Just a handful of women in India hold assets

The finding of the Karnataka Household Asset Survey, which measures the gender asset gap, is far from happy news.

While women may have come a long way, the statistics show that only 12% of Bangalore women own vehicles, 24% have cellphones and 46% own jewelleries.

This clearly indicates that they still have a long way to go to catch up with their male counterparts as 53% men own vehicles, 49% have cellphones and two per cent own jewelleries.

While among the urban women, 12% own vehicles, 20% cellphones, and 66% had jewellery; in rural areas only nine per cent had a vehicle, eight per cent had cellphones but a good 69% had jewellery. 

There’s more. Not only do the women own fewer assets but also the little that they can call their own is mostly of a low value and poor quality.

The project ‘In Her Name: Measuring the gender asset gap in Ecuador, Ghana and India’ was initiated in 2009 by an international team of researchers to address the problem of lack of data for policy makers and practitioners working towards the goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Funded by the MDG3 under the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs, the project has collected individual-level data in these countries since January 2009.

The home ownership rate of women was substantially lower then men — 47% of male adults in rural areas owned a residence, while the figure for the female adults stood at a paltry 17%. The gap was lowest in Bangalore with 16% and 10% home ownership rates for men and women respectively.

The analysis of the findings reveals that women hold little or no assets. The study, in a number of ways, proves that there is a substantial gender inequality in asset ownership. The inequalities are higher for key productive assets and also when one considers a value-based gap as opposed to an incidence-based gap alone. 

The most common form of joint ownership across rural and urban areas is by all members of the household for livestock, agricultural tools and low-valued consumer durables.

A surprising finding in rural areas was that cattle and large agricultural equipment were more likely to be owned by all members of the household (86% and 71%) as opposed to being individually held. Only in the case of jewellery, individual ownership by women dominated across all areas.

In Karnataka, the survey was conducted across four agro-cultural belts. There were 26 focus group discussions across the socio-economic classes, including 16 rural and 10 urban. There were 16 women’s groups and 10 men’s groups.