Where are the real working women? This is a question mostly reserved for Indian television soaps where kitchen politics, conniving matriarchs, women with privileges and kilos and kilos of make-up seem to rule the roost. But listen carefully to feminist economists or development economists and the question is even louder. Where are the working women in India? Why is female labour force participation declining?

The numbers are staggering whichever way you look at it. From 33 million as per United Nations’ Women’s High Level Panel, 25 million aas per Rohini Pande to 20 million per Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Associate Professor Himanshu, these are the number of women who have left the labour force. So how come we are not seeing coverage and debates on this in Indian mainstream media? In our politically-correct English press also (barring a few financial papers and digital platforms), why isn’t this topic getting the space and priority that these massive numbers deserve? Didn’t the Finance Bill rail-roading teach us that economics and law are too important to be left to economists and lawyers/legislators only?

Add to it, the International Women’s Day has virtually been converted into civil society’s Karwa Chauth moment (both in terms of marketing and gimmicry), shouldn’t we expect better, harder coverage of the issue? Or is it the general apathy to labour reportage, shoe-leather journalism on employment numbers too hard? Especially when competing images are of anti-Romeo squads and the newly-anointed Chief Minister’s trips to gaushalas (cow shelters)?

Another media black-out is of the latest United Nation’s Commission on Status of Women (CSW), the largest annual gathering on progress on women’s rights and gender equality. That concluded on March 27, 2013, the week that Indian mainstream media played images of gaushalas on loop. The UN member states pledged to close the gender pay gap and reduce and redistribute unpaid care and domestic work that falls disproportionately on women. After two weeks of intense discussions in New York, the Commission on the Status of Women ended with commitments by states to advance women’s economic empowerment by implementing equal pay policies, gender audits and job evaluations. The gender pay gap stands at 23 per cent globally, according to UN figures. The commission also agreed to increase public services and provide affordable childcare that would allow women to undertake paid work and reduce unpaid labour. India is a major participant in CSW.

Take a look at the declining participation of women in the Indian work force:

• In India, 93 per cent of the economy is in informal employment as per the Arjun Sengupta Committee Report.
• Women’s labour force participation rate has declined to 22 per cent.
  85 per cent of women are engaged in vulnerable employment – especially in home-based work (37.4 million workers), domestic work (4.2 million workers) and construction work (5.7 million women).
• Exploitative practices, often based on identity, caste, and class, are also present; such as of manual scavenging, bonded and forced labour.
• Further, 65 per cent of all agricultural workers are women, their lack of resource rights is further exacerbated by climate change and disaster. As much as 81 per cent of agriculture workers belong to marginalised communities such as Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC). Distress migration and human trafficking due to poverty also exist.
• Despite a growing presence in the services sector (17 per cent of all workers are women), women’s labour continues to be unpaid, under-paid and exploited.
• Over and above vulnerability in employment is the fact that 51 per cent of the work done by women is unpaid and not counted in national statistics; including care and subsistence work. Some estimates put this proportion of unpaid work at 85-92 per cent.
• While marginally more women work in India than in Pakistan, Pakistan’s female labour-force participation rate is growing while India’s is declining. The percentage of women working in Bangladesh is two times that of India’s, which ranks last among BRICS countries in terms of women’s labour-force participation. Among G-20 countries, it is second from bottom – above only Saudi Arabia.
• This at a time when more Indian men are open to women in their families working in paid jobs; in fact even more than Indian women as per the latest International Labour Organisation-Gallup poll on Women at Work. It seems 65 per cent of Indian men are open to women in their families having paid jobs compared to 52 per cent Indian women who preferred paid jobs.

So, with educational improvements, falling fertility, why are women still withdrawing from markets/labour force?

The Planning Commission’s (NITI Ayog’s previous avatar) last Deputy Chairman, Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia explained it as women withdrawing from low-paid menial jobs to enroll into schools and higher education. The better female literacy/education numbers were touted to explain this away.

Harvard University economist Rohini Pande points out that the declining rates are difficult to explain and needs more research. Some of the findings of Evidence for Policy Design (the institute she heads at Harvard), are:

• Women want to work
• Jobs closer home attract women
• Social norms can evolve with enabling government policies and programmes, which they illustrate with Operation Blackboard that first educated women, then triggered women to join the education sector as teachers
• Government pronouncements like Skill India, Make in India need gendered lens in design and implementation
• Migration for employment is an under-explored, under-researched area, especially in case of women.

On the other hand, Farzana Afridi, Tarin Dynkelman, Kanika Mahajan – economists from Indian Statistical Institute, Princeton University and Ambedkar University respectively – have collaborated to analyse data across three National Sample Surveys. They opine that the declining rates are because of improved education amongst rural men and women. Women with medium levels of education choose to do more domestic work, and spend more time on child care and home-based activities. They predict the rural women labour participation will further decline.

However, Dr Firoza Mehrotra, of HomeNet South Asia (the network of home-based workers, most of whom are women), suggests the increasing informalisation of women’s labour, invisibilisation by shifting their work into their homes is resulting in under-counting and hence showing a decline.

There could be disagreement on reasons for the decline, but there is near consensus that women work force is declining in India, in times of unprecedented growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). And there is consensus on Indian policies being disablers rather than enablers for women’s work force participation. Maternity entitlements, in their new avatar, will be rolled out from April 1 2017, with 26 weeks of paid leave, rather than 12 weeks, is elitist and still limited to women in organized sector only. So the 93 per cent women in informal/unorganized sector are de facto excluded.

There is a massive child care/crèche crisis in India. With joint families breaking into nuclear and prohibitive costs of child care, many women who need it most can afford it least. India doesn’t have a universal crèche care policy. Dr Mridula Bajaj of Mobile Creches, explained, “Expensive, unregulated crèches are making moolah in urban India, while poor working women in rural and urban India are either withdrawing from work force or leaving their newborns with their older siblings, who are children themselves.”

While India’s low ranking at 122, in the Global Happiness Report (even below Somalia, Ethiopia, Nepal, Pakistan) got much media attention, two criteria in the ranking (social support in times of crisis and generosity) also deserve equal scrutiny. With unaffordable crèches and exclusive maternity entitlements, neither social support nor state generosity is on display. And the absence of both combined with the burden or care-giving responsibilities sets the perfect stage for declining women labour force participation.
And it is ironic that the big media (television and print) completely ignores this issue, even in our current times of wearing-feminism-on-your-sleeves-in-the-month-of-March and choose to chase the pets and the barber of the newly anointed Chief Minister instead…

The author can be reached at biraj_swain@hotmail.com