Education, Equality and Development: Persistent Paradoxes in India Women's History

This book explores the critical linkages between education and empowerment of women, marginalized groups and other disadvantaged sections of society. It: Provides an overview of educational policies and practices from India’s independence to the present day, and tracks relevant changes and amendments. Examines a range of issues connected with education such as the Right to Education Act; empowerment and community mobilization; higher education challenges and other emerging topics. Brings together both theoretical postulates and empirical findings.

This book studies the various dimensions of gender inequality that persist in higher education and employment in India. It presents an in-depth analysis of the complex challenges women face in higher education participation and in translating higher education opportunities into labour market success and into leadership positions, including in academia. It argues that despite substantial progress towards gender equality in enrolment, these inequalities act as barriers to realising the transformative role that higher education can have for women’s well-being and for the nation’s development. The volume looks at the issues that keep women from accessing the areas of their choice, and the challenges they face in leadership positions in higher education. An important critique of higher education policy and planning, the volume will be of interest to teachers, students and researchers of education, public policy, political science and international relations, economics, feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, law and sociology. It will also be useful for academicians, policymakers and anyone interested in the study of gender in Indian Higher Education.

The book begins with the momentous task of demolishing the prejudices attached with the phrase 'founding fathers' that has held an immense sway over constitutional interpretation. It shows that women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly had painstakingly co-authored a Constitution that embodied a moral imagination developed by years of feminist politics. It traces the genealogies of several constitutional provisions to argue that, without the interventions of these women framers, the Constitution would hardly have a much poorer document of rights and statecraft that it is. Situating these interventions in the larger trajectory of Indian feminism in which they are rooted, in the nationalist discourse with which they perpetually negotiated, and in the larger human rights discourse of the 1940s, the book shows that the women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly were much more than the 'founding mothers' of a republic.

In the Indian context.

Contents: Role of Women in Managing Small Scale Industrial Units: A Study, Education for Indian Women: A Study on Technology Education, Marital Rape: The Legal Domestic Violence, Women Education and Development, Empowerment of Women: A Holistic Approach, Women Education: A Harbinger of Economic Development, Women Education and Development in Orissa: A Paradigm Shift, Women Education and Development, Women Education and Development, Development of Scheduled Caste Women and Education, Education to Challenge Women Oppression.

Cutting-edge research from India finds bargaining power predicts whether electoral quotas can empower women to upend economic inequality.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - Case Scenarios, Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India), course: Economics, language: English, abstract: International efforts to address gender inequality have largely emphasized education as a means of achieving women's empowerment. Education serves as the conduit by which women, long rooted in the private sphere, move into the public sphere and assert themselves on an equal basis with men. As a springboard to employment and economic independence, advocates say, education provides the critical foundation from which further empowerment flows. It is in this backdrop that the present paper tries to find the relationship between inequality in education and women empowerment. The entire paper is divided into three parts. The first part is introductory that talks about the second and third goal of MDGs which is achieving universal primary education and promote gender equality and empower women respectively with certain indicators to achieve these goals. This part also gives a brief account of the gender inequality in education and employment world wide. In the second portion, the importance of education in general and women education in particular has been highlighted. It talks about the gender inequality in literacy in India. A comparative analysis between different states of the country is being made with regard to the parameters like education dimension index and the same index if adjusted for inequality. Further, the parameters like inequality adjusted HDI, education and income index have been taken for few countries to make a comparative analysis. To find the impact of inequality in education on various other parameters, a correlation matrix has been calculated. To know the level of women empowerment in various parts of the world, the variables like female share in national parliament, percentage of female literacy and female labour force participation rate has