Shyamal Majumdar: Social dropout

Access to education for women has increased, but majority of them still stay away from employment

Just a day before Corporate India went overboard in celebrating International Women’s Day, State Bank of India Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya made a telling comment. At the entry level, 33 per cent of employees of the country’s largest bank are women, she said. However, at the top management level, that figure is just four per cent.

 

The situation is no better at ICICI Bank, India’s largest private bank. A study by the ICICI Group showed that at junior management levels, the representation of women in attrition is higher by around two per cent than their representation in the total grade population. In other words, if at these levels, women constitute 25 per cent, then their representation in attrition is 27 per cent. This, in turn, impacts the supply line for higher levels.

 

The number of women leaving the bank at middle management levels is also in the same proportion. That’s because most women in junior management positions are between 26 and 30 years — the ages at which they marry and start a family. The study said this may not be the sole factor responsible for the two per cent higher attrition among women at these levels, but it is clear that this is a significant one.

 

Both SBI and ICICI Bank have tried to stem this attrition by formulating women employee-friendly policies. SBI, for example, has brought in a two-year sabbatical for women staff and announced work-from-home facilities this week. On its part, ICICI Bank has a scheme called iWork@home that allows women employees to work from home for one year, which can be further extended. Some other initiatives include helping women managers who travel on business, by covering the travel and stay of young children and their caregivers.

 

But this attrition level in a sector that is generally perceived to be more women-friendly (while only one in 10 Indian companies is led by women, more than half of them are in the financial sector) is worrying. The situation in other sectors is abysmal. For example, only a quarter of India’s workforce is female, far below the world average of 50 per cent, according to the World Bank. And a vast majority of India’s working women — about 63 per cent —are employed as helpers on farms. Women typically account for less than one in five employees in sectors outside agriculture.

 

It’s actually a puzzling picture: Over the past few decades, access to education for women has increased but close to 78 per cent of eligible female graduates choose not to participate in the organised workforce. This social drop-out — or graduate women choosing to complete their education only because of social reasons and not because of the desire to join the organised workforce — is the reason the replacement hired for women dropping out at most levels is invariably a man.

 

The conventional wisdom that the situation is better in urban India is hardly true. For example, findings of the National Sample Survey (68th Round) showed that in 2011-2012, out of every 100 women 24.8 worked in rural areas. The corresponding number for men was 54.3. Women’s participation was drastically less in urban areas. For every 54.6 employed men, there were only 14.7 working women.

 

The reasons are many — from women being overlooked for certain jobs on account of their gender to being offered, inequitable wages and development paths — gender disparity presents itself in several ways in workplaces.

 

Companies say gender pay gap exists because of divided work-family loyalties, as women take more time off from work to care for their families, leading to long career breaks. By the time they return to the job market, they have often missed the bus. Evidence exists that women lose out through voluntary termination of service at a rate two or three times faster than men once they have attained the experienced, mid-career level.

 

But discrimination can occur at every stage of employment, from recruitment to education and remuneration, occupational segregation, and at the time of lay-offs. Men and women tend to work in different sectors of the economy and hold different positions within the same occupational group. Women tend to be employed in a narrower range of occupations than men, and are more likely to work part-time or short-term. They also face more barriers to promotion and career development.

 

One wishes the narrative around Women’s Day was better.