Gender gap in poverty biased by caste in India: an empirical analysis

Gender inequality is a major obstacle to the overall progress of the human race. Women empowerment, defined as an adequate representation of women in all aspects of life, beginning with political decision making, can be a powerful weapon for eradicating gender inequity. Like other cultures across the globe, patriarchal monopoly and gender discrimination either in domestic or working space in India are marked essentially by caste-based social hierarchy. In this paper, we undertake IHDS-II survey data to look into the poverty gap between second-generation sons (male) and daughters (female) across different caste groups in India and the effect of the individual- and household-level characteristics on the poverty gap. This paper identifies gender gap in three related dimensions, namely incidence of poverty, depth of poverty, and severity of poverty in India to the extent of 26.3 percent, 14.2 percent, and 9.6 percent using Oaxaca-Blinder RIF regression technique . The results indicate that the gender disparity in poverty among second-generation sons and daughters is compatible with the caste hierarchy, that is, the scheduled caste/scheduled tribe societies have the highest gender disparity in poverty; on the other hand, other backward-class societies have the second-largest gender difference in poverty, whereas the upper caste society has the lowest gender disparity in poverty. This finding suggests that the gender disparity in poverty is skewed by caste. The pure composition effect of intergenerational income mobility due to educational mobility reduces the poverty gap between second-generation sons and daughters without any fear of the counterfactual effect of pure coefficient change in mobility composition across castes. We also find in this paper that the ‘gender gap in poverty biased by caste’ is more evident in the northern, eastern, western and central regions compared to the southern region of India.