Economic Discrimination Against Women

This book examines the economic problems of women and their work participation in labour market with special reference to agriculture. Despite various development measures introduced by the State and Central Governments for empowerment of women, the women population did not benefit meaningfully. Moreover they were discriminated in all walks of life. Even though it is observed that several changes have taken place on the socio-economic frontier of rural India since independence, they did not substantially improve the position of women. Hence an attempt is made in this book to examine economic development of women and their work participation in labour market in an integrated way. It analyse the various approaches to the study of problems of women focusing on divergent explanations regarding gender differences and participation of female in work force and examines the relevance of the approaches in the present context. In this book agricultural wages of men and women are analysed and theories of wage discrimination are evaluated. It also explains various labour market theories with particular reference to women’s low pay and employment. This book also analyses the trends and levels of employment and unemployment of women in rural labour markets highlighting the high and fluctuating unemployment levels of female workers. It also focuses on the impact of agricultural technology on women workers. This book concludes that majority of women workers are remaining as agricultural labourers. The agricultural employment tries to maximize on the basis of sex and fix low wages for women and high for male workers. The impact of technology was deleterious and displaced women from their works and female tasks become male tasks with a high wage when new equipments are introduced thereby forcing more women into agricultural sector a casual labor. There fore this book suggests an overall development strategy by integrating of agriculture and industry with more employment generation, productivity and efficiency. Unorganized women workers require education and technical training to switch over to more specialized and high payment employment potentialities.