Social Policy and the Documentation of Older Women as Citizens

• In Event: Inclusion and Control: Identity Documentation in the Global South

Abstract

Being registered and recognized by the state form a pre-requisite to achieving fully fledged citizenship across the globe. A gender gap exists in patterns of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) in many low and middle income countries. Deficits in civil registration are especially marked among older women, whose contact with the state has tended to be minimal compared with that of their male counterparts. Unlike men, who are more likely to experience military conscription and serve in more formal labor arrangements, women have been more marginal to the institutions that bring people into contact with the state and induce them to establish a legal identity. Confinement to informal work (often at home) and non-enlistment in military service have allowed many women to avoid establishing a legal identity. The consequences for their further marginalization (including from the right to vote) have been all too apparent. Beyond the structural causes leading older women to remain less incorporated in civil registration systems, older people on the whole have not been the subject of national and international efforts to champion birth registration, which might otherwise have rectified pre-existing gender gaps. These campaigns have focused instead on younger cohorts. In the current generation of children and adolescents, gender gaps in civil registration appear to be far less marked nearly everywhere.
Recent studies have observed the causal connection between the roll out of non-contributory social programs for low income individuals and the incentives these programs have entailed for the delayed civil registration of applicants and beneficiaries. Although most of these studies do not account for group differences, practitioners as well as academic country experts have observed the impact of these programs on the delayed registration of a variety of marginal groups, including ethnic minorities and women.
To date, no large cross national study examines the gendered impact of non-contributory transfer programs on documentation late in life. We explore the relationship between a single but crucially important type of social program — non-contributory social pensions — and the late registration of women in the population cohorts eligible to receive them. Our working hypothesis is that these programs, by creating positive incentives for registration (due partly to age eligibility requirements), have reduced the stock of unregistered older women across many low and middle- income countries. Having one’s birth registered and receiving an old age pension shortly thereafter has accelerated the sequence that obtains in countries with timely birth registration. If the (casual) connection between delayed birth registration and receipt of an old age pension holds, social policy will have empowered an important share of women late in the life cycle beyond the income boost entailed.

To document the gender gap in birth registration cross-nationally, we draw on two indicators and data sources. Our first measure of gendered access to civil registration is age heaping in the census, which reflects departures from the normally smooth age distribution. This indicator taps into the propensity of people to guess round number if they do not know their exact age, and thus constitutes an important proxy for whether people have documents to determine their exact age. Disaggregating age heaping by gender allows us to track the development of the gender gap in civil registration across countries and over time. Our second measure comes from the Global Findex survey, a project to monitor financial inclusion. For nationally-representative samples, the survey captures whether respondents have identity documents necessary to open bank accounts. These indicators allow us to capture the stock of unregistered older women across countries as well as how the gender gap in access to identity documents develops over time. Drawing on techniques for time-series cross-sectional analysis, we then analyze how the introduction and expansion of non-contributory pension schemes influences the gender gap in access to civil registration.

Author

• Wendy Hunter, University of Texas, Austin