The gender ratio may now be skewed in favour of women but sceptics blame small sample size
The year passing us by took the biggest toll on one segment of Indians — women. The Coronavirus pandemic affected us all, women the most. Perhaps the defining picture of the social impact of COVID-19 is of the employed urban woman at home not feeling at home at all, having to juggle between working from home, managing the daily chores, running errands, helping children adjust to a new world within the four walls, all the while hoping the husband shares the burden with her. The misery is untold for women where couples lost their jobs, saddling them with more responsibilities. The pall of gloom lifted briefly when the National Family Health Survey-5 told us the sex ratio is, for the first time, skewed in favour of women at 1,020 women for every 1000 men. That should have sparked celebrations of a new gender reality but it did not. A swift analysis of the data revealed that the survey sample was not large enough to justify the sex ratio figure. Only the national census data can be credible. It did not stop the optimists from insisting there are no longer any “missing women” in India, a phrase used by Amartya Sen referring to the millions of girls not allowed to be born or killed at birth. Reality eventually struck home. The census data for 2001 and 2011 tells us a sordid tale that sample surveys like NFHS would know nothing about. They revealed shocking levels of female foeticide.
Against a global average of 952 girls per 1,000 boys at birth, it was 915 in 2001 that fell to 910 in 2011. This is the grim reality. We have strong laws to prevent sex selection but doctors and quacks conduct such procedures secretly. We went in for reforms in inheritance laws thinking that might help gender equality but many parents were found averse to girls inheriting their share of assets because they believed that under the Hindu system, the property would go to the girls’ in-laws. The Government introduced measures to empower women in terms of education and employment. In most patriarchal settings, even today, families prefer the patrilocal system under which the son, unlike the daughter, remains in the family home after marriage and generally ends up inheriting the parents’ property after their death. There was a growing belief that a robust public-pension scheme can help parents remain independent after retirement and that might encourage them to divide their property equally between the children, unmindful of son preference. Hardly a third of the elderly segment has pension cover at present. Some States have two-child laws to encourage family planning but these are affecting the sex ratio, too. Where the first child is a girl, the chances are high of sex selection being resorted to the second time around. We are not going to solve the problem in a day but we can use the International Women’s Day theme for 2022 — #BreakTheBias — to make a beginning.