PEW CENTR REPORT ON GENDER ROLES
About the report and survey:
- This is the second report based on a Pew Research Center survey conducted face-to-face nationally among 29,999 Indian adults.
- The survey also included several questions on gender roles in Indian society, but these questions were not analyzed in the previous report and are now being published for the first time.
- Local interviewers administered the survey between Nov. 17, 2019, and March 23, 2020, in 17 languages.
- The survey covered all states and union territories of India, with the exceptions of Manipur and Sikkim – where the rapidly-developing COVID-19 situation prevented fieldwork from starting in the spring of 2020 – and the remote territories of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep; these areas are home to about a quarter of 1% of the Indian population. The union territory of Jammu and Kashmir was covered by the survey, though no fieldwork was conducted in the Kashmir region itself due to security concerns.
- This study, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, is part of a larger effort by Pew Research Center to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the world.
- The Center previously has conducted religion-focused surveys across sub-Saharan Africa; the Middle East-North Africa region and many other countries with large Muslim populations; Latin America; Israel; Central and Eastern Europe; Western Europe; and the United States.
- The rest of this Overview covers perceptions of gender discrimination; how Indian attitudes on gender compare globally; the strong influence of education and religion in gender attitudes; the minimal differences in gender attitudes between Indian men and women, and among adults of different ages; and regional and state-level variation in how gender roles are viewed.
Key findings :
Indians broadly accept women as political leaders.
- India has a long history of women holding political power, from the 1966 election of Indira Gandhi, one of the world’s first woman prime ministers, to other well-known figures, such as Jayalalitha, Mamata Banerjee and Sushma Swaraj.
- The survey results reflect this comfort with women in politics.
- Most adults say that women and men make equally good political leaders (55%) or that women generally make betterleaders than men (14%). Only a quarter of Indian adults take the position that men tend to make better political leaders than women.
While most Indians say that men and women should share some family responsibilities, many still support traditional gender roles.
- For instance, 62% of adults say both men and women should be responsible for taking care of children, while roughly a third of adults (34%) feel that child care should be handled primarily by women. Similarly, a slim majority (54%) say that both men and women in families should be responsible for earning money, yet many Indians (43%) see this as mainly the obligation of men.
- Meanwhile, nearly nine-in-ten Indians (87%) completely or mostly agree with the notion that “a wife must always obey her husband.”
- This includes a majority of Indians (64%) who completely agree with this sentiment. Women are only modestly less likely than men to say that wives should obey their husbands in all situations, and most Indian women express total agreement with this sentiment (61% vs. 67% among men).
- (Throughout this report, differences in opinion between men and women are modest. In other words, Indian women typically are not much more likely than Indian men to express egalitarian views on gender roles.)
An overwhelming majority of Indian adults say it is very important for families to have both sons and daughters, and a substantial share are accepting of sex-selective abortion.
- Indians are united in the view that it is very important for a family to have at least one son (94%) and, separately, a daughter (90%).
- Historically in Indian society, though, families have tended to place higher value on their sons than their daughters, a custom broadly referred to as “son preference.”
- One enduring manifestation of son preference has been the illegal practice of sex-selective abortions – using ultrasound or other tests to learn the sex of a fetus and terminating the pregnancy if the fetus is female.
- The survey finds that four-in-ten Indians say it is either “completely acceptable” or “somewhat acceptable” to “get a checkup using modern methods to balance the number of girls and boys in the family,” a euphemism that connotes sex-selective abortion. In contrast, roughly half of adults (53%) say that this practice is either somewhat or completely unacceptable.
Most Indians (63%) say sons should be primarily responsible for parents’ last rites or burial rituals, although attitudes differ significantly across religious groups.
- Religious funeral practices for loved ones are widely seen as very important in India, and at least according to Hindu tradition, sons must perform last rites for a parent to ensure freedom for the soul in the afterlife.
- Most Muslims (74%), Jains (67%) and Hindus (63%) say sons should be primarily responsible for funeral rituals, but far fewer Sikhs (29%), Christians (44%) and Buddhists (46%) expect this from sons.
- (Muslims and Christians were asked about “burial rituals,” while all other respondents were asked about “last rites.”) Instead, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists are more likely to say that both sons and daughters should be responsible for their parents’ last rites.
- Very few Indians, regardless of religion, say daughters should be primarily responsible for funeral rituals.
Muslims are more likely than other Indians to support traditional gender roles in families, while Sikhs are often the least likely community to hold such views.
- For example, while most Indian Muslims (61%) say that men in a family should be primarily responsible for earning money, just 17% of Sikhs say this. And Muslims are more than twice as likely as Sikhs to assign sons the primary responsibility of caring for aging parents (43% vs. 17%).
Indians favor teaching boys to respect women as a way to improve women’s safety.
- As described in a previous Pew Research Center report, roughly three-quarters of Indian adults (76%) say violence against women is a “very big problem” in their country.
- Police cases registered as “crimes against women” nearly doubled between 2010 and 2019, and rapes and murders of women have led to massive protests across India. The survey asked respondents which of two options is more important to improve the safety of women in their community: teaching boys to respect all women or teaching girls to behave appropriately.
- About half of Indians (51%) say it is more important to teach boys to respect all women, while roughly a quarter (26%) say it is more important to teach girls to behave appropriately.
- An additional quarter of Indian adults don’t take a clear position between those two options, instead voicing that some combination of the two approaches is necessary, that improved law and order through policing will improve the situation, or that women are already safe.
Compared with people in other countries around the world, Indians have relatively traditional views on gender roles.
- Although Indian adults are roughly in line with the global median in their support for equal rights for women, by two other measures the Indian public appears much more conservative, according to a series of other surveys conducted by the Center in recent years.
- Only one out of 61 countries surveyed has a higher share of adults than in India who agree completely with the notion that men should have greater rights to a job than women when jobs are scarce. And just two out of 34 countries surveyed exceed India in the shares who say a marriage is more satisfying if the husband provides for the family and the wife takes care of the house and children.
- On this question, the percentage of Indians who take this view (40%) is well above the global median (23%).
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