KHPT organized a colloquium on June 20 titled ‘Measuring Gender inequality in India: Temporal and Spatial patterns’, facilitated by Dr Abhishek Singh, Professor and Head of Department, Department of Public Health and Mortality Studies at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai. Dr Singh discussed his efforts to quantify the impact of patriarchy on gender and society through the  India Patriarchy Index. He talked about the various indices developed to measure gender inequality and how many of them are obsolete.  He also spoke about the conceptualization of the patriarchy index,  which expands on a European index to measure patriarchy.

Dr Singh went on to describe the methodology of  small area estimation, which is an application of the index in small areas. To substantiate its significance, he cited the similarity of instances of violence in Bihar and some districts of Maharashtra to show that the rate of violence varies within states. He stated that researchers must avoid simplification of data and the assumption or generalization that an indicator for  a problem would apply to the entire state.