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Employment and Educational Status: Challenges of Women Empowerment in India
Authors: Pankaj Kumar Baro & Rahul Sarania
Number of views: 605
Women empowerment is the vital instrument to expand women’s ability to have resources and to make strategic life choices. But, Indian societies have received notoriety for being unsafe for women. In fact, the level of atrocities against women is an indicator of the coercion of our society and underscores that we are a suppressed society. Clearly, safety is an obsolete word in today’s India. In India, women are devalued traditionally and the men are normative reified. The Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum in 2009 ranked India 114th out of 134 countries for inequality between men and women in the economy, politics, health, and education. On equal economic opportunities and women’s participation in the labour force, India ranked 127th and 122nd respectively. Women’s employment both in rural and urban areas is very low compared with men, particularly in urban areas. In the front of education, still the female literacy rate (only half of the female population are literates) is wadding behind male literacy rate (three fourth of the male population are literates). Not only this, the rate of school drop outs is also found to be comparatively higher in case of women (NFHS-3). The sex ratio of children attending school is 889 girls per 1,000 boys. There are several constraints that check the process of women empowerment in India. Social norms and family structures in developing countries like India, manifests and perpetuate the subordinate status of women. The need of the hour is to identify those loopholes or limitations which are obstructing the realization of empowerment of women and this initiative must be started from the women folk itself as well as more importantly policy initiative taken by the state and society. This paper tries to identify the extent and behavior of attainments in the front of employment and education of women in India and tries to focus on certain challenges for achieving the desired goal of women empowerment.
Keywords: Empowerment, Vital, Strategic, Suppressed, Inequality, Wadding behind, Perpetuate, Loopholes, Attainments etc.