Indian women in workforce: No headway in three decades

Responsibilities at home leave women in India with no time to work, though 90 per cent of them aspire to work. Accordingly, their participation in labour force remains stagnant at below 35 per cent for almost three decades now, says a study on India by the World Bank as part of its World Development Report released on Wednesday.

India was in the same group as the Middle East (West Asia) and many northern African countries, while in China and most South American nations, women account for more than 50 to 70 per cent of their labour force.

Maitreyi Bordiya Das, who presented the report on India called ‘Poverty and Social Exclusion in India’, cited these figures to say that the reasons for this stagnation was a mystery though there were indications that household responsibilities left the women with no time to do anything else.

 

The level workforce participation in countries of similar size and economy as India were better and, in many countries, it was improving. But there had been no improvement in India since 1983, she said.

She said low participation was seen mainly where women were educated, and where their husbands earned well.

She said poor participation by women was also seen among wage workers, with just 13 per cent of working-age women compared to 36 per cent of men doing wage work.

She said it could have something to do with inequality in wage rates between women and men, with women earning just 71 per cent of men’s wages in salaried work and just 56 per cent of their wages in casual work.

The report blames unequal wages as a clear disincentive for women to work in India. In contrast, with the lack of increase in numbers of women in workforce over the years, the report says almost 90 per cent of women doing only domestic work say it was from compulsion.

The World Bank study using data from NSS 61st round (2004-05) says that over 50 per cent of the women surveyed said that the entire burden of household work was on them with no one to share it, thus ruling out the possibility of working outside their homes.

A third of the women according to the NSS report cited by World Bank said they would accept paid work in additional to the household duties while a majority said they would like regular part-time jobs, with a preference for self-employment.

The report also analyses why a majority of women in the labour force are confined to farm-based labour and do not venture for other forms of work. Based on the NSS data, it says the 58.5 per cent women surveyed said they needed credit to do some work, and about 15 per cent wanted training.