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Gender Disparities in India

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Despite rapid economic growth, the explosion of microcredit programs and self-help groups, and laudable efforts to increase women’s political participation, gender disparities have remained deep and persistent in India. The UN Gender Inequality Index has ranked India below several sub-Saharan African countries. Gender disparities are even more pronounced in economic participation and women’s business conditions in India. Using data from the 2011 Global Gender Gap report, Figure 1 shows that while India scores around the average of the gender gap index overall (horizontal axis), its score for women’s economic participation and opportunity is worse than 95% of all countries in the sample (vertical axis). Despite India being the second fastest growing economy in the world, gender disparities have remained deep and persistent in India.

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What explains huge gender disparities in women’s economic participation in India? In a recent paper, we examine this question by looking at female entrepreneurship and its local determinants in unorganized manufacturing and service sectors.

The good news is that the overall India average female business-ownership share (in manufacturing) has increased over time from 26% in 2000 to 37% in 2005. However, there is wide variation across states and industries in the prevalence of women as entrepreneurs. Among the major states of India, those with the highest share of new proprietary businesses in the unorganized manufacturing sector owned by women in 1994 are Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala. Those with the lowest share of female entrepreneurs are Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Similar patterns hold across states when comparing overall business ownership rates by gender. All but one state (Sikkim) saw an increase in the share of new businesses owned by women over the period of 1994 to 2005.