The Vanishing Half-An Inquiry Into Gender Inequalities In India

This book deals with three problems.Firstly Gender Development Index is not established as an acceptable aggregative measure of gender inequality because it fails to address to the problem of missing women properly. A new index such as Gender inequality Index has been offered by adding in age specific death rate (ASDR). It is found that the ASDR is quite capable of capturing the discrimination at an age group of 0-4 years quite satisfactorily. Accordingly GII could capture gender bias (in aggregative form) in a much superior manner than GDI. Secondly It has not been clearly established from the literature whether child nutritional status has really improved if gender inequality gets reduced over time.This has been investigated both in terms of cross-section and pooled data.Thirdly the relationship between income and quality of life has been studied in terms of cross-national data over a period of time.This has also been studied both with and without the presence of gender bias.Finally there are some discussions about relevant policy implications.