While the labour ministry is in the process of finalising a comprehensive national employment policy to address the growing unemployment in the country, here is a surprising fact it is grappling with. Unemployment levels are the highest for young educated women in India. On the other hand, the unemployment among rural females in the age group of 15 to 24 is lower than the rural males of the same age group.
Even considering the most conservative yardstick used by the government to measure unemployment, young women with secondary or higher secondary education in urban India have an unemployment rate of 77.3% compared to 54.4% for young males with similar education levels. These figures are based on ?usual status? of employment, which indicates employment over the last one year.
The numbers are much worse when considering the ?weekly status? and ?current daily status? parametres, which indicate gainful employment in the previous week and the day before.
While acknowledging that part of the reason for urban women with higher education not being employed could be their higher economic status and family support levels, Sukti Dasgupta, senior specialist on employment and labour market policies at the International Labour Organisation (India office) points to another worrying factor.
?Women face the highest unemployment levels in urban India as well as among the youth. Even among male graduates, unemployment is high. It?s tougher to get jobs, but it?s even tougher for women. There is still some kind of gender discrimination prevalent in the labour market,? she stresses.
Unemployment among urban women with less or no education isn?t as bad as they need to work to survive and are able to find domestic jobs, Dasgupta notes. As far as rural women are concerned, their unemployment rate is lower than men for simpler reasons.
?Rural women are counted as contributing family workers as they work on the farm or have a household enterprise. But if a rural family has more than one son, even if they work on the field, they are listed as unemployed as they will tell surveyors that they are looking for work,? Dasgupta explains. Unemployment is defined as being without work and actively looking for work.
Incidentally, women?s participation in the labour force (LFPR) went up between 1994 and 1999, only to go down again in 2005. ?One reason for the fall could be the income effect. When men earn more, women withdraw from the market–a reflection of cultural contexts. Another reason could be a decline in economic conditions could crowd them out of the market,? Dasgupta said.
In fact, a study commissioned by the ILO to understand this phenomenon, published in May, found that while women between age group 21-34 had a 34% participation in the labour force, it slid to 17% for women between 35 and 49 years of age.
The study attributed the slide largely to ?reproductive workload?-an euphemism for getting bogged down with marital responsibilities. A confirmation of this-a survey by the NCAER found unmarried women between 18 and 60 years of age have 43% LFPR, higher than the national, Delhi and overall urban averages.