The Italians seem quite comfortable, what with their Roman heritage to show off, mounds of spaghetti to dish out and their old but barely tarnished membership of the European Union. But an Italian mama, it appears, does almost as much housework and child-caring as her Indian counterpart, who is known to be poor, meek and mostly housebound anyway. This is one of the more unexpected findings of the recently released 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development, the researchers and authors of which evidently expected that women in the developed world would be too intimidating for the men to shrug off when it came to washing dishes or changing nappies. (One old trick is to leave streaks, even blobs, of grease on the plates or pinch the baby to make it yowl so no one demands equality again, but tricks are probably not statistically significant.) This burden-sharing among sisters across the world is obviously bad news for gender equality and does, in a way, skew the equivalence, however tentatively posed, between gender equality and development.

There is some good news, too. There are now more girls than boys in university in all developed countries and in 60 out of 90 developing ones. That is promising, at least for light relief: men clutch despairingly at their smugness with brilliant women around. Enrolment in schools at the primary level is almost equal all over the world. The tertiary level, however, does not look so good, and India is among countries with the highest level of female dropouts after the primary stage. The world is “missing” six million women every year as opposed to one million men. China and India still have among the highest number of “missing” women — which makes the gender inequality implicit in the school dropout rate even more mind-boggling.

Things should have begun changing long ago in India; there was enough planning and allocation of funds to make that happen. But the real tussle is over denying women agency; given the tiniest bit of a chance, women simply do better. The combination of inadequate resources and the traditional boy-preference is the immediate cause of the inequality in health and education — still glaring in India, according to the report — but there is certainly a covert desire to hobble women at any cost. The moment they are put in charge, as in panchayats through reservation, they have shown that they are better than men at ensuring clean water and proper sanitation for their communities. If the issue is, at least partly, one of agency — and, maybe, control — the devil might ask, maybe the sisters across the world actually do not want to give up keeping house and raising children? But the devil’s question is not statistically significant either.