Gender Parity in Urbanizing City: A Case Study of Barasat City, India

For sustainable urbanization, promoting equal value for men and women is indispensable. Although an urban environment provides women greater admittance to education, health and well-being, jobs, services, and infrastructure, compared to women living in rural areas, there are still disparities in access and opportunities for women within a city. The study emphasizes adopting a comprehensive and intersectional approach to assess the spatial variation of gender equality, which takes into account the multidimensional nature of gender-driven disparities and the effect of unplanned urbanization by integrating geoinformatics with geostatistics. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to create a composite index of gender parity that covers multiple dimensions of gender parity, i.e., health parity, social parity, economic parity, education parity, and empowerment parity. The use of the local indicator of spatial association statistics has conclusively demonstrated the capability of identifying specific clusters of greater gender parity and outliers. The built-up area has been estimated by remote sensing technique, and the percentage of built-up has been used as the measure of the level of urbanization. The correlation allows the calculation of relationships among different dimensions of gender parity and built-up percentage. It has been found that the built-up strongly influences economic parity followed by health and educational parity. While correlating among the dimensions of gender parity, it has been observed that educational parity has the strongest impact on improving overall gender parity. By identifying spatial locations of poor gender parity and the key determinants of gender parity, policymakers can allocate resources and develop targeted interventions to address the specific needs of those areas. Additionally, incorporating gender parity considerations into urban planning can help ensure that urban development is more inclusive and responsive to the needs of women.