Why aren't India's women in the workforce?
Traditional gender roles in India are a huge problem with a very real cost
In November 2020, eight months into the lockdown, there were still 13.5 million fewer persons in the labour force vs. November 2019, 6.8 million men and 6.6 million women. Of these, 2.3 million rural women were out of the labour force, vs. 4.3 million urban women. On the other hand, 3.4 million rural, and 3.4 million urban men were out of the labour force. Thus, even as the size of the total labour force shrunk by 3.1% between November 2019 to November 2020, the size of the female labour force shrunk by 12.8%, vs. 1.8% for men. (emphasis original)
Source1
As with so many other trends, the pandemic accelerated what has already existed for nearly two decades now: an overwhelming majority of India’s women are outside its workforce. According to the Indian government’s own PLFS data, 26.1 per cent of urban women and 53.7 per cent rural women were either working or looking for a job in 1987-88. In 2018-19, those numbers were 20.4 and 26.4. As of 2019 World Bank estimates, only eight countries had lower female LFPRs - Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Gaza and Egypt2. It really is fascinating to look at, in a way that a car falling off a cliff is fascinating to look at.
Take that in for a second. More than three in four women in India aren’t working or looking for a job. That proportion is four in five in urban India.
It doesn’t look like it’s by choice or aspiration. A national survey of 74k participants in 2018 found that 74.3 per cent of girls aged 13-19 wanted to work after their studies, and 70 per cent of the girls wanted to pursue higher studies3. A third of them wanted to be teachers, followed by tailors and doctors and policewomen. 73.3 per cent wanted to get married after the age of 21.
Currently, 60 per cent of women are married by the time they’re 20. More than three-fourths aren’t working or looking for a job. 92 per cent of rural women who are out of the workforce are required to spend most of their time in domestic duties, 60 per cent of those because there’s no one else to do them4. ~40 per cent girls aged 13-18 aren’t in school, most of them either dependants or doing unpaid domestic work5. Most of the women in rural India work in agriculture6. Most common jobs for urban women are as garment workers and domestic cleaners.
Too many girls in India are dreaming about becoming teachers and police officers and waking up to full-time housework. And that’s a really, really sad thing.
This should not be happening, at least in theory. Women’s literacy rates went up from 34.8 per cent to 64.6 per cent between 1991 and 20117. The median age of marriage, though still 18.78 (page 156), is up from 16.79 in 1998-99. The total fertility rate has dropped from 2.85 to 2.2 in this period (same source). The Gross Enrolment Ratio for women 18-23 (the proportion of the population educationally enrolled in this age group) has gone up from 6.7 per cent in 200110 to 26.4 per cent in 2018-1911. Historically, those factors have been thought to boost the LFPR12, freeing women up to participate in the economy and take up jobs.
And yet, Indian women have been further dropping out of the workforce through the last two decades. Why?
First, about how work is measured. In the PLFS, most women seem to be excluded because they are engaged primarily in “domestic duties”, or “free collection of goods for household use” (collecting firewood, vegetables etc, and sewing, tailoring etc for domestic use). If you count them, more women work than men.
Further, judged by this more expansive definition of work, many more women work than men in India – the work participation rate for all women in India has been consistently higher than for men. In 2011-12, across both rural and urban areas, the total female work participation rate (even after declining over the decade) was as high as 86.2 per cent, compared to 79.8 per cent for men.
Source13
But here’s the thing: saying “actually, women are working more!”, while probably well-intentioned, comfortably misses the point. This can only be a part of the answer at best: Yes, Indian men don’t do nearly as much housework as they should. Yes, housework is “real work”, whatever the hell “real work” means. Yes, women’s household work should be acknowledged and valued (and it isn’t right now). But, but, but, more than three in four Indian women aren’t participating in the workforce! The trees are nice, but have you noticed the forest?
There are few factors contributing to this.
First, women in India are more educated than they’ve ever been. But it’s easy to miss that we were fighting much bigger battles until very very recently. Women’s literacy didn’t cross 50% until the 2001 census. Government policies have improved things a lot at the early education level - 95 girls are enrolled per 100 boys in secondary schools (VI-VIII), up from 58 in 1990-9114. But as NSSO rounds show, beyond the age of 14, rural women only get 2.1 years of schooling on average, while urban women get 3.4. And the enrolment ratios, while significantly improved in the last two decades, are still 19.7% for rural women and 35.7 per cent for urban women. That means close to 80 per cent of rural women aged 15-24 weren’t in the education system in 2011-12. While we have taken big strides in ensuring education is available to everyone, the kind of education that will equip someone to take up skilled jobs has a long way to go.
Second, on the other hand, domestic pressures haven’t improved much at all. In 1998-99, rural women spent 9.1 times as much time as rural men on “unpaid production activities”15. In 2018-19, they spent 7.1 times as much16. For urban women, that ratio went from 10.6 to 8.2. That’s…. improvement, technically. But is it really? (Before you ask: yes, the lockdown pushed more men to share housework. But that was, like any sudden change in anyone’s life, temporary - and the pendulum has now swung back17.)
Third, there is a (narrowing) raw gender wage gap: on average, women’s wages are 34 per cent lower (they were 48 per cent lower in 1993-94, ILO estimates18). A lot of it could be explainable by economic variables like education and experience19, and I don’t want to wade into how much that is the case. It appears that most of the gap is due to women having to take up jobs in lower-paid occupations. But the point is, at least on a raw level, it exists. On average, a woman is likely to earn less than a man, and that reinforces the pressure on women to be doing unpaid household work.
Fourth, social incentives point strongly towards women not working, whether due to stigma or due to women not working being considered higher status: high caste Hindus and Muslims have the lowest female LFPRs at all ages20.
But as you’ll note, none of these factors have particularly gotten worse, or can actually be expected to have gotten at least a little better in the last few decades. They may help explain why things are this way, but why the decline?
There are primarily two dynamics at play here.
First, the U-curve. It has been theorised21 that women’s LFPR follows a U-shaped curve with income and education: at lower income/education level, where their work is needed for the household, their work participation is higher. As the family’s income increases, their work isn’t needed anymore, and they start withdrawing from the workforce. As they gain more education and their time is more valuable, they move back into the workforce. This finding has been contested, but something similar is seen in the Indian WLFPR against educational attainment22.
As Indian women have slowly moved into getting pre-primary and primary education, then, they have moved rightward along this U-curve. Additionally, though mobility hasn’t changed much, nearly every point of the income distribution is better off today than they were in 198023. Since most households are doing better, with the social incentives and pressures on them, women could be withdrawing.
Second, as I’ve written about before24, Indian agriculture’s share of employment fell from ~63% in 1991 to ~49% in 2017-18. In these decades, the overall trend has been the movement of our workforce away from agriculture and into other industries. That has set a few things in motion:
One, women have significantly lower mobility than men in our society in terms of moving to cities and taking up jobs there25, so they can’t move as easily to where the jobs are.
Two, the current state of women’s education in India means that a large chunk of the female ex-agricultural workforce isn’t the most skilled, and can’t take up skilled jobs being created.
Three, industries where this unskilled labour force can work (manufacturing and construction - though MGNREGA has a definite positive contribution) haven’t created enough jobs to catch up, and industries that have grown haven’t created employment for women.
During 1999 and 2009, female employment in agriculture fell by 9 percentage points, and fell in manufacturing from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent. Female employment in the construction sector rose by only 3 percentage points while there was no change in the services sector (authors’ calculations from the NSS 1999 and 2009). Thus, economic growth has not been able to absorb female workers leaving agricultural work.
Source26
[…] in the urban areas, employment in high-skilled occupations was driven by output dynamism in low labour intensity, high-value added services. While jobs in these occupations showed some tendencies of being able to break the gender segregation, the increases were limited to a small section of women workers, who possessed the required skills and educational qualifications. A large part of women’s work in urban areas was created in low skilled or unskilled occupations, mainly as garbage collectors, cleaners, domestic workers and hairdressers and beauty service providers.
[…] whatever occupational dynamism did occur for women workers in rural areas was primarily created by the government, directly and indirectly. Because of MNREGA, women workers in rural areas ventured into construction, albeit in unskilled activities, while the use of low paid women workers in public health and education services meant an increase in such supposedly high-skilled activities that were nevertheless poorly remunerated. However, a large middle segment of occupations requiring medium skills, that engaged a substantial share of non-farm women workers, continued to reflect segregated occupational patterns with negligible changes over almost two decades.
Quoting from the ILO report:
Indeed, […] female employment growth between 1994 and 2010 largely took place in occupations that were not growing overall. […] The data reveal a large degree of gender-based occupational segregation in India. Less than 19 per cent of the new employment opportunities generated in India’s 10 fastest growing occupations were taken up by women. The share of women increased in only 3 out of these 10 occupations over this period: other professionals, personal and protective services workers, and labourers in mining, construction, manufacturing and transport, while it declined in the other 7 occupations.
To sum up: The economy has shifted away from agriculture, but the sectors where women can enter haven’t grown nearly enough to catch up. The bulk of the female labour force isn’t highly skilled, our economy isn’t creating jobs for secondary-educated women, and on average they still earn less. Social pressures still heavily push them towards unpaid housework. Because households are doing better than they were, they don’t need to work. This has led to women slowly exiting the Indian workforce, in cities as well as villages.
Traditional gender roles in India are a very real, huge problem. When you think about feminism in India, you should not be thinking about Shruti from JNU with pronouns in her bio - you should be thinking about the 80% of urban women who aren’t even looking for a job. We’re not talking about third-wave feminism here. We’re still in the middle of the second. Patriarchal household structures have a very real cost.
India is projected to have the world’s largest workforce by 202727. A McKinsey study in 2015 projected that India would add $2.9 trillion to its GDP by 2025 if women (magically) started participating in the economy as much as the men28. This is a huge crisis or a huge opportunity, depending on how you look at it.
The train is barrelling down the tracks as we lay them. If we can enable enough of us to fulfil our potential, young India, waking up to adulthood, may move mountains.
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Footnotes
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3788855
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.tlf.cact.fe.zs?locations=IN&most_recent_value_desc=false
https://www.nanhikali.org/pdf/TAG-Report.pdf
https://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/Decline%20in%20Rural%20Female%20Labour%20Force%20Participation%20in%20India.pdf
https://ncpcr.gov.in/showfile.php?lang=1&level=1&&sublinkid=1357&lid=1558
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-workforce-is-masculinising-rapidly-1560150389726.html
http://164.100.47.193/Refinput/New_Reference_Notes/English/Girls%20Education%20in%20India.pdf
http://rchiips.org/NFHS/NFHS-4Reports/India.pdf
https://www.dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FRIND2/FRIND2.pdf
https://education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/statistics-new/Stat-HTE-200708_0.pdf
http://aishe.nic.in/aishe/viewDocument.action;jsessionid=5CAA232C2AF4F9ADACFE8EE6515F0A0A.n1?documentId=262
https://www.oecd.org/social/labour/34562935.pdf
https://cse.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Mondal_et_al_Women_Workers.pdf
http://164.100.47.193/Refinput/New_Reference_Notes/English/Girls%20Education%20in%20India.pdf
http://microdata.gov.in/nada43/index.php/catalog/140
http://mospi.nic.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/Report_TUS_2019_0.pdf
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https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---asia/---ro-bangkok/---sro-new_delhi/documents/publication/wcms_638305.pdf
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/38367/1/ARCWP40-BhallaKaur.pdf
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/files/publications/faculty-working-papers/women_work_india_cidwp339.pdf
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w4707/w4707.pdf
https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---inst/documents/publication/wcms_250977.pdf
https://qr.ae/pNZljY
https://qr.ae/pNr3t0
http://archive.indianstatistics.org/misc/women_work.pdf
http://ftp.iza.org/dp9722.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-31/india-seen-topping-global-labor-force-in-next-decade-data-show
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Employment%20and%20Growth/The%20power%20of%20parity%20Advancing%20womens%20equality%20in%20India/MGI%20India%20parity_Full%20report_November%202015.pdf
how do you break the U-turn in LFPR - education can reduce fertility rate but not bring women into workforce.
This is very shocking, thanks for writing this insightful article 👍