Relevant for SOCIOLOGY Syllabus-
G.s paper III: Indian Economy: Unemployment
Sociology: Gender; Inequality; Poverty, deprivation and inequalities.
NEWS IN SHORT
- India is one of the worst countries for working women. The OECD Economic Survey of India found the country has the largest difference between employment rates of women and men among OECD nations at 52 percentage points. Turkey comes next with a difference of 37 percentage point. Sweden and Norway are best in the category with less than five percentage point difference.
- Currently, unemployment among young, educated women in urban areas is quite higher, the report says, adding that underemployment and poor job quality remain important issues.
- The employment gap between women and men is highest 15 to 29 years bracket. The report estimates that 11 million people enter the labour market every year and that the employment rate has also declined in the country.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Syllabus: paper I: stratification and Mobility: Gender, Inequality
- The functionalist perspective sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation and broadly focuses on the social structures that shape society as a whole.
- This theory suggests that gender inequalities exist as an efficient way to create a division of labor, or as a social system in which a particular segment of the population is clearly responsible for certain acts of labor and another segment is clearly responsible for other labor acts.
- The Functionalist Perspective: A broad social theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability.
- Division of labor: A division of labour is the dividing and specializing of cooperative labour into specifically circumscribed tasks and roles.
- According to conflict theory, society is defined by a struggle for dominance among social groups that compete for scarce resources. In the context of gender, conflict theory argues that gender is best understood as men attempting to maintain power and privilege to the detriment of women.
- Therefore, men can be seen as the dominant group and women as the subordinate group. While certain gender roles may have been appropriate in a hunter-gatherer society, conflict theorists argue that the only reason these roles persist is because the dominant group naturally works to maintain their power and status.
- According to conflict theory, social problems are created when dominant groups exploit or oppress subordinate groups. Therefore, their approach is normative in that it prescribes changes to the power structure, advocating a balance of power between genders.