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Oster on empowerment of women's rights in India

In print | March 27, 2008

The Economics department hosted a lecture by Professor Emily Oster of the University of Chicago on Monday in which she spoke about her recent research on gender inequalities in India. The lecture, entitled “Gender Inequality in India and the Power of TV,” focused on the current state of women’s rights in India and the surprising effect that cable has on female autonomy.

Oster is the author of numerous publications, including “Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women,” published in the Journal of Political Economy as well as “The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women’s Status in India,” the paper on which this talk was based, which was co-written with Rob Jensen of Brown University. Phoenix reporter Hannah Purkey recently sat down with Oster to discuss the current status of women in India and the possible effects of cable on this status.

Hannah Purkey: What is the general situation of gender equality in India at the moment?

Emily Oster: I think that there are at least two aspects of this that are important: one is the issue that people are more familiar with about gender imbalances in population, that there are more men than you would expect based on other countries. It looks like women and girls are dying at higher rates than you would expect based on natural processes and that probably has to do with discrimination, particularly in childhood with food or vaccines or other kinds of inputs. In the end, you have a population that has more men than you would expect. That’s been exacerbated to some extent by sex selective abortion, which has become more and more common.

The other thing, which people talk less about but is still a big issue, is that there is a fair amount of discrimination in terms of restricting what women can do and also to some extent spousal abuse and what’s deemed acceptable. In these surveys, when you look at answers to questions like who decides about you obtaining health care, whether you want to go to the doctor, about 25 percent of women say that they decide on their own, 25 percent say that they decide that jointly with their husband, and 50 percent say that someone else, their husband or their parent-in-law, makes those decisions.

There are similar results with questions like are you allowed to go out by yourself or do you keep your own money. So these kinds of decision-making things also tended to show what looks like women who are restricted in their movements. The other thing that I find really striking is when you ask people about spousal abuse, ask women, if it is acceptable for a husband to beat his wife if she does x, y or z, 60 percent say that there is some situation where that is acceptable. For example, if she neglects the children, 30 percent say its okay, if she goes out without telling her husband, another 30 percent say its okay. That kind of thing I find very striking because it doesn’t get talked about as much, but it feels like it is almost as bad as these excessive mortalities. It affects people everyday; all the time you have these discriminations.

HP: Has the government tried to intervene and fix any of these issues?

EO: The Indian government would love to change these things, but it is really hard to alter these things. Part of what makes our study about TV a little surprising is that we actually see effects of TV on gender. This is surprising given that the government has tried to do many different things. They tried to tell people that you should really value your daughter, it didn’t seem to have any effect. They tried to pay people to have daughters, which also had no effect. They tried to outlaw dowries, but people just ignored them.

So there is a real effort to try to affect these things. I think people understand that this is a problem, but it’s hard for the government to mandate preferences, and it is hard to know how you can change what people’s beliefs are. That’s just not easy.

HP: Your recent research looked at these inequalities and the affect that TV had on them. What exactly were you researching and what connections did you discover?

EO: We looked at the affect of introducing cable on a number of traditional measures of women status. Particularly we looked at autonomy, which is measured by a set of questions like can you go out without telling your husband, can you obtain health care without permission, as well as education for girls and fertility, since people say that when women have more control they have lower fertility rates.

So we looked at all those things and we actually can see big changes in all the measures and a response to the introduction of cable. We see improvement in autonomy, women get more autonomy, girls tend to go to school more and we get a decrease in fertility.

Then we try to think about why that is happening. We have less evidence on that, but we do see some direct impacts of cable television on attitudes, not as much behaviors, things like son preference and attitudes toward beating. So we think it could be some of these changes of behavior are driven by changes in attitude.

HP: What about TV do you think changes gender roles?

EO: I think that the intuition we have, and again it is a little hard to prove that this is the mechanism, is that these people are in rural areas and what is on TV tends to be shows that depict urban areas. The shows are not about how women should be liberated, they are just soap operas, but they are showing environments where women are going to have more rights and more of these kinds of behaviors like going out without telling our husband. Things like that are going to be much more typical. You never see any spousal beatings, it’s actually not allowed to be shown, and girls will be enrolled in school.

There is going to be differences here so I think that one way to think about it is that you have a peer group that you have in your village, which before TV was the only people you interacted with and those are the guys that I get all of my ideas from about what is acceptable. Then suddenly I turn on the TV and there is this whole other peer group, who you now identify with to some extent. The new attitudes you have are instead of being the same as everyone around you are going to be some average of everyone around you and also what you are seeing on TV.

HP: So the opinions of local peers still have a large effect on gender roles?

EO: Yeah, one way to look at it is that TV shows you urban areas, which tend to be more favorable towards women. So one way you can ask the question of how big are the effects is how much of the way between your rural areas and the urban area you get moved by having TV, and that’s about 40 percent. This is a big effect but not 100 percent. The rural areas look more like the urban by 40 percent but not completely, which suggest that you are still getting some weight on what people around you are doing and what you have done in the past

HP: Is it possible that the types of people getting TVs are just more modern and therefore more progressive with women’s rights?

EO: That is a concern. What we do is we have village level variation of TV. So you don’t get TV, your village gets TV. The way we actually try to identify these effects is by looking at villages that change their cable TV status over the period that we observe them.

We see them three years in a row, so we have some villages that always have TV, some villages that get TV between the first and the second survey round, some that get it between the second and third and some people that never get TV.

We look to see whether the changes in these attitudes are timed with the changes in cable. We look at whether the guys that get cable between first and second round changed their attitudes between round one and two; if the guys who got cable between two and three changed their attitudes between rounds two and three and whether we see changes in their attitude between rounds one and two.

We would say there is no change in behaviors between round one and two, but we see big change in round three. So in general the question is are these changes lined up in terms of timing with the changes in access to cable. Because we see the same people three times in a row, we have a better ability to identify what is happening.