Skill India can retain women in workforce

India’s 2018 Economic Survey posits that India not only has millions of missing women, but that it also has millions of “unwanted” women — 21 million to be precise.

A popular policy solution is financial incentives: bribe parents to have daughters, educate them and keep them alive till they attain adulthood. But such incentives don’t have a strong track record of changing skewed sex ratios — arguably, because they don’t address the large difference in male and female earning potential as adults. 

Can public policy change this by helping women engage more actively in the economy? Possibly, but a host of factors will need addressing. Households invest less in women’s education; women have less information about jobs and opportunities; women’s mobility is constrained; and gender-based discrimination in labour markets remains a pervasive problem. The result is that only 27 per cent of India’s women remain in the labour force and more and more continue to drop out (Fletcher et al. 2017). 

There is a policy opportunity for India to address this reality. One clear opportunity is Skill India, a set of schemes with female-friendly policies that could be further leveraged to disrupt the decline in women’s economic activity. With a 75 per cent increase in the budget for skilling and job development this fiscal year, the government has an opportunity to draw young women into the labour force and make women more wanted. 

But to do so requires knowing how well these programmes help women get and keep jobs, and what more can be done. 

With support from the International Growth Centre and JPAL, our research team set out to understand how how skilling can be made more female-friendly. We collected data from over 2,600 former trainees (1,900 women) from seven major Indian states (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh), asking them about their training, job placement, and migration experiences.  

Skilling programmes often leave women behind. Less than 25 per cent of women who went through the major skilling programme we studied held a job for three or more months after their programme. This number is lower than the corresponding figure for men; similarly, women are less likely to receive and accept job offers than men. But looking only at the population that joins jobs, these women remain in their jobs as least as long as men.

Migration is a key constraint for women. While female trainees are less likely both to receive job offers and accept those offers after skilling than men, they are even less likely to accept jobs that require migration, particularly for jobs that are out-of-state. Women reported dropping out of jobs after skilling primarily due to family-related challenges and difficulty migrating. Men, on the other hand, reported challenges related to low pay and unfavorable working conditions. 

Migration support may improve women’s employment outcomes. Access to migration support is associated with higher labour force participation and longer job tenure. Respondents who migrated for their job after training and then left this position were asked whether they received any of seven different types of migration support: assistance finding accommodation, opening a bank account, setting up an account to receive government benefits, obtaining a phone number or SIM, finding food, finding medical help, and using public transportation. More migration support is associated with longer job durations. That said, we need more evidence on how best to support women's migration. 

Some states had remarkably strong outcomes for women. While women fare worse than men on a variety of labour market outcomes overall, results vary significantly by state. We recently examined administrative data from a major skilling programme in Odisha from over 100,000 skills trainees and found that women in Odisha were more likely than men to be placed in jobs for at least three months, and 55 per cent of female trainees were placed in jobs for three months or longer. Importantly, most of Odisha’s female trainees migrated for their jobs. 

Poor female skilling and employment outcomes need not be a given. Instead, skilling programmes can be designed to alleviate gender-specific constraints and usher women into the labour force. An obvious policy lacuna is the lack of structured migration support for the many youth coming to urban areas for jobs for the first time. Efforts to support migrants hold great promise to transform the skilling and employment landscape. Beyond that, policies need to directly address the fact that family members have major concerns about sending daughters and sisters for skilling and work.

To address these concerns and ensure households take informed decisions, policies could provide targeted information to rural households on the economic returns to women’s skilling and employment, incentivise group-based enrollment (which household members report finding more acceptable), and address family members’ concerns about women’s safety as they migrate and live away from their families. Fortunately, the resources under Skill India can be leveraged to address these challenges and ensure that a woman who wants to work gets the skills and opportunity to do so.   

The writers are with Harvard Kennedy School and Oxford University