More women in workforce can add $35 bn to GDP

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Chennai: More women entering the workforce could add $35 billion to the GDP over the next five years, lifting incremental demand by 10%, says a study by Future Capital Holding (FCH) on, The impact of working women on India’s growth, incomes and consumption—XX factor.

The growing participation of women in workforce will make the country 12% richer by 2025 to reach 25% by 2050 from paltry 5% in 2015, adds the study. The sectors that mainly gain from women’s economic empowerment according to the study are financial services, educational services, retail and entertainment and branded goods.

Drawing a correlation between purchasing power of working women and enhanced consumption of goods and services, the study finds that working women (WW) households have 60% mobile phone penetration when compared to 34% in non-working women (NWW) households, 59% of WW households read English magazines compared to 31% of NWW households who prefer local language magazines. Sharing the spouse burden in repaying homeloans, the study puts financial contribution of WW households towards such expenditure at 72% higher than NWW households.

Based on Esteve-Volart report on lauding Karnataka for best performance on male-female ratio, FCH study maintains that an early smile of fortune on country’s GDP would have been possible had the entire country embraced the Karnataka model much before. Adopting the Karnataka model would have propelled India ahead of Russia, Brazil and Korea to be 10th largest economy on a dollar basis translating it to an per capita income of over $1,000 compared to the current $769 level, the study claims.

The study reveals that WW are making deep inroads into high profile careers once considered to be a male bastion. Number of women in newsrooms, for instance, are estimated to be around 50% today, up from 12% in 1990. The number of newly registered women chartered accountants between 2000-2006 is already 45% larger than the total number of women enrolled between 1990 and 2005. The share of women in IT workforce has grown to 35% from 24% in 2004.

Analysing WW participation across three major sectors, FCH finds that the bulk of WW are still in the primary sector (broadly agriculture) notwithstanding a sharp decline from 26% in 1980 to below 2% in 2005. WW have single digit percentage presence of 4.3% and 5.3% in secondary and tertiary sectors respectively, it added.