Poised for a dividend? Changes in the life trajectories of India’s young women over the past two decades

Shareen Joshi, Kakoli Borkotoky, Abhishek Gautam, Nitin Datta, Pranita Achyut, Priya Nanda and Ravi Verma

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 12, 1-24

Abstract: This paper examines recent changes in the life trajectories of Indian women. We use data from four major national population surveys that span the years 1998–2016. We look at several cohorts of women across the states and regions. We compare decisions related to education, marriage, childbearing and participation in the labor force. Though there is considerable diversity across states and regions, as well as religious groups, we find some consistent patterns that emerge everywhere. First, educational attainment and the age at marriage have been steadily increasing. Women who do not complete secondary school are more likely to marry early. Second, caste and religion (rather than education) play a significant role in decisions after marriage, such as the timing of births, the use of contraception and labor force participation. Third, women from disadvantaged communities continue to have very different life trajectories than other social groups. They are more likely to use contraception and participate in the labor force. Lower levels of schooling also appear to exacerbate the disadvantages of social identity. The pace of these changes varies sharply across states as well as regions of the country.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242876 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 42876&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0242876

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242876

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().