Despite a rise in GDP, Millions of Women are disappearing from India's Workplaces

India has recently surpassed the UK to become the fifth largest economy, in terms of GDP. By 2029, India is set to be become the third largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan.

As impressive as it seems, India’s 14% growth in April-June quarter is not all glitz. While it is socio-economically one of the most disparate countries today, the primary piece missing from India’s economy is its women.

During the peak of the pandemic, almost 90 million women in India left the workforce, which according to Bloomberg Economics, could have accounted for more than 30%, or $6 trillion, of India’s GDP by 2050.

India’s low female labor force participation rate should not come as surprise. (LFPR is a measure of the proportion of a country’s working-age population that engages actively in the labour market, either by working or looking for work.) For women in India, LFPR was already at a low of 32% in 2005, dwindling to just 19.2% in 2021 and finally to 9% in April 2022.

Right now, in this metric, India lags behind countries like China, Brazil, UAE, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia and by a significant difference.

What can the government and employers do?

While a lot of factors that contribute to women’s participation in work-force are entrenched in cultural norms that take generations to mitigate, there are several low-hanging fruits that governments and employers can act on to keep women in workplaces:

For formal sector

• Flexible work model

  An ILO report indicated that 34% of rural Indian women and 28% in urban areas were willing to accept work at home. Flexible working hours, remote working as well as, supporting women’s safety, especially, those working odd hours, will significantly bolster female participation.

• Make payslips transparent

  Unexplained wage gaps and unconscious bias towards hiring men is, anecdotally, an ongoing problem in Indian corporates. Employers till perpetrate an opaque culture around sharing salaries. Sharing of such information is not only discourage but also, deemed as “confidential”. While lack of transparency might not directly lead to an unexplained wage gap, the opposite immediately helps resolve it.

• India’s Amended Maternity Act

  Redistribution of responsibility at home is not just a matter of cultural perspective but also a legal one. Legally, all businesses in India are required to give 26 weeks of maternity leave and with no alternative leave extended to fathers, it perpetrates gender roles. Additionally, this is extended only in large or “established” firms and large population of working women in India are not covered by this act.

For informal sector (majority of women in India work in this sector)

• Remove discriminatory labour laws

  India applies regulations on women’s labour across several domains. There are weight-lifting regulation on women’s labour, restrictions on employment in night-time shifts and “morally inappropriate” industry such as liquor, where in several states women are still exempt from working- all this without taking into consideration their willingness or ability. Eventually, an employer is disincentivised to hire women in workplaces such as factories where they can “extract” work more from a male hire.

• Making advanced or specialised education accessible

  Specialised Masters or Advanced degrees in India continue to be a priviledge of the rich. While India has large pool of youth entering the workforce (median age being 28 years and 35% of the population still under 20 years), they are not intellectually engaged in the government education schemes and are practically shut out of advanced degrees.