Social networks and changing norms in conservative India
Filed Under (Other Topics) by Kathy Baylis on Feb 6, 2010
(written with Eeshani Kandpal)
Background: Eeshani Kandpal just returned a couple weeks ago from initial field work in the small, rural state of Uttarakhand, which is nestled in the Indian Himalayas. She’s studying the effect of a program geared at improving women’s empowerment in this traditionally conservative area. It seems as if the program is having a remarkably positive effect on these women’s lives, which got us thinking about why and how it seems to be working.
Uttarakhand is a relatively poor province in northern India, where villages tend to be remote and are often without basic infrastructural facilities, like government schools and hospitals. It’s also a place where women have traditionally been treated as second-class citizens, where girls are often less educated and less well fed than boys, and domestic abuse is not uncommon. For instance, data from a nationally representative survey (NFHS 2005-06) show 33 percent of Uttarakhandi women, but only 12 percent of men have never received any schooling. Girls have a much higher post-natal mortality rate than boys and more than one out of every four women aged 15 and 49 reported having experienced domestic violence. So, like many other regions, women in Uttarakhand face an uphill battle for equality.
An Indian government initiative called Mahila Samakhya (MS) aims to increase female autonomy through education, and has been in place in Uttarakhand since 1995, covering six of thirteen districts in the state. This program works at the community-level, and focuses on improving formal and informal education for women. Adult educational facilities provide women the opportunity to complete additional schooling or in some cases to become literate. Group meetings increase female mobility and expand peer networks, and makes the lives of these women less solitary. In these meetings, workers tell participants they should not put up with or engage in social ills like domestic violence, dowry, or sex-based discrimination. The groups support members on issues like domestic violence, alcoholism, dowry, and female infanticide. The information provided by the program and the exchange of ideas within the networks leads to changed social norms. We observe women becoming more mobile, both physically and socially, and often engaging in income-generating activities. These changed social norms and the ability to earn an income lead to women having greater say in their home and more control over household resources.
So what is causing this program to have such an impact? Certainly providing education to women is a good thing, and can improve their job prospects. Along with generating explicit income opportunities, the education might also be increasing women’s ‘reservation wage’; so when bargaining with their husbands over household resources, women’s alternatives are improved by knowing about better job opportunities and having more marketable skills. While we think this straight-forward economic mechanism makes sense, at a gut level, there’s something more going on here.
Intuitively, social context matters. People don’t want to be the first person to break a social norm – they don’t like to be outliers, perhaps because of a negative feedback loop resulting from the social relativism of others. We frequently heard program participants say something like: “we were unsure what others would say if we tried to stand up to our in-laws or stop our husbands from hitting us. Everyone else in the village lived in similar lives, and we did not want to risk being different.” By expanding networks, the MS program alters people’s peer sets. Participants meet program workers who are more empowered than average. These program workers show them how social norms can change, and provide a reference point for the new social norm.
Support groups also matter. The remoteness of the region combined with the stringent social norms means that once married, women are often unable to visit others, including their extended families. Days for women are often largely filled with collecting firewood and water, and neither task is conducive to real interaction. Even when the women try to complete these tasks in groups, they have walk in single-file along the side of the hill, and are at hard at work in forest. So, this “group activity” does not bring much communication with others. The solitary woman has no support group and so will likely stay with the status quo for fear of being ostracised. By organizing women into support groups, the MS program allows women to change the social norm without worrying about social sanction. Program workers and the support group intervene in cases where the family of a participant does not change its treatment of the participant. For example, one MS participant’s birth family ostracized her for having left her abusive husband. When the village MS worker heard about this treatment, she went to the woman’s family and talked to them about how they were punishing the victim. It took several visits, but eventually, the participant’s family came around and helped her get a divorce from her husband. She now lives with her brothers and mother.
Information matters as well. Along with explicitly providing participants information on various possibilities they might not otherwise know about, which might increase women’s reservation wage, information appears to affect these women in other, more subtle, ways. For instance, some participants say they never thought about getting a job because it’s not something women tended to do. Other participants say they never thought about being more independent because all they saw was women who were financially and emotionally dependent on men. One might think about this information as expanding the perceived feasible set for participants. But information is also valuable for information’s sake. For instance, one participant reports that just knowing that women were successful lawyers, diplomats, professors, entrepreneurs changed her outlook about her life. This information caused her to want to earn an income and be more self-reliant. Note that Emily Oster (2009) also found this affect as more women got access to cable TV. Thus, even without the change in peer group or the social support, seeing women in non-traditional roles seems to have an effect.
In summary, the MS program appears to have a visible, dramatic impact on the life of these Uttarakhandi women. Talking to participants highlights the many ways in which the strengthening of network ties improves the human condition, even in the midst of stark, all-encompassing poverty. Both friends and role models are good to have, especially when change is hard to come by.
