Here's why Indian women are increasingly falling off employment map

If the number of women who quit, was a city, it would be the third-most populated in the world

Photo: iSTOCK

In the first four months of 2017, a nugget of information went by unnoticed: While jobs for men increased by 0.9 million, 2.4 million women fell off the employment map, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a think tank.

“Only women suffer when there’s an employment problem,” said Mahesh Vyas, CMIE managing director and CEO.

The trend for this year points to a continuing story of Indian women increasingly clocking out of the workplace.

It might not seem like it at first glance. You see women employed everywhere, in ad agencies and start-ups, on construction sites and in fields, in shops and restaurants, in schools and anganwadis, flying airplanes and driving taxis.

Yet, if the number of women who quit jobs in India between 2004-05 and 2011-12 (the last year for which census data is available), was a city, it would, at 19.6 million, be the third-most populated in the world, after Shanghai and Beijing.

Only 27% Indian women are currently in the labour force. Among G-20 countries, only Saudi Arabia is worse, IndiaSpend reported on April 9, 2016. Within South Asia in 2013, India had the lowest rate of female employment after Pakistan. In over two decades preceding 2013, female labour force participation in India fell from 34.8% to 27%, according to an April 2017 World Bank report.

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