Development as Freedom (33 page)

The perception of individual contributions and appropriate entitlements of women and men plays a major role in the division of a family’s joint benefits between men and women.
⁷
As a result, the circumstances that influence these perceptions of contributions and appropriate entitlements (such as women’s ability to earn an independent income, to work outside the home, to be educated, to own property) can have a crucial bearing on these divisions. The impact of greater empowerment and independent agency of women thus includes the correction of the iniquities that blight the lives and well-being of women vis-à-vis men. The lives that women save through more powerful agency will certainly include their own.
⁸

That, however, is not the whole story. There are other lives—men’s and children’s—also involved. Even within the family, the lives affected may be those of the children, since there is considerable evidence that women’s empowerment within the family can reduce child mortality significantly. Going well beyond that, women’s agency and voice, influenced by education and employment, can in turn influence the nature of the public discussion on a variety of social subjects, including acceptable fertility rates (not just in the family of the particular women themselves) and environmental priorities.

There is also the important issue of
intrafamily
division of food, health care, and other provisions. Much depends on how the family’s economic means are used to cater to the interests of different individuals in the household: women and men, girls and boys, children and adults, old and young.
⁹

The arrangements for sharing within the family are given, to a great extent, by established conventions, but they are also influenced by such factors as the economic role and empowerment of women and the value systems of the community at large.
¹⁰
In the evolution of value systems and conventions of intrafamily division, an important role
can be played by female education, female employment and female ownership rights, and these “social” features can be very crucial for the economic fortunes (as well as well-being and freedom) of different members of the family.
¹¹

In the context of the general theme of this book, this relationship is worth considering a bit more. As has already been discussed, the most useful way of understanding famines is in terms of the loss of entitlement—a sharp decline in the substantive freedom to buy food. This would lead to a collapse in the amount of food the family as a whole can buy and consume. While distributional problems within the family can be serious even in famine situations, they are particularly crucial in determining the general undernourishment and hunger of different members of the family in situations of persistent poverty, which is “normal” in many communities. It is in the continued inequality in the division of food—and (perhaps even more) that of health care—that gender inequality manifests itself most blatantly and persistently in poor societies with strong antifemale bias.

This antifemale bias seems to be influenced by the social standing and economic power of women in general. Men’s relative dominance connects with a number of factors, including the position of being the “breadwinner” whose economic power commands respect even within the family.
¹²
On the other side of the coin, there is considerable evidence that when women can and do earn income outside the household, this tends to enhance the relative position of women even in the distributions within the household.

While women work long hours every day at home, since this work does not produce a remuneration it is often ignored in the accounting of the respective contributions of women and men in the family’s joint prosperity.
¹³
When, however, the work is done outside the home and the employed woman earns a wage, her contribution to the family’s prosperity is more visible. She also has more voice, because of being less dependent on others. The higher status of women even affects, it appears, ideas on the female child’s “due.” So the freedom to seek and hold outside jobs can contribute to the reduction of women’s relative—and absolute—deprivation. Freedom in one area (that of being able to work outside the household) seems to help to foster freedom in others (in enhancing freedom from hunger, illness and relative deprivation).

There is also considerable evidence that fertility rates tend to go down with greater empowerment of women. This is not surprising, since the lives that are most battered by the frequent bearing and rearing of children are those of young women, and anything that enhances young women’s decisional power and increases the attention that their interests receive tends, in general, to prevent overfrequent childbearing. For example, in a comparative study of nearly three hundred districts within India, it emerges that women’s education and women’s employment are the two most important influences in reducing fertility rates.
¹⁴
The influences that help the emancipation of women (including women’s literacy and women’s employment) do make a major difference to fertility rates. I shall return to this presently in the context of assessing the nature and severity of the “world population problem.” General problems of environmental overcrowding, from which both women and men may suffer, link closely with women’s specific freedom from the constant bearing and rearing of children that plagues the lives of young women in many societies in the developing world.

There is considerable evidence that women’s education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children. The influence works through many channels, but perhaps most immediately, it works through the importance that mothers typically attach to the welfare of the children, and the opportunity the mothers have, when their agency is respected and empowered, to influence family decisions in that direction. Similarly, women’s empowerment appears to have a strong influence in reducing the much observed gender bias in survival (particularly against young girls).

Countries with basic gender inequality—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Iran, those in West Asia, those in North Africa and others—often tend to have higher female mortality of infants and children, in contrast with the situation in Europe or America or sub-Saharan Africa, where female children typically have a substantial survival advantage. In India, male and female death rates in the 0–4 age group are now very similar to each other in terms of the average
for the country as a whole, but a heavy disadvantage persists for women in regions where gender inequality is particularly pronounced, including most states of northern India.
¹⁵

One of the most interesting studies of these issues—presented in an important statistical contribution by Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio, and Jean Drèze—deals with data from 296 districts in India in the census of India of 1981.
¹⁶
There have been follow-up studies by Mamta Murthi and Jean Drèze dealing with later evidence, particularly the 1991 census, which broadly confirm the findings based on the 1981 census.
¹⁷

A set of different—but interrelated—causal relations are examined in the studies. The variables to be explained include fertility rates, child mortality rates, and also female disadvantage in child survival (reflecting the
ratio
of female-to-male mortality in the 0–4 age group) in interdistrict comparisons. These variables are related to a number of other district-level variables with explanatory potential, such as female literacy rates, female labor force participation, incidence of poverty (and levels of income), extent of urbanization, availability of medical facilities and the proportion of socially underprivileged groups (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes) in the population.
¹⁸

What should we expect to be the impact on child survival and mortality of the variables that may link most closely to women’s agency—in this case women’s participation in the labor force and women’s literacy and education? It is natural to expect this connection to be entirely positive as far as women’s literacy and education are concerned. This is strongly confirmed (more on this presently).

However, in the case of women’s labor force participation, social and economic analyses have tended to identify factors working in different directions. First, involvement in gainful employment has many positive effects on a woman’s agency roles, which often include greater emphasis being placed on child care and greater ability to attach more priority to child care in joint family decisions. Second, since men typically show great reluctance to share the domestic chores, this greater desire for more priority on child care may not be easy for the women to execute when they are saddled with the “double burden” of household work and outside employment. Thus the net effect could go in either direction. In the Murthi et al. study, the analysis of Indian district-level data does not yield any statistically
significant, definite pattern on the connection between women’s outside employment and the survival of children.
¹⁹

Female literacy, in contrast, is found to have an unambiguous and statistically significant reducing impact on under-five mortality, even after controlling for male literacy. This is consistent with growing evidence of a close relationship between female literacy and child survival in many countries in the world, and particularly in intercountry comparisons.
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In this case, the impact of greater empowerment and agency role of women is not reduced in effectiveness by problems arising from inflexible male participation in child care and household work.

There is also the further issue of
gender bias
in child survival (as opposed to
total
child survival). For this variable, it turns out that the female labor force participation rate and female literacy rate
both
have very strong ameliorating effects on the extent of female disadvantage in child survival, with higher levels of female literacy and labor force participation being strongly associated with lower levels of relative female disadvantage in child survival. By contrast, variables that relate to the
general
level of development and modernization
either
turn out to have no statistically significant effect,
or
suggest that modernization (when not accompanied by empowerment of women) can even
strengthen
, rather than weaken, the gender bias in child survival. This applies to, inter alia, urbanization, male literacy, the availability of medical facilities, and the level of poverty (with higher levels of poverty being associated with
higher
female-male ratios among the poor). In so far as a positive connection does exist in India between the level of development and reduced gender bias in survival, it seems to work mainly
through
variables that are directly related to women’s agency, such as female literacy and female labor force participation.

It is worth making a further comment on the impact of enhanced women’s agency through greater female education. Murthi, Guio and Drèze’s statistical analysis indicates that, in quantitative terms, the effect of female literacy on child mortality is extraordinarily large. It is more powerful an influence in reducing child mortality than the other variables that also work in that general direction. For instance, keeping other variables constant, an increase in the crude female literacy rate from, say, 22 percent (the actual 1981 figure for India) to
75 percent reduces the predicted value of under-five mortality for males and females combined from 156 per thousand (again, the actual 1981 figure) to 110 per thousand.

The powerful effect of female literacy contrasts with the comparatively ineffective roles of, say, male literacy or general poverty reduction as instruments of child mortality reduction. The increase in male literacy over the same range (from 22 to 75 percent) only reduces under-five mortality from 169 per thousand to 141 per thousand. And a 50 percent reduction in the incidence of poverty (from the actual 1981 level) only reduces the predicted value of under-five mortality from 156 per thousand to 153 per thousand.

Here again, the message seems to be that some variables relating to women’s agency (in this case, female literacy) often play a much more important role in promoting social well-being (in particular, child survival) than variables relating to the general level of opulence in the society. These findings have important practical implications.
²¹
Both types of variables can be influenced through public action, but respectively require rather different forms of public intervention.

The agency role of women is also particularly important for the reduction of fertility rates. The adverse effects of high birthrates powerfully include the denial of substantial freedoms—through persistent childbearing and child rearing—routinely imposed on many Asian and African women. There is, as a result, a close connection between women’s
well-being
and women’s
agency
in bringing about a change in the fertility pattern. Thus it is not surprising that reductions in birthrates have often followed the enhancement of women’s status and power.

These connections are indeed reflected in interdistrict variations of the total fertility rate in India. In fact, among all the variables included in the analysis presented by Murthi, Guio and Drèze, the
only
ones that have a statistically significant effect on fertility are female literacy and female labor force participation. Once again, the importance of women’s agency emerges forcefully from this analysis, especially in comparison with the weaker effects of variables relating to general economic progress.

The negative linkage between female literacy and fertility appears to be, on the whole, empirically well founded.
²²
Such connections have been widely observed in other countries also, and it is not surprising that they should emerge in India. The unwillingness of educated women to be shackled to continuous child rearing clearly plays a role in bringing about this change. Education also makes the horizon of vision wider, and, at a more mundane level, helps to disseminate the knowledge of family planning. And of course educated women tend to have greater freedom to exercise their agency in family decisions, including in matters of fertility and childbirth.