Fertility Decline and Changes in Women’s Lives and Gender Equality in Tamil Nadu, India

This paper uses an historical approach to contrast the relationships between fertility declines and gender equality in the India states of Punjab and Tamil Nadu over the past four decades. The contextual analysis draws on mulitiple quantitative and qualitative secondary sources to map trends in fertility, gender outcomes and policy initiatives to explain distinct patterns of fertility decline and its gendered consequences across these two states.

The abstract is available here. This research is part of a series of empirical studies from the Fertility and Empowerment Network, which is examining whether and to what extent increasingly smaller family sizes in lower and middle income countries have empowered women or resulted in fundamental transformations in inequitable gender systems.