India’s women want to work but the jobs are missing

When Bengaluru-based Shradha Verma got pregnant, the 34-year-old marketing professional was set on resuming work after her six-month paid maternity leave. Her company had flexible options for her role — but when it came time for her to go back to work, her request for remote work was denied. “What it boils down to is how accommodating and how flexible your immediate team members are. I'll talk about specifically my case, the manager refused to allow me the flexibility to work from home, although it was possible, given my profile,” she told Devex. With no extended family in the city, no day care facility at her workplace, and limited organized day care facilities around the city, Verma made the hard choice to quit her job to care for her baby. Even when companies like the one Verma worked at do have diversity policies and flexible working options in place, they tend to remain only on paper. So what is holding women with higher education back from participating fully in India’s workforce — and what needs to change? Indian women’s low labor force participation India’s female labor force participation has remained a challenge for a long time now. At 37%, it is significantly lower than the global average of just over 50%. It is also lower when compared to other middle- and low-income countries, including its neighbor Bangladesh, where 42.5% of the women are in the workforce. This is low both given India’s level of development and its unfolding economic growth story, Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, deputy director at the Yale Economic Growth Center, told Devex. This is despite India’s adult literacy rate for women being comparable to other lower-middle-income countries, according to World Bank data. The problem was previously thought of as a supply-side issue, where factors at home and education levels were seen as major barriers. But with increasing research, it appears that as women gain high levels of education, there are few jobs available that match their skill levels and pay enough to make it worthwhile to outsource child care, so they step out of work, according to experts Devex spoke with. “Job opportunities for educated women are limited — jobs with decent pay, benefits, and safe, good work conditions. We need more jobs in the formal sector that cater to the job preferences of these women,” said Farzana Afridi, a professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi. The issue of low participation of women in the labor force is also indicative of a broader job crisis in India — signs of which have been there for a long time. According to Kanika Mahajan, an associate professor of economics at Ashoka University, the job market is hard for everyone. With men already struggling in jobs with low wages and profits, women find it harder still to enter the market, she explained. “Given that most of young women are college educated, or at least school educated, and even then, you don't see a major stake in the workforce participation … that … indicates that there is job distress,” Mahajan said. When a country grows economically the expectation is that the gender gaps would narrow. But research from around the world shows that this does not always happen; countries at similar income levels can also have vastly different gender gaps. On the whole, South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa regions have the lowest female labor force participation in the world, with only around a quarter of the women engaged in paid work. Emerging tech jobs maintain gender gaps Many of the jobs in recent years in India have been driven by tech companies that allow consumers to opt for services such as transport, delivery, cleaning, or grooming through mobile apps. This market has reinforced gender norms, or in some cases even exacerbated gender gaps. First, women fall behind in terms of access to smartphones compared to men. But the new jobs have also replicated the gender segregation of the labor market. “What you saw in the early labor market is that drivers are usually men, and those working in beauty parlors are usually women. You find the same thing on these platforms as well. That segregation has not changed,” Mahajan said. This, she said, also decreases the kind of work opportunities that are available to women to some extent, as some of the jobs explicitly advertise that they are looking for men, she said. Household norms holding women back and discrimination at work are two parts of the puzzle that must be addressed at the same time, according to Yale Economic Growth Center’s Ratan. Just as households are unwilling to let women go to work, companies can be unwilling to hire them based on their status, Ratan explained. This notion of what women can and cannot do often differs significantly from how women rate their own abilities, she explained. Child care and safety remain an issue In both traditional and tech-driven jobs, issues related to child care remain. In India, the government mandates six months of paid leave for women, but the burden of that is on the company, not the government. “The costs historically have been borne by the employers themselves … and so that has squarely, you know, made it a disincentive for them to invest greater amounts in women workers,” Ratan said. For Ratan, a prudent way to do it would be to follow the lead of the Nordic countries, where they have a public provision that covers the cost of parental leave and everybody pays into it. The approach makes it a collective priority to ensure children have high-quality child care and support, she said. Women’s safety is another systemic issue, especially in certain industries that require working at odd hours. Female employees’ safety is currently designated the responsibility of individual companies, while this ought to be the government’s responsibility, according to Mahajan. “[Lack of safety] closes so many doors. If we look at the current debate, which is all about providing security to women who are working in these industries [such as manufacturing] at night, and all these are costs to employers,” Mahajan said. She added that when employers are burdened with so many costs, the knee-jerk reaction from the industry’s side would be to hire fewer women. Recommendations for a way forward The World Bank offers a range of solutions to address both demand and supply side problems to increase female workforce participation. On the supply side, the bank recommends improving child care services, transportation, and vocational training options, as well as women’s financial inclusion. On the demand side, it recommends inclusive hiring, public employment guarantee schemes, and help to match job seekers with employers. Increasing understanding of the issue is also a way of better informing policies to address the gap in female labor participation. While research on women and how women’s labor is measured have picked up in recent years globally and in India, there are still data gaps. “We need more data at the firm and enterprise level, hiring practices of firms, work conditions within offices/firms, conditions of informal versus formal sector workers. These will help us understand how women are faring relative to [men] within sectors and occupations,” Afridi said. On the whole, Mahajan said that the government has to be nudged to address the larger issue of job creation and women’s safety — both of which will help more women enter the workforce. Meanwhile, women are continuing to attempt to enter the workforce with limited success. When Verma’s toddler began adjusting to a playschool at 18 months old, she felt ready to resume hybrid work and began applying. But despite having two master’s degrees and nine years of work experience, the roles she is being offered are junior positions. “It sort of lowers your confidence,” she said. “I could sense it from the hiring manager's voice or body language when I was giving the interview that they were not comfortable hiring someone who's on a break or who's away from office for a particular period of time, you know, even though I was telling them, it's motherhood,” she added.