Socio-economic status of working women in Haryana.

• Author: Sharma, Manjusha

1. INTRODUCTION

   The socio-economic status of working women in a society is the true index of it's economical, social, cultural and spiritual levels. No doubt socio-economic and official background of working women play an important role in determining their decision making at home and interim their decision making at workplace. Generally it is expected that working women enjoys higher status in the society as compared to housewife. Socio-economic status is an indicator of social cultural advancement of a society. As things stand today, working women can broadly be classified into three categories (1) Government Servants, (2) Private Servants (3) Self Employed. It will be interesting to compare socioeconomic status of working women across these three categories.

   The present paper is a humble attempt to assess the socio-economic independence of working women on their plight in the society. The paper is organised into four Sections. Section--2 discuss the methodology used and specifically indicate how to measure the socio-economic status of working women; Section--3 presents the empirical results; finally Section--4 presents the socio-economic index of working women with concluding remarks.

2. MEASUREMENT OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC INDEX

   To select the sample, a two stage proportionate random sampling technique has been employed with zone of the district as the primary unit, followed by district and working women as ultimate unit of sampling. A sample of 70 working women from each district has been taken selecting 30 women from Government Service, 20 from private sectored 20 women employed in self employment activities. Finally, a sample of 280 has been selected i.e. 120 from Government Services, 80 from Private Organisation and 80 engaged in self-employment activities.

   To measure the socio-economic status we have used a composite index. A composite Socio-Economic Index has been constructed using the seven socio-economic indicators viz age, education, earning, place of residence, type of family, control over income and caste. Firstly, different point scales have been used to assign scores to the above determinants. Every respondent have been assigned scores as per these scales and the scores obtained under different determinants have been added to obtain the average scores. The average score so obtained is the Socio-economic status of that respondent. In the same way Socio-economic status of a group of respondents i.e. women workers employed in Government service, Private organizations and self employment activities, has been derived to compare and analyze the socio-economic status of these different groups of respondents.

   The responses of each and every respondent in respect of all the seven determinants of socioeconomic status on their respective ten point scales have been recorded. The Socio-Economic Status Index has been computed as follows:

   S.E.S. = S1+S2+S3+S4+S5+S6+S7/7

   Where Si is the total score of respondents in respect of the ith characteristics where (i) is 1(Age), 2(Education), 3(Earning), 4(Place of residence), 5(Type of family), 6(Control over income) and

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

   In this section, distribution of the respondents has been done by the socio-economic indicators discussed above:

   Age: As seen in the below table 1 that 36.67 percent of the working women in government services fall in the age group of 31-40 years. The age group 0-20 years contains a total number of five women. Women in this age group are from lower strata of society, who due to economic compulsion can not continue their study and have to resort to work for livelihood of...