Gift Kasika
The World Health Organisation defines gender as the socially-constructed roles, behaviours and activities that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. Gender elements have evolved, and are different from one religion to another.
Education is one of the major factors that have a significant influence on the elements of gender in societies.
Education is the process of facilitating the learning process, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Educational opportunities and attainments are substantially different between male and female, which is mainly attributed to different norms and cultures that continue to persist across the world.
Education is central to one’s ability to capitalise on an opportunity that may present itself. Disparities persist in terms of school enrolment between males and females, and average years of schooling.
Statistical data indicates that female enrolment at primary and secondary schools and average years of schooling have substantially risen over time, attributed to policies such as free education.
Addressing gender inequality is particularly important, as basic education is becoming a foundation for development in today’s technological era, in which traditional production methods are being replaced with knowledge-intensive human capital.
Economic opportunities are likely to present themselves to those who invest in education and acquire the necessary skills. Those without education are likely to remain behind in the formal economy.
A general measure of occupational gender dominance divides the proportion of all working women in a specific sector by the proportion of all working men employed in the same sector. When a ratio of that measure is above one, women are over-represented, and a ratio of less than one indicates that men dominate the sector.
Using this measure, a regression of data from developing countries indicated that women are over-represented in service occupations, professional and technical jobs as well as in clerical and sales work in both developing and developed countries. There is a slight convergence in female and male ratios in industrial sectors while they display a faster convergence in wage employment, compared to self-employment.
Households discriminate between boys and girls in terms of allocating resources for educational investment, which has considerable consequences on a child’s prospects in the labour market.
Women and men do not share equal access to productive resources, and their abilities in the labour force are substantially different.
Naturally, women have limited access to productive resources compared to men, which weakens their ability to participate in income-generating activities. In developing countries, poor representation in socio-economic activities limits women’s abilities to actively participate in political decision-making in their communities and at national levels.
Women are considerably underrepresented in executive government branches and in the cabinet. Women occupying cabinet positions are more likely to be in ministries concerned with women or social affairs than in strategic ministries which are responsible for major policy decisions. Data on 151 countries suggests that of the 466 female ministers, 95 of them were heads of ministries responsible for women and social affairs, and only 22 were heads of ministries responsible for finance and other strategic ministries. The conclusion, therefore, is that women are under-represented in decision-making bodies.
When wealth is concerned, estimating the gender wealth gap is a challenging task because there is no adequate summary measure for individual welfare that can be compared for males and females. The most used poverty indicator is household consumption, which is mainly collected on households rather than on individual household members. It’s a challenge to measure household consumption for a specific individual because most of the goods are consumed jointly within the household. To facilitate comparisons between males and females, poverty emphasis is on the comparison between female-headed and male-headed households. The interest in such comparison measures stems from a substantive and statistical point of view. The proportion of female-headed households has been rising across countries, and those households may be more vulnerable economically since females have poor access to economic resources, and have few males of working age to contribute to household income.
Households normally pass gender roles and values from one generation to another. Knowledge, skills and social expectations that define socially acceptable values between males and females are firstly transited within the household to children at a tender age through explicit instructions, observations and following their parents and others’ activities, and by punishments for unacceptable behaviours. Allocation of resources such as food, healthcare and educational investments between males and females in the household affects the young ones on their ability and access to learning their cultural values, which they as well have to later transmit to the next generation.
In most countries, girls are expected to do more household and maintenance activities such as cooking and cleaning, while boys are expected to participate in wage-earning activities.
Girls tend to sacrifice or be forced out of school or their schooling time to take care of children, while boys continue with their education. By the time they become adults, women generally work long hours when wage work and domestic work are taken into consideration. Even when women participate in the labour market, they continue with their domestic responsibilities after work. Parents in some cultures have less incentive to invest in their daughter’s education because of the perception that girls will become part of their husband’s families after they are married.
Men and women allocate their resources in domestic homes differently, which affects the welfare of their families differently. While the patterns of resource allocation effects differ, there are some consistencies in the patterns of resource allocations. Resources managed by women are generally invested in household welfare such as on expenditures for children, as well as on expenditures that strengthen women’s well-being and status in the household.
Women’s income increases expenditure on household elements such as food, children’s education, health and nutrition. Incomes in the hands of women have a more positive impact on children’s survival than the income controlled by men.
On average, increases in household incomes, whether in the hands of men or women, improve children’s survival and nutrition, regardless of whether controlled by men or women, although the improvement is considerably higher when the income is controlled by a female.
On the other hand, resources in command of men have a greater impact on a household’s net asset worth than on women. Women tend to invest relatively more in the human capital of children than men, while men appear to invest relatively more in physical assets. Women’s access to productive resources tends to increase their investments in education, formal healthcare and other income-generating activities, which increases their opportunity costs for fertility and therefore increases their expenditure on contraceptives.
Most of the work for women in developing countries is unpaid domestic or communal work, which is not recognised by policymakers. The failure to account for the time spent on unpaid work within households can result in policies that end up not delivering the intended results. An overview of how households allocate time and other resources by gender provides a platform for more effective policies that can deliver positive results.