SubscriberWrites: Missing women on the streets of Delhi

Women Walking in Paharganj streets | Representative image | Zenaira Baksh/ThePrint

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In 1990, Amartya Sen estimated that more than 100 million women were missing in South and West Asia and China. These women went missing because of sex-selective abortion, biases in nutrition and healthcare, and sex-selective violence (see work by Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray, among others).

I extend that line of inquiry by asking, "How many women are missing from public life?" In particular, of all the people out on the street over the course of a typical day in Delhi, what proportion are women? To answer that, I devised a plan to send people to random street locations at random times and asked them to take photos at head height. I collected the data between November 2016 and January 2017, between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. In all, I collected nearly 1,958 photos from 196 locations. I crowd-sourced counting of the number of men an women in the images. Because of administrative issues, the data I collected has many biases, e.g., the locations people went to were much too concentrated, but it still gives a valuable snapshot of a small part of Delhi. 2

On average, about 81.5% of the people on the street were men. The average proportion of men across various locations was 86.7%, which suggests that somewhat busier places have somewhat more women. There are reasonable extenuating explanations, including that Delhi is a migrant city, but none for deviations as large as 30%. Much of the bias may lie in the real (and perceived) threats of molestation, violence, harassment, patriarchy (allowing wives, daughters, and sisters to go out to work or for recreation), discrimination in employment, and similar things.

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