Women's Day: How to bring more women into the job market

In the Netflix series Fame Game, Madhuri Dixit plays the character of a superstar who has been at the height of her career for years. You'd think such a person would have complete agency over her life. Not so. It turns out that Anamika Anand, the beautiful actress and prima donna with many a blockbuster under her belt, has virtually no say when it comes to managing her finances. Although she is the one who earns all the money in the family, her husband decides how it is to be used. At home, patriarchy calls the shots and keeps her in her place.

Fame Game is no arthouse show with a social message. Yet it offers a telling snapshot of the way women, even successful women, tend to be controlled by deeply entrenched social mores which ordain that the husband, or the father, or the family elder has absolute authority over their lives.

Still, an Anamika Anand at least has a career to draw strength from. For countless Indian women, a complex web of social, economic and familial factors makes paid work itself a distant dream.

This Women's Day, while we celebrate the stellar accomplishments of the women of our country, while we raise a toast to those shining achievers who are shattering all manner of glass ceilings, it is important to pause and look into the penumbra of the majority of Indian women who are continually falling off the workforce, or not managing to enter it at all.

India has witnessed a steady decline in the labour force participation rate (LFPR) for women. (LFPR refers to the share of the population above the age of 15 who are employed or are actively seeking work.) World Bank data estimates that India's female LFPR fell from over 26 per cent in 2005 to 20.3 per cent in 2019. (The corresponding figure that year was 30.5 per cent in Bangladesh and 33.7 per cent in Sri Lanka.) The Covid-19 pandemic made the situation even worse. According to the government's own data, female LFPR slumped to 16.1 per cent in the July-September 2020 quarter, no doubt driven by the massive job losses in the wake of the first lockdown.

Data from independent agencies also suggest that the downward spiral in female LFPR has only gathered pace. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) says that in 2019-20, India's female LFPR was less than 11 per cent, compared to 71 per cent for men. And urban women fared worse than their rural sisters: LFPR was 9.7 per cent among urban women, as against 11.3 per cent among rural women. What's more, women faced a much higher unemployment rate — 17 per cent, compared to 6 per cent in the case of men.

So why has there been such a steep slide in the participation of women in India's labour force? Why, despite economic growth, and all the statistics about robust economic recovery post the pandemic, has it remained transfixed at the bottom end of the scale?

In most countries, female LFPR has typically followed a U-shaped trajectory. With economic growth and rising incomes, women initially tend to quit work as they no longer feel the need to earn money to add to the household income. But as growth leads to social development, such as declining fertility rates and the spread of education among girls, women come back into the workforce to partake of the jobs that are being created.

This has not happened in India. Despite a fall in the fertility rate and advancements in female education, women have continued to drop off from the job market. This is due in part to the fact that not enough jobs are being created. India's manufacturing sector has not been able to produce enough labour-intensive jobs that could have been taken up by women, the way Bangladesh's garment industry has done, for instance. The result is that the available jobs pool is disproportionately appropriated by male workers, whose need for paid work is traditionally considered much more urgent than women's.

However, the overriding reason for women in India to remain outside the workforce, or withdraw from it, continues to be social and familial. Even today, women are expected to shoulder the bulk of household duties and care-giving, which severely limits their ability to participate in paid work. According to data from the National Statistical Office (NSO), in 2019, women spent over 7 hours daily on unpaid domestic chores, child care and care of the elderly, while men spent less than half that time on the same tasks.

Most women, especially married women, are not in a position to disregard this huge demand upon their time and energy. Add to that the social restrictions on female mobility, the strictures on venturing out too far from the family home and concerns of safety, and you have a perfect storm of conditions that force women to stay off the labour market, or, at best, opt for irregular work in the informal sector that can be performed at or close to home.

India dropped 28 places in the 2021 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report and was ranked 140th out of 156 countries. The report says that the country's low rank is primarily due to its poor performance on the parameters of women's economic participation and political empowerment. This stark decline in gender parity is particularly lamentable when you consider the fact that there are multiple studies to suggest that the equal participation of women in the economy could result in a huge fillip to India's GDP. A 2015 McKinsey report, for example, stated that the country could add $700 billion to its GDP by 2025 if it brought about gender parity in its non-farm workforce.

Clearly, boosting female LFPR would result in an enormous demographic dividend for the country, not to speak of vast improvements in the quality of life of millions of Indian women. Government upskilling programmes such as the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana can do their bit. But for real inclusion to take place, policy measures must focus not just on skilling and job creation, but also on support services for women who are willing to work. Opportunities for work that is proximate, child care facilities, safe transportation, removing gender gap in pay, and so on, could all motivate women to loosen the grip of family and join the job market.

A key driver of this effort is, of course, gender sensitisation and social change. Sustained interventions must be made to uproot deep-seated patriarchal notions that regard women as inferior creatures whose primary role in life is to lay themselves down in the service of husband and family. This Women's Day, let us aspire to a society where the majority of Indian women are able to access gainful work, and, unfettered by familial pressures, move towards the path of self-determination.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.