Gender, Community Context and Children’s Activities in Rural India

PremChand Dommaraju, Arizona State University

Using Living Standard Measurement Study data from rural India, we examine the independent and interactive effect of gender and community on children’s activities. Departing from the traditional dichotomy of child labor or schooling that is often used in analyzing children’s activities in developing countries, we employ a four-fold classification that takes into account children who neither work nor enrolled in school and children who both work and study. The community variables considered are village development, village caste composition and school factors. We expect to find that girls are more likely not to be enrolled in school and are more likely to be neither working nor studying. Also, communities with the least and most diverse caste composition would be more conducive to schooling for both boys and girls than communities in the middle of this distribution. Poor school quality is more detrimental to girls schooling than for boys.