Women Participation in Higher Education: A Comparative Study of The North Eastern States of India

Abstract

Participation of women in higher education is one of the important development indexes. In many national and international forum, women education has been regarded as one of the benchmarks to measure societal development. Compared to the developed countries the status of India in women participation in higher education is not satisfactory. The Northeastern states being landlocked and geographically isolated, the participation of women in higher education is highly challenging. This paper tries to explore the women participation in higher education among the eight northeastern states. The study further tries to explore whether matrilineal society has any role to play in deciding the participation of women in higher education. The analysis is done based on secondary data collected from the Ministry of higher education, India. Among the states, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Nagaland show higher gender parity index (GPI) which indicates GPI favouring females. Among the states, five states have GPI above the national average (.92).