Editorial Overview: Violence and Discrimination against Women

Setting the Stage for Discussion

Women’s participation in the labour market often comes with a trade-off in their role at homemaking. This is very different to the trade-off men face in their labour market decisions. Success in the labour market may not necessarily improve a woman’s social status, if the society views her role primarily as one of a homemaker. But such views clearly deny the society of economic prosperity that women would unleash if they could participate in the labour market in a robust way. It has been abundantly evidenced that women who take time out to raise family find it difficult to re-enter the labour market, with their lifetime earnings being reduced by a variety of factors including motherhood. Considerations such as motherhood, child care and family obligations have tremendous impact on a woman’s decision to participate in the labour market, which in turn affects her income and her children’s welfare. Low labour market participation rate of women is a universal problem and different countries have sought to improve the rate in a variety of mechanisms. In the United States, introduction of social security, tax credit for children and various legislations to protect women at workplace have played important roles in lifting the women’s labour market participation rate from 18.6 per cent in 1890 to 50.5 per cent in 1980 (see Killingsworth & Heckman, 1986). ¹ For women aged 25–54, the participation rate in the US is about 75.2 per cent as of 2010 (Blau & Kahn, 2013). In the UK, the average participation rate for women increased from 32.3 per cent in 1921 to 45.6 per cent in 1981 (Killingsworth & Heckman, 1986). For India, the picture is not all that clear. The women’s labour market participation rate (for women aged 15–59) was 28.3 per cent in 1993, but in 2009 fell to 23.3 per cent (Majumdar, 2012). This is certainly a worrying statistic. Not only is the participation rate significantly lower than the East Asian countries (where it is around 50 per cent), but the rate seems to be falling over time (at worst, not rising significantly). There are also concerns, as the participation rate seems to be negatively correlated with education, again a disturbing trend.

Women’s decision to participate in the labour market depends not just on the wage they expect to get, but on a number of social factors, such as how safe the workplace is, to what extent she will have control over her fertility choice and particularly for Indian women, how welcoming her marital family will be to her spending time away from home. Additionally, there are caste-related taboos and prejudices (gender biases) that are carried over to the labour market that make employment relations fraught with social frictions. All these factors intricately affect a woman’s decision to work and seek economic independence.

While there is a vast literature dealing with wage discrimination and female labour supply, this Special Section of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics on the Violence and Discrimination Against Women is devoted to the problem of violence against women. It is known that women face the risk of abuse at home by their spouses, molestation and even sexual violence by strangers outside their homes and harassment by colleagues at workplace. Men do not face such risks for being men, but women do. Some estimates suggest the world economy is at least 17 per cent poorer by inflicting violence on women (Fearon & Hoeffler, 2014).

Recall the horrific incident of gang rape and murder of the Delhi paramedical student Jyoti Singh. On 16 December 2012, she was attacked by a gang of six men in an off-duty school bus. She was not only raped relentlessly, but the youngest of the perpetrators, who was juvenile at the time, took special interest in wounding her vital organs mercilessly. Later, the perpetrators were arrested and sentenced to death, barring the juvenile. A recent documentary on the event revealed the mindset of the perpetrators, one of whom said that the woman had to die, ‘because of her own faults, first she stayed outdoor late in the evening and second she resisted rape’.

Although this incident surpassed all known cases of brutality in India, there are many exceptional events of violence against women recorded around the world. Levitt and Dubner (2009) discuss the famous case of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old New Yorker, who was sexually assaulted and murdered by a stranger at night in front of 38 witnesses. The New York Times had reported, ‘Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead’ (Levitt & Dubner, 2009, p. 98). Not only did 37 people fail to call police, but their eyewitness accounts also differed. The killer was caught few days later and when asked about his motive for killing his reply was ‘I just wanted to kill someone.’

Starting from sex-selective abortion, molestation, acid throwing, rape and sexual harassment at work to intimate partner violence at home, the list of violence a girl or a woman potentially vulnerable to is indeed very long. These unfortunate events damage women’s health and mental well-being (Krantz & Garcia-Moreno, 2005). Each risk factor is an obstacle that a girl must avoid/overcome to grow up to be a working woman. To what extent this risk of violence affects her eventual labour market participation and how such risks can be mitigated are of great importance. However, the economic literature has by and large not satisfactorily addressed these questions.

Understanding these obstacles requires an arsenal of research tools and need to be dealt within an interdisciplinary framework. On the one hand, we need to study from the literature of the economics of crime (Becker, 1968) to analyze how a violent offender manipulates the evidence and the victim’s incentive to report, as well as how the legal systems fail to render justice. On the other hand, we also need to study economics of intra-household distribution that is often the most critical factor linking a woman’s fertility choice with her financial independence. Above all, we need to understand how the labour market processes various pieces of information regarding a female worker’s productivity—present and future—and thereby determines her wage that is often found to be lower than that of her male counterpart, controlling for similar characteristics (Becker, 1965, 1985). These interrelated questions render research on violence against women and its economic ramifications a complex and challenging academic exercise. The special section on the Violence and Discrimination against Women will be spread over two consecutive issues of JIE, this being the first one, and will put together several research articles on this topical subject. The questions at the core of the research presented in the sections are: Where does violence of women start, where does it end? How does it disadvantage women? And above all, what factors help mitigate the phenomenon?

Introducing the Articles in This Special Section

We know that some aspects of violence are intergenerational; for some women, the risk of being abused as a girl child or as wife begins well before they are born. This is known as the problem of intergenerational transmission of abuse and it has received attention from sociologists, psychologists, social workers and more recently also from economists. It is often seen that there is a strong correlation between childhood experiences of abuse and their own adult life experience of abuse. To put it loosely, a girl child whose mother has been abused by her husband (or similarly positioned males in the family) will have a greater risk of being abused by her own husband/partner. The correlation has been found by many studies. But the direction of causality is not clear. Is it the girl’s experience of seeing her mother abused that induces certain behaviours, such as choosing a spouse/ husband, which invites greater risk of abuse? Or is it the case that her mother or parents together decide on her future (probably with good intentions) that ultimately disadvantages her and increases the risk of abuse?

The article by Abramovaite et al. The Dynamics of Intergenerational Family Abuse: A Focus on Child Maltreatment and Violence and Abuse in Intimate Relationships looks at the literature on intergenerational abuse and focuses on the issue of maltreatment of children. Parents who had been abused in their childhood are more likely to inflict abuse on their own children. Families of parents with the neglected childhood are at some extra risk of child abuse. As the article explains, the idea of a cycle of abuse or violence requires three conditions to be met: a boy witnessing violence will grow up to be a violent husband; a girl witnessing violence as a child will not abandon her violent husband and a boy/girl growing up in a violent home would end up choosing a girl/boy who grew up in a violent home. However, a satisfactory economic model that shows a cycle of violence as an equilibrium phenomenon is yet to be seen. To the extent individual behaviours (of violence) conform to the social norm of violence (such as wife beating, dowry death, etc.), economic theory can go a long way. Evolutionary game theories have already shown how social norms evolve and this line of argument is very useful for understanding violence against women as a ‘bad’ social norm. However, there are some complex issues that are yet to be understood. Does childhood experience of violence per se makes one violent or is it the economic stress that comes with disturbed upbringing that pushes one to violence or is it simply bad parenting? If the factors are environmental, then they are much harder to solve, but if it is bad parenting, then training can help to easily overcome them. The authors argue that understanding the causes is the key in designing the right intervention.

The article by Ghosh The Political Economy of Domestic Violence in a Mumbai Slum—An Ethnographic Analysis provides a grass-roots perspective on the intergenerational abuse problem. She presents a field study-based analysis of the trap of marital abuse or intimate partner violence. Based on the interviews of 54 women in a Mumbai slum, she documents that mothers who experienced abuse in their own lives married their daughters off at an early age to maximize the prospect of a good (and happy) match. Because earning males prefer young brides, successful matches would hopefully lead to an abuse-free life. But getting married early also means unfinished schooling and a significant disadvantage to future economic independence. Unfortunately, as the study shows, the very strategy (getting daughters married off early) that is meant to help their daughters escape the abuse trap leads to reinforcement of the trap, when the husband’s incomes become irregular or when hard times fall on the family. The girl’s low education magnifies her risk of being abused. Although this study does not go into quantitative risk analysis, the findings are very compelling. The woman after her marriage hardly finds any safety net. Her natal family may not provide any support, and neighbours can look away. Fortunately, as the study shows, children in some instances do provide a ray of hope, as they often stand up against their abusive father. This is their conscious effort to break the cycle of violence.

One may expect broadly, except in very stressful environments such as the ones described by Ghosh, that economic independence of women (or legal entitlement of wealth of the husband or parents) is the key to mitigate the risk of abuse. This will also help achieving gender balance, at least within the household. If that is true, then with recent growth spurts in India, women would see greater job opportunities, and thereby improved economic status within their households. Does it also help acquiring a safer and better status outside? What about the policies that empower women economically? The article by Amaral et al. Employment Programmes for the Poor and Female Empowerment: The Effect of NREGS on Gender-based Violence in India addresses this question by studying India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREG) that offers 100 days of rural work to any man or woman in need of work. The programme was launched in 2005, and since then it is growing in its popularity. One interesting finding of this study is that with greater income opportunities accessible to low-income women, there is some evidence of improvement in their status within the household; dowry death rate has fallen. But on the contrary, domestic violence has gone up along with kidnapping of women and sexual harassment. It seems that as women are spending more time outside, the risk of external violence has increased, along with frictions with the husband (possibly due to time spent away from home). The external risk has increased, because there has not been matching investment in safety and security of women in public places.

The article by Gangopadhyay Sexual Violence: A Model of Occupational Choice and Gender Wage Gap takes a dispassionate look at the international data on rape and other types of violence against women (United Nations database) and compares them with the Indian data (obtained from the National Crime Record Bureau). Contrary to the popular perception, India is not the worst country in terms of the reported incidents of rape. For India, the number of rapes per 100,000 populations is 2.03 in 2012, while the same for Sweden is 66.5 (in 2012). Of course, there is always a serious under-reporting problem. But even with the allowance of a reliable degree of under-reporting (obtained from the literature), the author persuasively argues that still India would fall in the lower tail of the global distribution of the incidence of rape. However, the author notes an intriguing fact: the incidence of rape shows positive correlation with per capita GDP, but negative correlation with female labour market participation rate. The second relation is expected, but the first one is puzzling. The author builds a simple model to explain this puzzle. The model assumes two sectors—traditional and non-traditional. The traditional sector is less productive than the non-traditional sector, and hence the traditional sector can offer only a lower wage. But the non-traditional sector also involves greater risk of sexual abuse or rape. The higher wage of non-traditional sector is coupled with higher risk of rape/sexual harassment, which makes it equivalent to the traditional sector, in the eyes of the female workers. This is the argument offered by the author using a standard model of labour supply.

Conclusion

One important question that the articles in this issue do not satisfactorily deal with is the issue of public policy. The articles by Abramovaite et al. and Ghosh make it clear that the question of intervention to break the cycle of intergenerational abuse is quite complex. Perhaps we need a combination of policies rather than a single policy. The article by Amaral et al. highlights the importance of public goods provision, particularly public goods/services that need to be tailored to women’s specific needs. Gangopadhyay, on the contrary, shows the universality of the problem of rape, and how it can affect the wage gap between sectors for women. These insights are to be kept in mind while designing policies or evaluating a given policy.

An important contribution of this collection of articles is that it demonstrates the challenges involved in analyzing the economics of the violence against women, both in terms of the factors that underlie it and its impact on economic outcomes. As is evident from the articles in this section, the research on the problem of violence against women requires an interdisciplinary approach. Relying exclusively on economic or sociological or psychological approaches will give only a very partial view. While the quantitative and mathematical models of economics are very useful in estimating risks of violence and identifying the points of intervention, sociological studies are particularly important in understanding how social norms and obstacles come on the way that economic approaches fail to take into account. Psychological insights are also crucial for understanding some dynamics of household decisions, particularly understanding how emotions and optimism might play important roles in deciding whether to report spousal violence to police. Collaborative research is an important way forward. These four articles and the ones in the next issue hopefully will generate significant research on this problem.