india

Updated: Jul 27, 2019 06:54 IST

There are enough anecdotal accounts of women not being allowed to (or not wanting to) move to other towns and cities to take up jobs. Data on migration from the 2011 census that’s just been released bears these out.

Across various education levels, men are more likely to migrate for work than women, according to the data, although there has been some improvement. The gap between the number of men and women migrating for work has reduced between the 2001 and 2011 censuses.This isn’t surprising: the number of women opting to study longer is increasing and better education makes it easier for women to move for work.

The census gives data on persons who migrated for work in the decade since the previous census. These numbers are disaggregated by gender and education.

Data for the 2001 and 2011 censuses shows that workers with higher education levels are more likely to migrate. The number of migrant workers with a technical degree or diploma equivalent to a degree or a post graduate degree – the highest professional educational category in the census – as a proportion of all those with such degrees or diplomas was 12 times the number of illiterate migrant workers expressed as a proportion of the total illiterate population in the 2011 census.

Interestingly, migration for work has come down across all education levels.

The headline numbers given in Chart 1 hide a big gender gap in migration patterns. The share of migrant male workers in the total male population is significantly higher than the share of migrant female workers in the total female population. This gap increases as education levels go down.

This could be a result of relatively poor women workers not being able to afford the minimum facilities to guarantee their safety and well-being outside their homes.

To be sure, the gender gap in migration has reduced between the 2001 and 2011 census, which suggests that India is slowly overcoming its bias against women moving out of their homes to seek work.