It’s no secret that the number of women in the labour market is significantly lesser than that of men, but did you know that in India, when it comes to rural women in labour force, the number is not just low, but has been almost steadily declining over the years?
“About 70-80% of men in urban and rural areas are in paid employment. Whereas only about 17% of urban women are actually in the paid workforce. And for rural women, it’s been steadily declining over time,” says Dr. Rosa Abraham, citing the annual State of India Working 2023 report brought out by Azim Premji University, and throwing light on the enormity of the problem.
Dr. Abraham, who is a faculty at Azim Premji University, and works at the Centre for Sustainable Employment focusing on women in the labour market, was speaking at ATREE last week.
The U-Curve
The U-shaped curve is often associated with Nobel-winner Claudia Goldin who used it to trace the women’s labour force participation in relation to a country’s economic progress.
When a country is less developed, there seems to be a very high female labour force participation rate; However, it tends to dip as the country progresses, but beyond a certain level of development, it starts to climb back up again forming the shape of a ‘U’.
The assumption is that as a country progresses from middle to high income, female participation also increases given the availability of well-paying formal jobs.
India, however, seems to be an outlier, says Dr. Abraham.
“For our level of economic growth, we have very few women participating... We are not productively engaging a large section of our female workforce,” she says.
Women farmers seen busy in rice field at a village in Abhanpur near Raipur, Chhattisgarh. | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
Multiple explanations
As per the Periodic Labour Force Survey Report 2022-23 released by Ministry of Statistics, the female labour force participation in the country is around 37%, that is about one-third of the total female population.
There are multiple schools of thought in academia explaining this gap and one of them points towards a ‘supply side story,’ Dr. Abraham explains.
“When you say supply side it basically depends on the workers, the families and regions they come from, mobility restrictions, norms that they operate under, care burden, low earnings so much so that even if you participate you are paid so poorly that you rather not participate.”
The demand side strand, on the other hand, argues that the economy has not created enough jobs, hence the women have fallen off. As agriculture work contracted and the economy grew, it however failed to create good jobs that could keep the women engaged. This puts the onus on firms, the states and the government to set up industries to increase demand and argues that the moment there’s demand, the women will come into the labour force.
Yet another argument is that women’s work is not captured precisely by the surveys. This brings attention to what question is being asked, how it is being asked and very importantly, who it is being asked to.
For example, if a woman assists her husband at the family farm or business, does she or her husband think of her as employed?
“In more recent years there’s been some conceptual clarity on what constitutes employment. Employment is any work for pay or profit. But a lot of women’s work could get missed out on or understated,” says Dr. Abraham.
“Typically, in a labour survey, especially in the case of our national surveys which is the periodic labour force surveys, enumerators go to the household, and speak to whoever is present there at that time. In more conservative regions, it would be the head of the household, a man who would report on behalf of everybody in the household,” she added.
Given that the primary identity of a woman is widely thought of as the caretaker of her home, not only do men under-report women’s participation in the labour force, but women themselves often don’t accept their identity as employed, especially if the questions do not go into the details and simply ask whether she is employed.
Women farmers spreading maize kernels for drying after harvest on the National Highway 65, near Kanchikacherla in NTR district of Andhra Pradesh. | Photo Credit: RAO GN
The motherhood penalty
Motherhood penalty is a term coined to indicate how women, when they have children, are forced to suffer a penalty with respect to their employment unlike in the case of men. This penalty could be in several forms such as withdrawal from work, lower earnings compared to a man and so on, all directly as a result of becoming mothers.
“This has been very strongly established in high-income countries. But in low- and middle-income countries we don’t have that kind of data that’s systematically collected. In India, from 2017, we have data that’s tracked systematically.”
“What we found was in the Indian context there’s no motherhood penalty,” says Dr. Abraham, whose team spoke to a sample of women, in Karnataka and Rajasthan report.
While that may seem like reason to cheer, she goes deeper to paint a clearer picture of reality.
“Salaried work of women is unaffected due to childbirth, but it’s already very low. It doesn’t fall, but it doesn’t increase either. Any increase that we saw was actually in informal paid work which is essentially casual wage work and self-employment.”
But there’s a catch there too.
Employment as a penalty
Dr. Abraham further explains, “The idea of there being no penalty may sound amazing. But then you need to kind of turn this concept on its head and ask if it is indeed a good thing. In many households, women don’t have the luxury of not being in work after childbirth.”
In India, there’s a huge informal labour market which allows these women to return to work after childbirth. For example, construction sites where women work as their babies sleep on the site or remain with the mother in slings tied to the latter’s shoulder, is a common sight.
But studies have also shown many such children being underweight, stunted or wasted.
This happens because, while such informal labour may allow women to continue in employment after childbirth, the working conditions often do not allow them to give exclusive breastfeeding to babies in the first six months which is critical for adequate nutrition, developing immunity and other physical and cognitive benefits.
In such circumstances, the woman continuing in work itself becomes a penalty, “because the kind of employment that they’re doing is extremely precarious and drudgerous work at the cost of their health and their children’s health,” points out Dr. Rosa.
“This brings us to the question of whether employment on its own is something we should be aiming for, or should we be rather talking about the quality of employment as well as how women are navigating this employment alongside their care work.”
Published - April 23, 2024 09:00 am IST
