Higher Education and Employment Aspirations of Women in India

Existing literature has underlined that cultural factors, economic factors, social background, parental status and encouragement and labor market equality influence the female child’s educational aspirations. The present study is an attempt to correlate development indicators for women’s enrolment in higher education. The study uses secondary data sets from the Registrar General of India, National Family Health Survey, and higher education statistics of the Ministry of Human Resources and Development. Based on the performance of the women’s status indicators, better-performing States and under-performing States have been classified. Kerala, Punjab and Meghalaya show better performance in women’s development indicators and States such as Bihar, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh have poor women development indicators. States with higher women development indicators fared better in terms of less gender inequality in higher education enrolment. There were no noticeable differences between better-performing States and under-performing States in terms of the ratio of women enrollment in different disciplines to the total women enrolled for under-graduate courses. Moreover, a primary survey was conducted in the Changanacherry municipality of Kerala to understand the factors that influence women’s decisions to go for higher education and employment. Socio-economic variables such as caste, health, number of brothers, nature of the institution they are studying at (whether technical or general education institutions), parental income, parental encouragement, 2 marks and pre-college aspirations tend to possess a larger influence on the higher education aspirations of women at the household level. Again, the status of health, marital status, pre-college aspirations, mother’s education, income of respondents from any other source and parental income seems to influence the employment decision factor of women respondents