Married, employed…not empowered ……….Rema Nagarajan | TIMES INSIGHT GROUP
Sunita, is just over 16 and helps her mother in her work as a domestic employee. But she earns nothing at the end of each gruelling 10-hour day. Her mother gets the wages, Sunita admits to knowing nothing about being paid for her work. I dont know, she says, You have to ask my mother. Things may change little, if at all, for Sunita even after she gets married.
Uma Sharma, a married consultant in an Internet start-up company, is very unlike Sunita in almost every way, except for one crucial point. My money goes straight into a joint account with my husband. I ask him for money whenever I need it. I dont feel the need for a separate account. All household purchases are made by me but when it comes to investing, my husband knows best.
Sunita and Uma are at two ends of the societal divide. But their plight is not too different. Both are employed but are they empowered? Neither of them makes independent decisions about the money they earn. Indian women may have come a long way in terms of education and employment, but they are still far from being empowered. It is a point well made by the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS).
The survey found that one in six of married working women had absolutely no control over the money they earned; only one in ten married women were able to make even relatively insignificant decisions, such as visiting friends and family and more than a quarter of them had say on the crucial matter of their own healthcare.
However, the survey found that bettereducated women, such as Uma had greater access to money and rights to decisionmaking within the family and about who they could see and when. The advantage was especially pronounced for women who were employed, earning cash and with 12 years or more of formal study. But it is a pitiful freedom and for too few considering the survey estimates that overall, just 36% Indian women aged between 15 and 49 are employed.
Though womens empowerment presents a dismal picture overall, there are wide variations between Indian states. Rajasthan, West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Tripura and Orissa, among others, constantly figure at the bottom of the heap on issues such as decision-making rights and a womans entitlement to spend, save or otherwise apportion her own earnings or those of her husband.
Interestingly, it is the north-eastern states, generally regarded as less-developed, that seem to empower women the most, with Tripura the exception. Among the southern states, Tamil Nadu not Kerala, as one might expect seems to offer women the best deal and they are worst off in Karnataka. Goa and Delhi too seem to be pretty good for women.
Ranjana Kumari, director of Delhis Centre for Social Research, says economic empowerment is often a mixed blessing for women because it does not lead to any control over the money they earn because of the low status of women in the family and society.
Ability to earn alone will not improve their lives unless their status is improved. They are regarded as objects possessed by the family and everything that belongs to them belongs to the family, she says.
Overall, marriage, it seems, changes the way a woman lives, in more ways than one. Single women, be they never-married, divorced or separated are seen as more in control of how they spend their monye and on whom.
This automatic sense of control is what leads women such as unmarried senior executive Poonam Jain firmly to declare, Of course, it is me who decides how to spend my money and on what. Who else will? Even after I get married that is unlikely to change.
Going by the recent survey, though, everything changes once an Indian woman marries.