The age old saying about a woman’s work never being done and over is doubly true in today’s times. In India’s cities and towns and in its villages, older girls and women find that they are expected to seamlessly go from house work to work outside the home, be it offices, shops, on the streets as hawkers or agricultural fields. Festivals imply more work and managing of time, inside and outside the house.
However, we are concerned in this article with labour force participation rates (LFPRs) for women in the country. This rate encompasses the ratio of females in the population who either have employment or are searching it. According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO 43rd round), the LFPR for women fell in 2011-12 after having shown an increase in 1999-2000 to 2004-05. In 2015-16, say the other records like that of the Labour Bureau Employment, this rate has decreased to 27.4 per hundred. Worryingly, this is the lowest in the world.
An update prepared on this subject in 2014 by Sher Verick and Ruchika Chaudhary of the ILO (International Labour Organisation) Decent Work Team for South Asia under the title “Women’s labour force participation in India: Why is it so low?” lists this rate in various countries in the subcontinent. “Most notable is the falling engagement of women in the Indian labour force, which occurred despite strong economic growth and rising wages and incomes.”
Challenges faced by working women
In fact, Verick and Chuadhary point out that a large number of women engaged in domestic duties are keen to take up work if they could do it and earn in their homes. This brings us to other significant issues like safe and efficient public transport and commuting facilities. A number of surveys worldwide have described how women prefer to take up low paying jobs provided they save on commuting time and hardships. This is a factor that requires focused attention from policy makers.
The ILO update that despite the rising literacy rate and education among women, the sectors in which they could gain employment do not have the capacity to do so. In most households where the income was rising, women left their jobs outside the home for a number of reasons. And more noteworthy is the fact that women’s work is not documented adequately or correctly in official data.
This scenario is of course not designed to elicit much optimism for the near future if one couples it with the state of the Indian economy. The unemployment rate for women in 2018 was calculated at 15.7 per 100 as compared to 5.4 per 100, for men.
Rising unemployment affects women more than men
A Press Trust of India (PTI) report in a business newspaper in April 2019, quoting the survey on unemployment by a leading private university said that in general women have been “much worse affected” than men by rising unemployment among the higher educated as well as less educated. Not only are the rates higher as far as unemployment is concerned among women but their labour force participation rates have also taken a beating.
It follows of course that issues around work like wages, salaries and promotional prospects are fraught with gender discrimination and prejudices as far as women are concerned over their male counterparts. For example, an issue like sexual harassment at the workplace is a significant one as far as women workers are concerned. And yet, despite the rising awareness, the implementation of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 is tardy, to say the least.
The ground reality in various industries and sectors cannot be commented upon in this article. But as we have said above about an efficient and safe public transport network, there are other factors that should be attended to in the context of raising women’s participation in the labour force. It hardly needs to be stated that such attention and targeting should be based on gender specific issues. Right from access to skill formation, technical education, and maternity leave facilities to enabling women to become entrepreneurs.
It is interesting to note that economic researchers and observers across the world have commented upon this aspect of India’s economy and employment scene. In July 2018, the Economist wrote on this titled ‘Why India needs women to work’ and the strap observed: Were India to rebalance its workforce, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer.” The female employment rate in India, counting both the formal and informal economy, has tumbled from an already-low 35% in 2005 to just 26% now. In that time the economy has more than doubled in size and the number of working-age women has grown by a quarter, to 470m. Yet nearly 10m fewer women are in jobs. A rise in female employment rates to the male level would provide India with an extra 235m workers, more than the EU (European Union) has of either gender, and more than enough to fill all the factories in the rest of Asia,” is what it further adds.
It is time to heed these voices.
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Reshma Jain
Reshma Jain is one of the co-founders of The Narrators which is a publish- ing platform to lend a voice, a shape, a form to help people tell their story through the print or visual medium like biographies , documentries or
even e- platforms.[/column]