Ruhee Nigam Shah

Gender Inequality in India

Global Context - Fairness and Development

Goal - Toresearch what caused gender inequalities in India and how they affect girls and women in education and the workplace.

Introduction

Gender inequality is a very prevalent issue in India, preventing millions of girls and women from achieving their true potential. Often, these inequalities are left unaddressed and therefore it was important to me that I find out about them in order to educate other people about the problems girls and women face in India. For my final product I chose to present my findings in a research essay.

For my product, I had to conduct a lot of research. In order to organise my research and my essay I split my findings into three categories that I thought would be most interesting: 1. What caused gender inequalities in India 2. How inequalities have affected women in education and the workplace 3. How gender inequalities have impacted the wider society I made notes on the research that I thought would be relevant which was very useful as it meant that when it came to writing my essay I had all of the information ready. I also made an essay plan prior to writing the essay which gave me a clear structure to follow.

My Findings

After researching and writing my essay, I found some striking statistics about gender inequality in India. It is evident that there are huge gaps in the access to education women and men have. Women, especially in rural areas, have less access to education than men resulting in them not being able to find work.

Here are some of the most important statistics regarding literacy rate, unpaid labour and female GDP contribution:

Impact of Reducing Inequalities

The final part of my essay was investigating what the impacts of gender inequality is in India. I learnt that if these inequalities are reduced it will result in a stronger economy and less unemployment as well as a lower rate of child marriages and child pregnancies. Therefore, it is vital that girls are empowered through education as it will provide them with the tools to access opportunities and build a better future for themselves and other women.

Reflection

Overall I found the personal project to be very enjoyable and I developed many skills through doing it. In particular, I really enjoyed reading the articles about the importance of empowering women through education as they were very informative and interesting. The project however was definitely challenging and something I initially found quite hard to do was finding reliable and relevant information as there were countless resources available. However, this later got easier as I became quicker at scanning through articles and choosing the parts that would be relevant to my research.