Gender Parity in Indian Education – Progress and Problems

Abstract

Gender is a critical cross-cutting equity issue which implies that women are enabled to keep pace with boys in achieving equal educational access. In India, poverty and cultural practices play a key role in creating gender disparity in education. Literacy rate of female in India is 65.46% as compared to that of males which is 82.14% as per Census of India 2011. The Covid-19 pandemic induced lockdown further seems to aggravate the disparity scenario in the country. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyse the gender disparity in the education system of India at a disaggregate level i.e. at different stages of education. The stages of education considered here are primary, upper primary, secondary and higher secondary stage. We have also categorised students into scheduled castes and tribes in order to see if there exists any disparity in social groups. Also the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic in achieving gender parity is discussed. The Gender Parity Index (GPI) is further used to examine the extent of disparity in the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) between boys and girls of India.