country where the leader of the ruling party, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers, and a number of sports and business icons are women. It is also a country where a generation of newly empowered young women are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before.

But crimes against women are rising too.

With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30. Most disturbingly, according to police records, the offenders were known to their victims in more than 94% of the cases. Neighbours accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other relatives were also involved. Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country.

And it is not rape alone. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings and abductions of women were up 19.4%, women being killed in disputes over dowry payments by 2.7%, torture by 5.4%, molestation by 5.8% and trafficking by an alarming 122% over the previous year.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated that more than 100m women are “missing” worldwide – women who would have been around had they received similar healthcare, medicine and nutrition as men.

New research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than 2m women are missing in a given year.

The economists found that roughly 12% of the missing women disappear at birth, 25% die in childhood, 18% at the reproductive ages, and 45% at older ages.

They found that women died more from “injuries” in a given year than while giving birth – injuries, they say, “appear to be indicator of violence against women”.

Deaths from fire-related incidents, they say, is a major cause – each year more than 100,000 women are killed by fires in India. The researchers say many cases could be linked to demands over a dowry leading to women being set on fire. Research also found a large number of women died of heart diseases.

These findings point to life-long neglect of women in India. It also proves that a strong preference for sons over daughters – leading to sex selective abortions – is just part of the story.

Clearly, many Indian women face threats to life at every stage – violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality, neglect, bad diet, lack of attention to personal health and well-being.

Analysts say deep-rooted changes in social attitudes are needed to make India’s women more accepted and secure. There is deeply entrenched patriarchy and widespread misogyny in vast swathes of the country, especially in the north. And the state has been found wanting in its protection of women.

Angry citizens believe that politicians, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, are being disingenuous when they promise to toughen laws and speed up the prosecution of rapists and perpetrators of crime against women.

How else, they ask, can political parties in the last five years have fielded candidates for state elections that included 27 candidates who declared they had been charged with rape?

How, they say, can politicians be believed when there are six elected state legislators who have charges of rape against them?

But the renewed protests in Delhi after the woman’s death hold out some hope. Has her death come as an inflexion point in India’s history, which will force the government to enact tougher laws and people to begin seriously thinking about the neglect of women?

It’s early days yet, but one hopes these are the first stirrings of change.”

via BBC News – How India treats its women.

Posted in Gender imbalance, India alert, Inequalities, Social & cultural, Women's rights | 3 Comments »

Tags: Amartya Sen, current-events, Debraj Ray, Delhi, India, manmohan singh, politics, rape cases, singapore hospital, Women in India

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