Education for women reduses fertility due to __________.
(a) Education improves work opportunity for women.
(b) Educated women want their own children to be educated.
(c) Education and literacy make w

Question

Education for women reduses fertility due to __________.
(a) Education improves work opportunity for women.
(b) Educated women want their own children to be educated.
(c) Education and literacy make women more receptive to information about contraception
(d) Improving economic condition of women.
Answer options :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), Only (c). The stem asks what women's education reduces fertility *due to*, so it is asking for the mechanism, not for a list of the good things education does. Of the four printed statements only statement (c) names something that acts on childbearing itself: education and literacy make a woman more receptive to information about contraception. That is the channel demographers can trace step by step. A woman who can read understands a health worker's instructions, a package insert, a wall poster or a radio message about spacing and about which method suits her; she can tell a method's real side-effects from rumour; and she is better placed to raise the subject with her husband and with a health worker instead of accepting whatever custom prescribes. Knowledge of contraception is therefore converted into sustained use, and contraceptive use is one of the few things that lowers the number of births directly rather than through a chain of intermediate steps. Statements (a), (b) and (d) are all real and well-documented consequences of educating women, but each is printed here as a statement about employment, aspiration or income — none of them mentions fertility behaviour at all, and each would have to run through several further steps before it touched the birth rate. The option grid then settles the matter: statement (c) can be selected either alone, in option (2), or together with statement (d), in option (4), and the Commission's final key takes it alone.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This pairs statements (a) and (b) — better work opportunities and the wish to educate one's own children — and leaves out statement (c) entirely, so the one channel that actually touches contraceptive behaviour is discarded. Improved work opportunity does belong to the standard economic account of why educated women have fewer children: paid work raises the opportunity cost of the time a birth consumes, which is why the effect shows up most strongly where women's employment is outside the home. But that is an argument about the price of a woman's time, several steps removed from whether a birth is prevented, and the statement as printed says nothing about fertility at all.  (c) This pairs statements (b) and (d) — the wish to have one's own children educated, and improving economic condition — and again drops statement (c). Statement (b) is the recognisable quantity-quality idea, that parents who intend to school every child tend to want fewer of them, and statement (d) is the income channel; both are genuine parts of the wider literature on why educated women's fertility falls. Neither, though, is written here as a claim about how a birth is avoided, and this combination leaves the candidate with no statement at all about contraception, which is the mechanism the stem is reaching for.  (d) This is the near-miss, and the only other choice that contains statement (c). It adds statement (d), improving economic condition of women, to the contraception channel. The trap works because the addition sounds harmless — rising income and rising education do travel together, and both are associated with smaller families. But income is not itself a mechanism of fertility control: money buys many things, and whether it buys contraception depends on knowledge and willingness, which is exactly what statement (c) supplies. Statement (d) also duplicates much of statement (a), since better work opportunity is how education improves a woman's economic condition, and the Commission's key holds the answer to the single channel that operates on childbearing directly.

Concept: Female education is the most consistent correlate of falling fertility anywhere in the world, but a correlate is not a mechanism, and this question is about the mechanism. Demographers separate the two using the idea of proximate determinants: fertility can only change through a short list of intermediate variables — the proportion of women married and the age at which they marry, contraceptive use, induced abortion, and the period of post-partum infecundity created by breastfeeding. Everything else — income, schooling, urbanisation, employment, ideas about family size — is a background or distal factor, and it can move the birth rate only by working through one of those proximate channels. Education acts on several of them at once: it delays marriage, it raises the opportunity cost of a woman's time, it lowers infant mortality so that fewer births are needed for a given number of surviving children, and it raises both the knowledge and the use of contraception. That last channel is the shortest and most direct path from a classroom to a smaller family, and it is the one statement (c) describes.

State PCS 2024 Q41 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q41 — Economy PYQ with Answer